Unit 8200 wrote the programming and designed the algorithms that automated the genocide of Gaza and was also responsible for the pager attack in Lebanon. Now those who helped design the architecture of apartheid are being swallowed by the US tech-surveillance complex.
On Mar. 18, Google bought Israeli cybersecurity company Wiz for $32 billion. The acquisition will mark the single largest transfer of former Israeli spies into an American company. This is because Wiz is run and staffed by dozens of ex Unit 8200 members, the specialist cyber-spying arm of the IDF.
Unit 8200 wrote the programming and designed the algorithms that automated the genocide of Gaza and was also responsible for the pager attack in Lebanon. Now the men and women who helped design the architecture of apartheid are being swallowed by the US tech-surveillance complex.
The identity of the Wiz founders, all former Unit 8200, is fairly well-documented (by Israeli media at least). One of the founders, Ami Luttwak, boasts on his LinkedIn profile that he led a “mission critical R&D team” for Unit 8200 which won them the “Israel Defence Award 2012.” Less well-documented, however, is the fact that a huge chunk of the Wiz workforce, from office managers, to software engineers to product analysts, are also former Unit 8200. Following my investigation earlier this year into the former Unit 8200 members working in key AI positions for tech companies, I have identified nearly fifty Wiz employees as being ex Unit 8200 operatives.
It’s also worth noting that the Wiz deal represents a huge tax coup for Israel. It will bring around $5 billion dollars in revenue for the war economy, or around 0.6% of Israel’s entire GDP. Zionists have already expressed the benefits in terms of the war planes and missiles it will pay for to conduct genocide.
The valuation is curious, a huge 64x multiple of Wiz’s most recent annual sales. As someone noted, you could buy Delta Airlines or Brazil’s oil company Petrobras for this money and have change left over. The overpriced valuation is likely as much about politics as economics. Google is heavily invested in Israel. It opened offices there nearly 20 years ago, has bought a number of Israeli start-up tech companies in recent years, and former CEO Eric Schmidt has cosied up to Netanyahu on numerous occasions over the years. All the key figures at Google and its mother company, Alphabet, are proud Zionists. From Schmidt to current CEO Sundar Pichai to founder Sergey Brin to Anat Ashkenazi, the chief financial officer of Alphabet. At a time when Israel’s economy is faltering, the country is experiencing an outflow of people, the IDF can’t win in Gaza and Netanyahu is in deep trouble, the Wiz deal provides a much needed tonic. It helps paper over the economic and political cracks in the country and acts as a vote of confidence in Israel’s early-stage technology sector, the only sector of the Israeli economy that produces anything of note.
Without the Unit 8200-to-tech-startup pipeline, Israel’s economy would be screwed.
The Wiz deal then looks like a favour from Google to Netanyahu.
It keeps a critical business sector for Israel ticking over and provides a reassuring sense of business-as-usual in a blood-soaked land.
The genocide resumes
The day before the Wiz deal, Israel resumed its genocide of Gaza with an unhinged bloodthirsty rampage, the deadliest twenty-four hours in the last nearly eighteen months of genocide. A high bar had been set, and it was cleared. They attacked at night, itself an act of utter cowardice and sadism, and slaughtered hundreds as they slept in tents. In tents. Close to one hundred babies and young children were killed. The overall death toll exceeds 400 and is rising.
As expected, there is not a flicker of condemnation from world leaders, many of whom are arming Israel with the weapons and intelligence it needs for genocide. The British air force spent the ceasefire period gathering intelligence on Palestinians and feeding it to Israel so they could restart the mass murder efficiently.
The genocide is the end of the west. It destroys any claim to moral superiority over Russia, China, Iran or any of the officially designated bad guys. To hear western politicians screech about these appointed enemies while overseeing genocide is not just an insult to our intelligence, it is an appeal to our supremacy. To our white colonial supremacy. To our racism. They are betting that they can carry out genocide because we don’t really care about brown Muslims. They are betting we don’t care about the obvious hypocrisy of supporting Israel while demonising countries that aren’t mass murdering civilians. They think they can get away with arming a population on the one hand in the case of Ukraine and exterminating them on the other in Gaza because Ukrainians are white deserving victims and Palestinians are brown subhuman scum who deserve no sympathy. Victim status is socially constructed by the western media all the time. We rarely hear about black or brown boys and girls who are murdered or go missing but will always hear about white boys and girls who suffer the same fate. Some victims are legitimate and ideal, some are illegitimate. In the case of Gaza and Ukraine, western political and media elites have just extrapolated this to the population level. The baked-in assumption they are working from is that most people are basically racist and hypocrisy doesn’t move the dial. They’re betting the propaganda we’ve been fed since childhood about valiant Israel and the evils of our designated enemies has worked.
The genocide should help us shed our collective naivety about what the west is, what it stands for, what it is founded on. Which is to say slavery, white supremacy, greed, exploitation and unfathomable levels of death. Millions and millions and millions of people. From India to Africa to South America. The colonisation of South America killed so many people it changed the global climate. Having been depopulated by invaders, once thriving cities that were home to millions of people were reclaimed by trees and vegetation on a massive scale, drawing down carbon dioxide and cooling the world. And now, today, we get to see depopulated cities and mass death, livestreamed. For that is progress. We get to see the barbarity of western colonialism in glorious action.
Nothing should ever be the same again. If the genocide of Gaza hasn’t radicalised you, I don’t know if you can claim to be in touch with your basic humanity. If it hasn’t informed you about the true nature of western systems, then you simply do not want to be informed.
Cruel Britannia
The UK is moving ahead with large welfare cuts for disabled people, including those with cancer. On TV the other day, the UK’s health secretary Wes Streeting said that people with cancer should be in work, not at home resting. Alongside this, the government has said that to cut youth employment it will push young people to join the army. This, of course, is in the context of a massive expenditure on military weapons in the face of the Russian bogeyman.
What’s happening in the UK under a nominally centre-left Labour government is a good reminder that there is never a lesser evil if your leaders are neoliberals. Balancing the books on the backs of the poorest and most vulnerable in society is the north star of all neoliberals, whether they call themselves centrists, left wing or right wing. Cruelty is the policy and the point. Yet the last few years have also been a good reminder that everything is a choice. Covid showed us that clearly, as I have written about many times before. The money, in reality, is there for whatever governments want to spend it on. The government is not like a household. It can sell bonds to raise money to finance whatever it likes. It’s just that they don’t want to do that for us, unless, as during covid, they’re forced to. When it is suggested a government spends more on the public good, as Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders said they’d do, all we hear is whining and bleating about how this will ‘spook’ the markets and ‘undermine investor confidence.’ Under neoliberalism, the poor, sick and needy are just the necessary blood sacrifice for capital.
Freeing ourselves from the death grip of neoliberal ideology remains the central political task of our lifetimes.