20/ The tech its companies are developing there isn’t just designed to kill. It’s also designed to systematically humiliate: to degrade rights, dignity and human spirit.

To accept what’s happening in Gaza is to accept that that tech will eventually be used on us.

And we’ll be paying for it, too.

19/
Israel’s military campaign, we now know, aims at making Gaza unlivable for Palestinians, so as to force an eventual “population transfer”. This is now out in the open, thanks to Trump.

18/
But this is advanced tech that wasn’t developed for use within a framework of law, or even human rights. It was designed to maintain & escalate a dehumanizing occupation.

17/
Compare that with the potential market in an area where India is desperately under-capacity: police and law enforcement.

The key word here is ‘law’.

16/
"India has emerged as the largest purchaser of Israeli weapons in the last decade — accounting for 46% of Israel’s weapons exports — surpassing even the US.”

Despite this madness, hawkish spending on defense does have an implied limit. It’s been quite a while since India actually was at war.

15/
From article in Tablet Mag: 'Israel’s Love Affair With India'

“From drones to missiles to small arms, Israel’s military-industrial complex has found a desirable partner in the subcontinent...

14/
But in a globalized world it’s even safer to push product onto other countries – provided their governments are friendly.

13/
The norms & techniques they’d learned in Iraq – interrogation, incarceration, etc. – went back with them, to become used against Americans.

Weapons, equipment meant for use against an insurgency were pushed onto US police forces. Which is why they look & act like they now do.

12/
The classic case of imperial inventory coming home was after the US occupation of Iraq.

Demobbed soldiers went back and found work as policemen, prison guards across the US.

11/
How do you keep selling the product?
One way, of course, is new wars.

A better way is to repackage it, for governments to use on their own civilian populations.

10/
So what happens when a conflict ends? Or a campaign of ethnic cleansing is slowed by pressure for a ‘ceasefire’?

Think like a business. You’ve got a valuable product and a standing inventory, an assembly line, trained personnel, IP. It’s all set up.

9/
Foreign wars & occupations are, basically, ideal R&D labs for proprietary technologies of surveillance, control and killing.

I don’t know of a better example than Gaza:a human population that has been trapped and dehumanized to justify its indefinite domination and periodic slaughter.

8/
But there’s more to it than that. To maintain a competitive edge, these contractors need to use, test and refine their arms and military tech.

(I've written about how fundamental this was to the history of aerial war and bombing.)

7/
What it implies is that these firms don’t wait around patiently for wars to begin so they can move product.

They are deeply embedded in ways that exploit crises – and get politicians and officials to spend unbelievable sums of public money on their products.

6/
Israel and the US have huge huge industries of private firms producing goods & services for military / counterinsurgency uses.

There’s a word for this, obviously: a military-industrial complex.

5/
This thread *isn’t* about FRS & mass surveillance in Delhi. There’s good reporting on that in the Indian Express.

This is about the way that war, occupation & ethnic cleansing taking place “far away” produce tech that soon becomes a normal part of civilian infrastructure back home.

4/
Then I find that they’re using FRS software from Israeli companies: companies that have developed it since Oct 7, 2023, for the IDF to use in Gaza on mass-surveilling & targeting Palestinians.

3/
Then it turns out that Delhi plans to invest heavily in AI-driven facial recognition systems (FRS) to aid police work and surveillance.

2/
The headline: “Israeli facial recognition tech helps Delhi Police crack ₹80 lakh robbery case”

Great! They caught a robber!