We’re all familiar with the same destructive story that repeats every year. Congress sends billions of taxpayer dollars in military funding overseas to Israel, politicians cheer and applaud an “ironclad alliance,” and American weapons companies collect the profits as Israel expands its regime of colonization and genocide.

But buried inside the latest National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) bill is a provision that points to something much more disturbing and insidious than “military aid”—a policy shift that could transform the U.S.-Israel relationship for decades to come.

The NDAA is a must-pass defense bill considered each year by Congress. The proposed bill for fiscal year 2027 includes an enormous $1.5 trillion defense budget that would dramatically expand state militarization, surveillance, and corporate war profiteering. The bill is currently making its way through the House and Senate.

Earlier this month, both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees voted to approve a new dangerous measure within their respective versions of the NDAA. The measure lays out a policy aiming to deepen integration between U.S. and Israeli military technology, artificial intelligence systems, cybersecurity programs, surveillance infrastructure, intelligence operations, and weapons development. Supporters frame the provision as cooperation and innovation. In reality, it represents a toxic merging of America’s technology industry and Israel’s security state—with devastating consequences.

The timing is not accidental.

The current U.S.-Israel Memorandum of Understanding, the ten-year agreement guaranteeing $38 billion in military aid through 2028, is approaching its expiration date.

In the face of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, our movements have accelerated the fight to challenge military funding, expose the realities of apartheid and occupation, and make U.S. support for Israel increasingly costly politically—and we’ve been making significant gains.

To date, 75 Members of the House of Representatives have signed on to the Block the Bombs Act, critical legislation that would stop the Trump administration from sending weapons to Israel to use in its genocide in Gaza. In April, 40 Senators voted in favor of Joint Resolutions of Disapproval (JRDs) to block the sale of nearly $500 million in 1,000-pound bombs and Caterpillar D9 bulldozers that have been used by Israel to murder Palestinians and destroy infrastructure. These numbers were unthinkable just a year ago.

This historic shift in Congress is a result of overwhelming public pressure. Younger generations are far more skeptical of unconditional support for Israel than previous generations. Tech workers have begun organizing against military contracts. Communities have started challenging Big Tech and surveillance infrastructure.

Now the Israeli government, lobby, and its allies have been forced to pivot strategies. Josh Paul, a former State Department official who resigned in the wake of the genocide in Gaza, argues the new measure in the NDAA represents an effort to transform the U.S.-Israel relationship beyond traditional aid packages and toward long-term defense industrial integration.

Military aid can be cut. Contracts can be renewed. But the proposal of this deadly merger is designed to create something much more durable: institutional lock-in. Once governments, defense contractors, cloud providers, AI companies, and weapons manufacturers become financially and technologically dependent on one another, they develop a shared interest in preserving the relationship. What begins as a policy becomes infrastructure that is far harder to dismantle.

The proposed NDAA Measure also reflects a relationship between Silicon Valley and Israel that has been growing behind the scenes for years. The surveillance firms that developed and refined their technology through Israel’s occupation of Palestine are selling those same products to ICE, DHS, police departments, and local governments. The same billionaire investors funding Israeli defense technology are investing in AI companies, surveillance startups, technologies used to monitor and track people, and data infrastructure across the United States. As both Israel and the U.S. bet their economic futures on the success of the Big Tech industry that undergirds state military infrastructure, this convergence is becoming all the more important and profitable.

The expanding entanglement of U.S. and Israeli military tech industries paints a clear picture: Palestine is not a side story in conversations about the global rise of AI, surveillance, and technology-driven warfare—it’s a central character, and the fight for freedom for Palestinians is inextricably linked to the fight against these repressive technologies and destructive tech corporations globally.

The new measure in the NDAA promises to take the toxic U.S.-Israel military alliance to a whole new level. But it’s already facing significant bipartisan opposition—further evidence of our movement’s undeniable strength. The next step for the NDAA is a House floor vote, and Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie have already introduced an amendment to have the disastrous military merger stripped from the bill.

To understand where we’re headed and how to shape the fight ahead, we must first break down how we got here.

“Battle-tested” Israeli technology

For years, investors, defense contractors, technology companies, and politicians have been laying the groundwork for this exact type of integration.

