Surveillance, data, and algorithms as the doctrine of the 21st century: Genocide no longer depends solely on armies or borders; it operates on servers, on social media, and in our feeds

Originally published in Le Monde Diplomatique Brasil

By Isabela Rocha

In February of this year, Aaron Bushnell, a U.S. Air Force serviceman, engineer, and devout Christian, died by self-immolation in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. His reason? Before sacrificing himself, he declared that he would no longer be complicit in the genocide of the Palestinian people. Bushnell was a DevOps engineer and cyber defense specialist in the 231st Support Squadron, where his role involved facilitating, improving, and optimizing software development, testing, and deployment infrastructure. His martyrdom has everything to do with Project Nimbus, the multibillion-dollar contract between Google and Amazon, which has provided cloud computing infrastructure, artificial intelligence, and various technological services to the Israeli government and military.

Today, it is common to see on social media the argument that the world is allowing the genocide in Gaza to happen in much the same way it allowed the Holocaust to happen, leaving future generations with the same horror and the same uncomfortable lesson: you swear you would have acted had you been there, but you are here, now, and choose silence. However, I believe that while there must be collective accountability on the part of humanity for the death of an entire people, there are limits to what can be done in the face of the relentless American war machine.

This is because what is happening in Gaza does not appear to be merely a massacre, but rather a rehearsal. A military rehearsal can be understood as a systematic process of testing, calibrating, and validating doctrines, technologies, and warfighting protocols in a real-world environment, as envisioned by the U.S. Department of Defense's Technology Readiness Assessment (TRA), which recommends demonstrating emerging technologies under actual operational conditions before their large-scale deployment. Today, Big Tech effectively occupies the rank of lieutenant colonel within the armed forces of the United States.

The corporate agreements between American Big Tech companies and Israeli settlers cannot be understood as mere logistical support, but rather as an organic integration of technology and military strategy. The Palestinian people have never posed a threat to American power or its Zionist proxies. They have never had an army, navy, or air force. They have never possessed air defense systems or any military infrastructure comparable to that of the force occupying them. Not even Hamas, lacking the capability to confront Israel at any meaningful strategic level, represents a concrete threat to a highly data-driven military apparatus. Rather, it serves as a convenient pretext, periodically reactivated to justify massacres and sustain an apartheid regime under the narrative of “self-defense.”

The doctrine authorizing this form of automated lethality closely mirrors the U.S. Department of Defense's TRA framework: emerging technologies are considered ready for military deployment after successful demonstration in a real operational environment. Gaza, therefore, becomes the validation ground for this doctrine—a real-time testing environment where war not only destroys but also collects data, optimizes models, and trains machines for the next operation.

The world is not simply allowing the genocide in Gaza to happen. It is being forced to watch, horrified and intimidated, the message that a militarized Big Tech, in partnership with the Israeli government, is sending to the planet: if this can be done to the Palestinians, it can be done to anyone. Every Instagram story, every TikTok, every video of a family buried beneath rubble or an act of resistance crushed in Gaza becomes part of the cognitive theater of hybrid warfare. These are demonstrations of power projected globally, geopolitical warnings embedded in the ordinary flow of social media, dress rehearsals for a future in which sovereignty, international law, and civilian lives become irrelevant before Meta-Trumpist military supremacy.

What is emerging, therefore, is the expansion of proxy wars—not wars fought between conventional armies financed by rival powers, but between Western technological infrastructures and entire populations transformed into laboratories. Gaza is merely the first validation field for this model. Everything suggests that this pattern, in which occupied territory serves as a testing ground for military technologies and geopolitical doctrines of control, will be replicated in other regions of the Global South.

Hybrid Warfare – The Technological and Kinetic Elements

For the first time, a war is being conducted through the systematic and operational use of artificial intelligence for the selection of human targets. Tools such as Lavender, which reportedly classified up to 37,000 individuals based on digital behavioral patterns, and The Gospel (also known as Habsora), an automated target recommendation system drawing on geospatial data and aerial surveillance, have been used extensively by the Israel Defense Forces during operations in Gaza. These systems operate with a troubling degree of autonomy, suggesting names and locations for elimination based on algorithmic correlations rather than necessarily on material evidence.

The process begins with artificial intelligence deciding who may die. Systems such as Lavender are fed vast quantities of data: whom you speak to, where you go, with whom you live. If your profile appears suspicious, you may enter a list of potential targets. The decision to kill is based not on evidence but on behavioral patterns. In parallel, The Gospel analyzes satellite imagery, drones, and surveillance cameras to identify buildings, streets, and homes where data classifiers believe militants may be present. The machine then suggests which locations should be bombed.

