In his book Neoliberal Apartheid, Andy Clarno emphasises that “one of the most important impacts of neoliberal restructuring” is the “production of racialised surplus populations.”¹ The domination of such populations takes the seemingly paradoxical form of their expulsion from the direct exploitation of their labour in the production process. Instead of exploitation, various forces — including displacement, automation, and financialisation — have resulted in a global expansion and proliferation of various forms of precarious life, as well as the emergence of new classes of disposable humanity. Tracking this process, Clarno leads us to Palestine, where this production of Palestinians as surplus humanity has been intrinsic to the Zionist state project. Indeed, he suggests, the neoliberal character of contemporary Israeli settler colonialism has emerged through calculatedly avoiding the exploitation of Palestinians as labourers.

Clarno glosses the prehistory of this decision as follows. After 1948 and into the mid-1980s, Palestinians were integrated into Israel’s economy by providing low-wage labour, mostly in construction and agriculture.² However, beginning in the late 1980s, Israel’s shift towards a neoliberal economy diminished the need for Palestinian labour. As Israel transitioned to a high-tech economy, demand for industrial and agricultural workers dropped, and free trade agreements allowed Israel to outsource production — its textile industry, for example — to neighbouring countries. Meanwhile, Israel simultaneously tightened work permit restrictions for Palestinians and took advantage of newly accessible surpluses of precarious labour. As it brought in large numbers of noncitizen workers, it minimised its reliance on Palestinian labour.

In 2006, the wholesale elimination of work permits for Palestinians in Gaza consolidated a situation in which unemployment rates continually grew to exceed 30%.³ Unemployment is only one small measure of a larger set of processes by which Israeli state policy has attempted to cast Palestinian life not only as a threat to its existence, but as a particular kind of generally superfluous life. Such processes are the outcome of an epistemological project packaged in Israeli politics under the label of “security”. Indeed, the emergence of Israel as a giant in the defence and tech industries has persistently depended on its ability to render those deemed as “threats” perpetually available for knowledge extraction. Israel’s “success” is entirely contingent upon the forms of enclosure and predation to which it subjects Palestinians.

To inform the state’s practices of social control and militarised occupation, Israel’s security industry offers a plethora of systems specifically designed to extract and process biometric, personal, and behavioural data. Palestinian life is, as promised, constantly surveilled. But Palestinians are not simply the objects of this project of knowability. They are also the testing ground through which the Israeli defence industry comes to learn about itself and understand its own capabilities — trialling their products on live human targets to hone and perfect them over time.

To understand Palestinians as simultaneously disposable and central to the political and economic organisation of Israel is to point to a contradiction. “Despite Israel’s celebrated ‘disengagement’ […] in 2005,” writes Clarno, Gaza “remains Israel’s principal laboratory for securitization and extraordinary violence.”⁴ The production of Palestinians as enemies (politically), as disposable or inessential labourers (economically), and, ultimately, as data-bodies and test subjects (epistemologically) has transformed them into objects of assetisation for Israeli neoliberalism.

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Birch and Muniesa theorise assetisation as an answer to a conceptual problem: in contemporary capitalism, what drives the accumulation of capital is no longer primarily the proliferation of the commodity form. In today’s technoscientific capitalism, they write, “the dominant form […] is not the commodity but the asset.”⁵ They continue: “by asset, we mean something that can be owned or controlled, traded, and capitalised as a revenue stream […] it could be a piece of land, a skill or experience, a sum of money, a bodily function or affective personality, a life-form, a patent or copyright, and so on.” Assetisation offers an apt framework through which to interpret what appeared as a contradiction — the fact that the expulsion of Palestinians from the labour force has enabled new modes of technoscientific enclosure. In such contexts, it seems that new forms of accumulation collude with older, longer-established ones.

In the neoliberal era, Israel’s state-constitutive practice of land theft has been intensified by new financial logics that allow the production of Palestinian vulnerability, the seizure of Palestinian land, and the creation of financial assets to flow directly into one another. In her work on public finance, Melinda Cooper challenges the conventional understanding of “tax breaks”, arguing that state-directed exemptions from taxation are designed to facilitate private investment choices that have “the same effect on Treasury accounts as direct government spending”.⁶ What is typically designated as a “break”, then, is better understood as a form of state spending — hence the term “tax expenditures”. This framing clarifies cases such as Israel’s so-called “periphery tax break”, a fiscal measure intended to incentivise settlement development far from the state’s urban centres. In early November 2025, the Knesset — Israel’s unicameral legislature — authorised an additional 35 per cent in spending for settlements designated as “under threat”.⁷

Beyond the formal and informal militarisation of occupation, then, the development of private property through illegal settlements transforms violence against Palestinians into a mechanism of asset class formation. To Israelis and to potential investors recruited at synagogues and housing sales, the comparatively low cost of housing in illegal settlements in the West Bank has been rebranded as “affordable housing”, a solution to the so-called affordability crisis in Israel “proper”. This incentivisation — at the expense of Palestinian lives and livelihoods — further fuels the growth of transnational real estate and property-management industries, which leverage these state expenditures to market settlement housing to buyers in Los Angeles and New Jersey.⁸

Real estate is only one of a broader set of asset classes that have emerged from the production of Palestinian precarity. The ongoing manufacture of entitlement to Palestinian land is inextricable from (and routed through) another site of assetisation. Here, the consolidation of the settler-colonial state relies on a persistent narrative of vulnerability — one that casts the state as mortally threatened by its own victims, and thereby justifies situating Palestinians at the centre of neoliberal Israel’s extensive security economy.

As Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian argues, the construction of Palestinians as security risks underwrites the quotidian surveillance they are subjected to. By incessantly monitoring Palestinians, Israel “seeks to incorporate them into the polity as threatening Others who must be placed under constant surveillance and control.”⁹ This everydayness of surveillance establishes the need for what Shalhoub-Kevorkian terms an “industry of fear”, a political economy that necessitates, by its very foundations, both the reproduction of fear and the promise of its overcoming. Discursively, securitisation runs on the fumes of its own contradictions, continually needing to manufacture the problem it claims it will solve. It is here, where the politics of knowledge meets the extractivist economy of techno-Zionism, that datafication has emerged as an industry-defining force.

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Datafication, the process of converting human life into quantifiable digital traces accessible to algorithmic analysis and manipulation, allows for the integration of Palestinian bodies into Israel’s neoliberal economy as sites of continuously extractable and computable data. Their data traces — captured at checkpoints, intercepted through phone networks, or scraped from social media — become the raw material of the assetisation of Palestinian life, datafication being its mining process. For Mejias and Couldry, datafication involves two inseparable elements: “the transformation of human life into data” through quantification, and “the generation of different kinds of value from data”.¹⁰

The first element of datafication, the quantification of life, requires mechanisms and infrastructures for data collection, compilation, processing, and storage. Israel deploys a panoply of data-capture systems — CCTV cameras, license plate readers, biometric checkpoint scanners, facial recognition cameras, computer vision-equipped drones, spyware, and social-media monitoring tools, and more — all of which continuously extract data about and from Palestinian life.¹¹ Israel consolidates these accumulated abstractions in massive databases, such as the Wolf Pack database that assembles them into profiles about virtually every Palestinian, including their photographs, family members and history, educational status, and licence plates.¹² Israel stores this data on in-house servers as well as cloud services that extend its storage capacity.¹³ The “near-limitless storage capacity” unlocked through these contracts means that Israel is not constrained by the need to focus on collecting data on specific surveillance targets.¹⁴ It can surveil everyone.¹⁵

The second dimension of datafication — that of generating value — includes “monetisation but also means of state control”.¹⁶ In the Israeli context, this surveillance data is formally subsumed under the amorphous and fungible category of “intelligence”. In other words, it exists to inform and direct military decision-making, such as the identification of “threats” and the determination of targets. In practice, soldiers and state-deputised settlers responsible for settlement security routinely access databases such as Wolf Pack to justify checkpoint denials, arrests, raids, and the dispersals of protests.¹⁷ Israel values this datafication process not only for its role in decision-making but also for its legitimation of those decisions, including retroactively. Israeli military officers have openly acknowledged using Palestinians’ data to justify arrests or killings, “even after the fact”, noting that, “[w]hen they need to arrest someone and there isn’t a good enough reason to do so, that’s where they find the excuse.”¹⁸ More recently, these data traces have also been used to train and feed algorithmic models and systems that purport to automate the entire pipeline of evaluation and targeting. The most necropolitical manifestations of this are the Lavender and The Gospel target-generation systems, which were revealed to be in operation in Gaza over the past two years. In real-time, these systems assign individuals and buildings numerical scores that mark them as targets for bombing. The kill lists generated by these systems were used by the Israeli military to carry out thousands upon thousands of nominally “targeted” bombings with no regard for casualties.¹⁹

Israel’s military occupation is far from the sole beneficiary of the datafication of Palestinians. Private providers of security technologies provide the state with the technical infrastructure through which vast quantities of data are collected, consolidated, and analysed. These companies also use this data to train and improve the systems they deploy in occupied Palestine, with the ultimate aim of selling them in a global marketplace hungry for tools to identify targets, monitor populations, and suppress dissent. Israeli security contractors like AnyVision (now renamed Oosto) have, for instance, deployed facial recognition systems across more than 115,000 cameras throughout the West Bank to track the movements of Palestinians.²⁰ Variants of that same technology are now used in airports, train stations, and stadiums worldwide.²¹ Seeing as facial recognition systems require vast amounts of data in order to be accurate, it is not far-fetched to infer that the accumulation and processing of Palestinians’ facial data was instrumental in training the products that AnyVision sells for commercial use. Indeed, the company’s CEO has explicitly acknowledged that the technology was first validated in the West Bank — before generating more than 95 per cent of the company’s revenue through sales outside of Israel.²²

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The “Palestinian Laboratory” has become a common framework for analysing how Israel uses Palestinian territories as sites for testing and refining its military, surveillance, and security technologies.²³ Within this framing, Palestinians are often characterised as test subjects, a designation reinforced by Israeli weapons and security manufacturers’ use of the term “battle-tested” to market their products.