One of the most influential figures was billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer, who helped champion the Startup Nation project and co-founded Startup Nation Central in 2013. The premise was simple: Israel would be marketed not only as a military ally, but as a global center for cybersecurity, software development, venture capital, and technological innovation.

Why has Israel become so attractive to Silicon Valley, venture capital firms, defense contractors, and the Pentagon?

It’s not simply because Israel produces talented engineers. Many countries do that.

Israel offers something far rarer: an environment where surveillance systems, biometric technologies, AI tools, predictive analytics, drones, and military technologies can be deployed, tested, and refined in a real-world human laboratory. With no accountability, regard for ethics, law, or human life, these tests have been allowed to be taken to their most extreme—genocide.

Behind the language of innovation lies a human reality that is often absent from conversations about Israel’s technology sector.

For decades, Palestinians living under occupation have been subjected to some of the most sophisticated systems of surveillance and control in the world. Facial recognition networks, biometric databases, predictive policing programs, drone surveillance, AI-assisted targeting systems, and digital monitoring technologies have all been developed and deployed within that context.

That reality is inseparable from Israel’s rise as a global security and AI hub.

Israel does not merely sell technology. It sells technology that it argues has been tested and proven under real-world conditions. “Battle-tested” has become one of the most valuable marketing labels in the country’s defense and technology sectors.

The conditions that have subjected Palestinians to generations of a violent, high-tech occupation have also created a pipeline for the same technologies to be exported around the world.

In many ways, Palestinians have borne the cost of an industry that now generates billions in investment, acquisitions, government contracts, and military partnerships.

Profiting from the “Palestine Lab”

This pattern appears repeatedly. Technologies deployed against Palestinians are marketed as proven. Investment flows toward the companies behind them. Those companies receive contracts from governments and law enforcement agencies. The technologies are then integrated into policing, border enforcement, and surveillance systems elsewhere.

For example, Eric Trump recently invested in a major $1.5 billion deal involving Israeli drone manufacturer Xtend, which manufactures drones that have reportedly been used by the Israeli military in Gaza while the company simultaneously pursues contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense.

Federal agencies like ICE and DHS hold contracts with Paragon, an Israeli spyware company, as well as Cobwebs Technologies, an Israeli surveillance firm acquired by PenLink, a major provider of investigative and intelligence software to U.S. law enforcement agencies. The deal created yet another pathway through which surveillance technologies developed within Israel’s security ecosystem became tools used by police, immigration authorities, and federal investigators in the United States.

U.S. companies are also cashing in. After October 7, U.S.-based drone manufacturer Skydio sent hundreds of drones to Israel. The genocide in Gaza became a sinister testing laboratory for its drone technologies.

Today, Skydio has contracts with dozens of police departments, sheriff’s offices, emergency response agencies, and public institutions throughout the United States. In New Orleans, local organizers and civil liberties advocates led by groups like Eye on Surveillance have spent more than a year fighting the expansion of police biometric and drone surveillance technologies.

Unit 8200 and the export of surveillance “expertise”

Often described as Israel’s equivalent to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), Unit 8200 functions as far more than an intelligence agency. It operates as a talent pipeline connecting military intelligence to the private technology sector.

Young Israelis develop expertise in cyber operations, surveillance, artificial intelligence, data collection, and targeting systems through military service. Many then move into the private sector, launch startups, attract venture capital, and eventually sell their companies to major technology firms. Others become executives, investors, advisors, and board members.

Today, Unit 8200 alumni via the “8200 Alumni Association“ can be found throughout Big Tech companies, cybersecurity firms, venture capital funds, and AI startups.

Apple’s recent acquisition of Israeli AI company Q.ai serves as one of many examples. Through the transaction technology and leadership connected to Israel’s military-tech ecosystem, including individuals tied to Unit 8200, were incorporated into one of the most powerful corporations in the world. And they brought their experience from upholding the occupation of Palestine with them.

The walls between the Pentagon, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the surveillance industry are getting thinner by the day. What once looked like separate institutions increasingly functions as a single ecosystem.

The Big Tech-Israel alliance

Today, nearly every major technology company maintains a substantial presence in Israel and holds contracts with the Israeli government and military, including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Intel, Meta, Oracle, and Cisco.