To organize military operations, cloud computing services provide what is essential for these systems to function: servers, processing power, and data storage. Everything occurs in real time, and warfare becomes coordinated through digital dashboards accessed by military personnel as though they were online management systems. Together with Palantir, trends and threats derived from aggregated data—including neighborhood movements, telephone usage patterns, and even international public opinion reactions—are analyzed and anticipated.

Project Nimbus, the approximately US$1.2 billion contract signed in 2021 between Israel, Google Cloud, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), established local data centers in Israel. It grants access to AI tools such as facial recognition, automated image classification, object tracking, and sentiment analysis—technologies previously used in U.S. border surveillance and now reconfigured to operate over the population of Gaza.

Palantir, through its advanced analytics services, entered into a strategic partnership with Israel's Ministry of Defense to provide large-scale intelligence tools. Palantir systems have reportedly been used directly in Gaza operations, including proposing battle plans and integrating surveillance, predictive analysis, and lethal decision support.

Finally, at the tactical level, technologies such as the SMASH Handheld system assist soldiers by guiding their aim and trigger timing toward Palestinian targets, ensuring shots are fired at the optimal moment and making the act of killing as automated as a video game with sticky targeting enabled.

Credits : UN Photo/Shareef Sarhan

Hybrid Warfare – A Warning

None of this is only about Gaza. What is being rehearsed there is not confined to the besieged territory. What is being developed, tested, and refined is a doctrine of total hybrid warfare, in which kinetic operations—those of bodies, territory, and explosions—and digital, informational, and political operations function together in a data-driven system of coordination. War no longer depends solely on armies or borders: it operates through servers, social media platforms, and our feeds.

The objective is not merely to kill. It is to control what can be seen, felt, and thought. Physical bombardment is accompanied by symbolic saturation and mental exhaustion: videos, reports, images of bodies, and live testimonies transmitted in real time, framed by narratives that algorithms either amplify or suppress. This logic lies at the heart of cognitive warfare: shaping global perception, injecting doubt, demoralizing solidarity, and normalizing horror.

As a rehearsal, the Palestinian genocide in Gaza is also a warning. Through commercial mechanisms such as tariff threats, lawfare, and recent attacks on Brazil's General Data Protection Law (LGPD), we can already see this doctrine being exported and adapted to the realities of the Global South. Where there are no bombers, there is data surveillance by American technological oligopolies. Where there is no SMASH Handheld, there is calibrated disinformation. Where there are no armies, there are captured courts and lobbying efforts against national sovereignty.

What is being tested in Gaza—weaponized AI, automated targeting, cloud computing integration—represents the cutting edge of a control architecture exercised through the interoperability of digital infrastructure and military power. The father of Western military theory, Clausewitz, once said that war is merely the continuation of politics by violent means. Meta-Trumpism continues its politics through algorithms and blood.

Our feeds belong to Big Tech, now in service of the American war machine. In Brazil, technological infrastructure is dependent on the services of these technological oligopolies. An American soldier sacrificed himself in opposition to the massacre and horror, acting as an immune response incapable of overcoming the disease. It is no coincidence that the world is forced to watch: the means of resistance do not belong to us.

The architecture of domination is total. It inhabits the contracts we sign without reading, the terms of service we normalize, the devices we carry in our pockets, and the platforms that shape our thoughts. The war is transmitted in real time not to be stopped, but to be absorbed and metabolized as spectacle, tragedy, or merely another “humanitarian crisis.”

Let no one be mistaken: what is at stake is not only Palestine, but the possibility that any people, anywhere in the world, might oppose imperial machinery without being crushed by it. Gaza is not the exception. Gaza is the model.

Isabela Rocha is a master's graduate and PhD candidate in Political Science at the Institute of Political Science of the University of Brasília (IPOL-UnB). She coordinates the Computational Methods for Political Science Research Line within the Laboratory for Research on Political Behavior, Institutions, and Public Policy (LAPCIPP IPOL-UnB). She currently coordinates the Strategy, Data, and Sovereignty Working Group within the Study and Research Group on International Security at the Institute of International Relations of the University of Brasília (GEPSI IREL-UnB) and serves as president of the Forum for Strategic Technology of BRICS+, promoting the development of sovereign and trustworthy technological infrastructure in Brazil, throughout the Global South, across BRICS+ countries, and worldwide.