“where dada?”

Note: This is a post about why I am voting in favor of the ASA resolution sponsored by the Sociologists for Palestine.

My son is a year and a half old. He started talking a little bit late – not abnormally so, but just on the later side. As a result of that, and the usual parenting anxiety, we tracked his first words very carefully. The list grew – slowly, and then quickly. After he hit the phase where he was able to copy words pretty well, we switched to listening for sentences. So, I know that in mid-March 2024, he said his first full sentence: “where dada?”

Not long after he said those words, I read a long-form article on Israel’s use of surveillance technology and algorithms to identify and locate targets in its military campaign in Gaza. Israel’s system consists of two distinct pieces: an algorithm to identify likely Hamas militants and another to track where they are likely to be. In the current conflict, Israel changed how it used these systems. First, it decided to radically expand its target list to include low-level militants (and to be comfortable with an error rate of 10% false identifications). Second, it decided to increase the number of civilian casualties seen as acceptable collateral damage for taking out one Hamas militant:

In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants.

This dramatic increase in the number of acceptable civilian casualties changed the role of the second system, the one designed to use real-time surveillance to locate suspected Hamas militants. This system was seen as most accurate at identifying the locations of militants when they were in family homes. Combined with a willingness to kill many civilians to kill one militant, Israel’s strategy became one of dropping bombs on houses and apartment buildings:

However, in contrast to the Israeli army’s official statements, the sources explained that a major reason for the unprecedented death toll from Israel’s current bombardment is the fact that the army has systematically attacked targets in their private homes, alongside their families — in part because it was easier from an intelligence standpoint to mark family houses using automated systems.

The first system, the one that identifies targets, is called “Lavender.” The second, which locates those targets and was used to justify bombing family homes, is called “Where’s Daddy?”

The past of Israel/Palestine is complicated.* The future is uncertain. The present of Gaza is reasonably clear. As Masha Gessen wrote:

For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time—in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the two months since Hamas attacked Israel, all Gazans have suffered from the barely interrupted onslaught of Israeli forces. Thousands have died. On average, a child is killed in Gaza every ten minutes. Israeli bombs have struck hospitals, maternity wards, and ambulances. Eight out of ten Gazans are now homeless, moving from one place to another, never able to get to safety.

The term “open-air prison” seems to have been coined in 2010 by David Cameron, the British Foreign Secretary who was then Prime Minister. Many human-rights organizations that document conditions in Gaza have adopted the description. But as in the Jewish ghettoes of Occupied Europe, there are no prison guards—Gaza is policed not by the occupiers but by a local force. Presumably, the more fitting term “ghetto” would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.

There is little that any one person, any one academic, or any one academic association can do about the situation on the ground right now. The authors of the resolution know that. For me, as an American and a Jew and a parent who cries thinking about the thousands of children of Gaza killed after being targeted by an algorithm mockingly named after a child’s plaintive cry, I can at least stand up and say: “Not in my name.” As sociologists, we can do the same. Please vote for the resolution.

• If you want to learn more about the history of Israel/Palestine, you can consult the resources here as a starting place. I especially recommend Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine and the work of sociologist Areej Sabbagh-Khoury including her new book, Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba. Sociologists for Palestine have also organized an online teach-in for this Friday; you can find more information here.