In 2021, Google and Amazon signed Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud and AI contract with the Israeli government. Leaked documents later revealed unusual provisions that reportedly limited the companies’ ability to suspend services and provided extraordinary protections for Israeli access to cloud infrastructure.

Microsoft employees spent years organizing around the company’s relationships with Israeli military and government entities. Their efforts ultimately forced the company to commission independent reviews examining how its technology is used in conflict settings.

Cisco also deepened its relationships with Israeli institutions during the genocide in Gaza, highlighting how major technology companies increasingly function as cogs within a broader security machine, rather than neutral service providers.

Nvidia has gone even further. The company is building a massive AI campus in Israel capable of housing more than 10,000 employees. CEO Jensen Huang has referred to Israel as Nvidia’s “second home,” underscoring how central the country has become to the company’s long-term AI strategy.

These are not isolated business decisions. They are evidence of a growing integration between Silicon Valley’s Big Tech oligarchs and Israel’s technology sectors.

A global turn towards weaponized AI

In December 2025, Israel joined the U.S.-led Pax Silica initiative alongside Japan, South Korea, Australia, the UAE, Singapore, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. The initiative focuses on securing AI supply chains, semiconductors, critical minerals, energy resources, manufacturing capacity, logistics networks, and data center infrastructure.

This is the terrain on which geopolitical power is increasingly exercised.

The U.S. military is also making changes internally in response to these global shifts.

The Pentagon has entered into contracts with companies including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle, Anduril, Amazon Web Services, and SpaceX as part of a broader effort to integrate artificial intelligence into military planning, logistics, intelligence analysis, surveillance, and battlefield operations.

At the same time, senior technology executives at these companies are increasingly moving into military advisory structures and defense programs. Today, the wall that once separated Silicon Valley from the national security state is effectively nonexistent.

Resisting tech-powered state violence

Increasingly, the same repressive technologies that have infiltrated Palestinians’ lives are finding their way into immigration enforcement systems, police departments, schools, workplaces, and national security agencies far beyond Israel’s military apparatus.

But one of the biggest mistakes we can make is assuming this militarized tech take-over is inevitable. As Palestinians have shown us time and again, no form of oppressive system is invincible.

Workers at Microsoft forced independent reviews of the company’s contracts with the Israeli military and brought about the termination of Microsoft’s services to Unit 8200––the first known instance of Big Tech cutting a contract with the Israeli military due to human rights concerns . Google and Amazon workers built international campaigns challenging Project Nimbus, such as the No Tech for Apartheid campaign. Communities across the country have pushed back against Flock Safety surveillance systems, challenged police technology contracts, and organized against the construction of energy-intensive AI data centers. In city after city, ordinary people have demonstrated that public pressure can disrupt projects that once appeared unstoppable.

These fights are ongoing. But they demonstrate that this ecosystem is vulnerable.

Shutting down the plan to shift the U.S.-Israel military alliance into a more insidious partnership is about more than stopping a single policy. It is about interrupting the construction of a military-tech ecosystem that links Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the Pentagon, and Israel’s security establishment through shared contracts, shared infrastructure, and shared financial interests.

It’s also one piece of a much larger fight against the tech oligarchy’s dystopian plans to transform our communities into surveillance prisons, prevent us from organizing and challenging state power, and siphon our community resources to ensure their oppressive systems have what they need to expand.

As we move forward, the struggle will require deeper alliances between workers fighting the tech oligarchy, Palestine organizers, civil liberties advocates, labor unions, climate justice movements, abolitionists, immigrant rights activists, and anti-surveillance activists. Together, our communities must come to terms with the fact that the struggle against data centers and the spread of mass AI-powered surveillance will never be won as long as the U.S.-Israel alliance remains intact. The fight to dismantle Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism will also never succeed unless the destructive U.S.-Israel AI and military tech industries are eradicated.

The fight for Palestinian freedom is inseparable from the fight against data centers, mass surveillance, militarized policing, detention and deportation, and the destructive power of Big Tech.

The proposals to transform the U.S.-Israel alliance like those outlined in the NDAA haven’t emerged because our movements have failed. They have emerged precisely because our movements are winning. The cracks in their system are already showing. The question is whether we’ll be able to take our collective organizing to the level required break them wide open.

