1999. Beer-Sheva.
I was invited to “Cool People in the Hot Desert” — Hubert Burda’s idea, German and Israeli internet founders, researchers and investors, brought together at Ben-Gurion University to spark something. I went. I kept going back for years after, running workshops with students there. We visited the Weizmann Institute and other places like it.
I was amazed. The quality of what I saw. The drive to innovate — and not for the Israeli market. Never for the Israeli market alone. Always the world, with some very particular beneficiaries. Israel was already being called THE start-up nation. The venture capital was pouring in. Everyone wanted a piece of it.
I wanted a piece of it too, in my own way. I believed in it.
2010. Gaza.
I went for the first time, on a UN mission, helping to distribute OLPC laptops to children. The mission was never fully accomplished. Not even close. Israel controls what is “allowed” to enter Gaza, and laptops for children were, apparently, a risk.
While I was there I saw something else. Tiny drones, miniature, flying all over Gaza, photographing everything, sending the images back — to institutes I had visited ten years earlier, the same ones, building a 3D model of the strip. So that a soldier entering a house in Gaza would already have it live in his helmet: where the furniture was, where the doors were, where the windows were. Try to catch one of those drones and it would explode in your hand. All of it filed under “defense.”
I put those two things next to each other and didn’t like what I saw. The innovation I’d admired in Beer-Sheva had a second life I hadn’t been shown.
The years after. Arab Spring, and back to Israel/Palestine, again and again.
What I saw, over and over, never changed: Palestinian life run by Israeli decision. The streets. The electricity. The water. The money. The companies. The post. Nothing — nothing — in Palestinian hands.
And alongside that, I started to notice how completely the military is woven into a young Israeli life. It starts in kindergarten. It runs through school, where the most capable kids are identified early and given special treatment. It reaches its formal point in mandatory service. And then it continues straight into the universities, where innovation and finance sit at the very top of what gets funded and celebrated.
What comes out the other end is a multi-billion-dollar machine. Dual-use technology — dual in name, military in practice, because that’s where the money and the priority actually are. And it comes with something no lab or simulation can offer: real battlefield data. Equipment tested, live, on Palestinians.
Follow the money.
That’s exactly what Francesca Albanese did in her most recent report — From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide. Read it, and you arrive at her conclusions almost mechanically, because the money leaves a trail. I didn’t need the report to arrive there. I’d already seen it, with my own eyes, twenty-five years apart, on two ends of the same story: the conference room in Beer-Sheva in 1999, and the drones in Gaza in 2010.
I’ll be sitting on a panel soon with a young Palestinian journalist, Plestia Alaqad, and with Albanese joining remotely. I keep thinking about that arc — the one I watched happen, slowly, in plain sight, for a quarter of a century. Nobody hid it from me. I just had to be willing to look at both ends of it at once.