In those dispatches, what I didn’t say and what I’m still learning how to say, is that I was living inside the same stories I was reporting. In my attempts to write through the shelling, I was also mourning everything I had loved: my colleagues, my neighborhood, my teachers, my friends, and everything that had made Gaza home for twenty-five years. When I called editors to discuss framing or word count, I was sometimes standing in buildings that had already been hit at least once. The question of how to write about Gaza became personal and could no longer be separated from the professional responsibility. I thought of it then as a dual role—being both the reporter and part of the story. I didn’t yet understand that it was simply the reality of the work, which so quickly becomes the cost.

That cost has shifted depending on where I have moved. In Gaza, my reporting had to be quick. There was no time to sit with the losses that kept coming, let alone grieve them. When I crossed into Egypt on April 17, 2024, I thought I was stepping out of that cost. I simply thought distance would mean relief. Little did I know, leaving only changed how it followed me.

In Cairo, for the first time in a long time, I finally had a sense of normalcy with a stable internet connection and time that wasn’t immediately filled with urgency. And that’s when everything I had pushed aside started to catch up with me. Grief came to me differently. It didn’t disappear because I’ve moved somewhere safer. Usually, I would sit in a café trying to translate an interview and suddenly stop, caught by something closer to a choke of feeling I hadn’t let myself feel in Gaza. Physical safety did not stop my body from registering what it had been through.

That distance also changed the shape of my reporting. In Gaza, I hadn’t felt the need to build context in the same way I found myself obliged to in Egypt. The people I spoke to were people I knew, the places I described were places I knew by memory. From Cairo, though, I needed more calls and confirmations, and most of the time, I had to ask people to describe things I could picture but couldn’t be sure were still the same. The landscape was changing far from me, and I feared my understanding would fall behind it.

Reporters sometimes fall into the trap of urgency, filing as many stories and quick portraits as possible within the shortest span of time. During wartime reporting, that is not entirely wrong; part of the responsibility is keeping the world informed in real time as things unfold. But what gets lost along the way, and I’ve fallen into this too, is that urgency flattens the thing it claims to explain, and the cost of that flattening falls on the people left inside it. I have tried to resist it by asking for more time, conducting longer interviews, chasing details that were harder to reach from thousands of miles away. The effort is greater precisely because the proximity is gone. Without it, the reporting drifts into material that functions like journalism without quite being it.

Consider what access actually means in Gaza when it is not a methodology or a technique transferable from one context to another. Gaza has spent seventeen years under a blockade designed to keep the economy on the brink of collapse without tipping it over—a policy of calibrated suffering that requires its bureaucracy and euphemism. In that environment, trust has grown into a survival calculus. Before October 7, 2023, people in Gaza had watched foreign journalists arrive and depart, sometimes in ways that endangered them and sometimes that simply erased them, and they learned not to extend themselves easily to strangers with notebooks. The Palestinians’ relationship to outside documentation comes with a history of being documented against oneself: census records used for displacement, while testimony collected and filed under the wrong narrative, and images circulated without context until the context becomes the image.

So when the people I call know me, when they knew my family before I knew how to frame a news story, and ask about my mother before I ask about the strike that destroyed a neighborhood we both have memories in, the interview comes after the personal exchange, because that exchange is what makes the interview real and not performed. It is that part of the work that makes professional conduct possible in these conditions. There is no clean partition between the personal and the work because the work was never partitioned to begin with. Every conversation carries both.

This is a truth that certain editorial frameworks struggle to hold. Western journalism’s model of objectivity—which is not really objectivity but a form of social performance of objectivity, developed in a certain country at a moment in the history of professional guilds—treats the reporter’s distance from the subject as a measure of credibility. The closer the journalist is, the more suspect. This model has always served some reporters better than others. The reporter who covers the Midwest as a native Midwesterner is perceived as authoritative, while the reporter who covers Gaza while being from Gaza is understood as potentially compromised. The asymmetry reflects whose proximity has historically been legible as background and whose has been legible as bias.

I did not fully anticipate how differently this weight would register once I was outside Gaza. In the field, everything was immediate in a way that foreclosed interiority. There was no processing because there was no pause in which processing could occur, and that absence of pause could function as a kind of stability, or what stability looks like when health is not available. We kept reporting because we could not stop. It gets called resilience, though it has always felt more like a suspension of reckoning.

Now the suspension has lifted, and what did not surface then surfaces in my sleepless nights. The bombardment does not remain in the past where it chronologically belongs. It returns to me unpredictably. This is familiar to anyone who has read the clinical literature on post-traumatic stress. However, this clinical literature was mostly written by people who studied it from the outside, and there is something it does not quite capture: the experience of a journalist who is also a subject, reporting on people whose condition is a version of his own, who must take notes during the fragments and then file before deadline. This understanding has arrived, though late, with immense pain.

The professional adjustment fits inside a longer history. Palestinian journalists have always had to translate themselves for Western audiences, not to have their reporting recognized, but to establish their right to report at all. This is partly an effect of how the struggle of their people has been narrated from the outside: as a bilateral dispute between two parties with symmetrical claims, which requires symmetrical distance from all reporters and has the effect of treating Palestinian identity as a form of partisanship. It is also an effect of something older and less specific: the general suspicion, in Western media institutions, of reporters who are from the places they cover, a suspicion that applies unevenly and has consistently applied most heavily to reporters from the Global South.

In certain conversations with international journalists over the past few months, I have watched being Palestinian become a flag raised before my argument is finished. In that environment, my work gets scrutinized differently, a more intense quality of attention, more frequent requests for additional sourcing, a willingness to question framing on stories where framing would not be questioned if the byline were different. I have adapted to this and learned to lead with method: how I know what I know, how the reporting was structured, what multiple sources said and where they disagreed. I make the architecture visible early. It’s not that my background is irrelevant, but if it comes first, it can be used to preempt everything that follows. I have learned to translate the work into a form that forecloses certain dismissals before they arrive.

There is something almost absurd about this, if you follow it to its logical end. The reporting is stronger because of who I am and what I can access. The access requires a proximity that is then understood as a liability. So the work improves and the scrutiny increases in proportion to the same variable.

I keep asking myself, ‘what makes this moment matter now? What has actually shifted? What is specific, concrete, or newly true, every time a new atrocity occurs before my eyes?’ I think the only ethical answer available is precision and depth. The people I report on are people I know, or people who could be people I know without any great stretch of circumstance. When the writing becomes too abstract and drifts from the specific into the representative, when a person becomes a symbol of a category of suffering rather than a person who is suffering specifically, I feel that as a failure that goes deeper than the professional. It is a responsibility I cannot cleanly name but can reliably feel when I’ve violated it.

Being Palestinian runs through all of this in ways that resist the clean taxonomies journalism prefers. It is not quite a disadvantage in the way that word implies a neutral baseline from which I have simply fallen behind, nor is it an asset in the way that word implies something I can deploy and set down. It felt more like a complication, which is a different thing entirely, and it required a new way of managing it by ongoing attention that could not be pushed away.

Palestinian writing has a long tradition of bearing witness with this kind of precision—from Mahmoud Darwish’s refusal to let loss become merely lyrical, to Mourid Barghouti’s attention to the smell of the checkpoint, to Ghassan Kanafani’s characters who carry the weight of history without being crushed into allegory by it. That tradition is instructive. The smallest details are often where the truth is most concentrated, though the journalistic appetite for scale, numbers, timelines, geopolitical consequence, can most often obscure that. This has become the work. It is also how I have continued to make sense of the last two years, to keep going and get back on the phone to find the language that is close to right even when it is not yet all the way there. The gap between the two is where I live. I have learned to work in it without pretending it is not there.

Mohammed R. Mhawish is an award-winning writer and reporter from Gaza City. A contributor to The New Yorker and New York Magazine, Mohammed is a fellow at Type Media Center and a Knight Press Freedom Fellow at the Craig Newmark School of Journalism in New York. His reporting and essays have appeared in MSNBC, This American Life, The Economist, The Nation, and Al Jazeera English. He is a recipient of several journalism awards, including an Izzy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Independent Media, the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, the Neal Conan Prize for Excellence in Journalism, and two awards from the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association. In 2025, Mhawish was named Storyteller of the Year by the Institute for Middle East Understanding.

Mohammed R Mhawish

Exiled Notes is where I write from the edges of life and displacement, tracing stories of survival, memory, and the politics that shape Palestinians' lives.

By Mohammed R. Mhawish