The framing of Palestinians as “test subjects”, however, fails to grasp their centrality to the political economy of neoliberal Israel. Palestinians are not merely subjected to technological experimentation; they are fully embedded in the training, operation, and optimisation of Israel’s security technologies. The digital traces of Palestinian life are inscribed across the entire lifecycle of the technologies Israel develops and sells globally. Moreover, the capacity to extract and generate value from Palestinians’ data enables a broader set of financial instruments that channel investment into Israel’s surveillance and securitisation industries.

Seen this way, the extractive economy — and the necropolitical order that enables it — can be more accurately understood as one in which Palestinians themselves are rendered an asset class. This reframing becomes especially salient when considering Israel’s dependence on the global security market. Indeed, Israel’s economic and geopolitical future is increasingly tied to the development and export of security technologies. As noted by Privacy International, Israel today is home to more surveillance companies per capita than any other country in the world.²⁴ It is also the world’s leading exporter of spyware and digital forensics tools.²⁵ In a mutually beneficial arrangement, the Israeli government and military rely on private Israeli firms — such as NSO Group, Cellebrite, Cytrox, and Candiru — to carry out their technological development, whether as contractors or as employers of tech workers enlisted to contribute expertise and added capacity while on reserve duty.²⁶ In turn, these companies benefit from lenient export controls and capitalise on Israel’s diplomatic efforts, which often facilitate the sales of their technologies while simultaneously helping to normalise relations with purchasing countries.²⁷

This reliance on Palestinian datafication creates a form of asset dependency. Palestinians, in essence, become a critical asset class upon which Israel’s futurity is built. This asset dependency exists in a complex relationship with the eliminationist character of Israeli settler-colonialism. To some extent, at least, it is clear that Israel’s security sector’s data regime depends on a surveillable population. Over the past two years, however, the mass killing and displacement of Palestinians has disrupted the very systems of surveillance and monitoring, and the stable supply of data upon which the security industry depends. Israeli military officers have, for instance, raised concerns about the impact destroying Gaza’s telecommunications infrastructure would have on their ability to intercept and surveil Palestinians’ communication, citing a reduced “volume of phone calls in the territory”.²⁸

The neoliberal project that has turned Palestinian life into an asset for its colonisers may now be forced to confront the possibility of its own exhaustion, as the occupation devours its own data substrate — collapsing the promise of an economy of total knowability under the weight of the state’s genocidal logics.

Notes

1. Andy Clarno, Neoliberal Apartheid: Palestine/Israel and South Africa After 1994, 2019, p. 15. [^]

2. Clarno, Neoliberal Apartheid, p. 30. [^]

3. Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, On the Occasion of International Workers’ Day: President of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics Ms. Ola Awad Presents the Current Status of the Palestinian Labour Force, 2019. [^]

4. Clarno, Neoliberal Apartheid, p. 42. [^]

5. Kean Birch and Fabian Muniesa, eds. Assetization: Turning things into assets in technoscientific capitalism, 2020, pp. 1-2. [^]

6. Melinda Cooper, Counterrevolution: Extravagance and austerity in public finance, 2024, p. 17. [^]

7. Noa Shpigel, “Knesset Advances Bill Granting Tax Breaks to Israeli West Bank Settlements in ‘Threatened’ Areas”, Haaretz, 12 November 2025. [^]

8. Jonah Valdez, “The Companies Making It Easy to Buy in a West Bank Settlement”, The Intercept, 11 July 2024. [^]

9. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear, 2015, pp. 5-7. [^]

10. Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry, “Datafication”, Internet Policy Review 8, no. 4, 2019. [^]

11. Sophia Goodfriend, “Algorithmic State Violence: Automated Surveillance and Palestinian Dispossession in Hebron’s Old City”, International Journal of Middle East Studies 55, no. 3, 2023, pp. 461-478. [^]

12. Elizabeth Dwoskin, “Israel Escalates Surveillance of Palestinians With Facial Recognition Program in West Bank”, The Washington Post, 8 November 8 2021. [^]

13. Yuval Abraham, “‘Order From Amazon’: Tech Giants Storing Mass Data for Israel’s War”, +972 Magazine. 4 August 2024. [^]

14. Harry Davies and Yuval Abraham, “‘A Million Calls an Hour’: Israel Relying on Microsoft Cloud for Expansive Surveillance of Palestinians”, The Guardian, 7 August 2025. [^]

15. Lubna Masarwa, “Israel Can Monitor Every Telephone Call in West Bank and Gaza, Says Intelligence Source”, Middle East Eye, 17 November 2021. [^]

16. Mejias and Couldry, “Datafication”, p. 3. [^]

17. Breaking the Silence, Military Rule: Testimonies of Soldiers from the Civil Administration, Gaza DCL and COGAT, 2011–2021, 2022*.* [^]

18. Davies and Abraham, “‘A Million Calls an Hour’: Israel Relying on Microsoft Cloud for Expansive Surveillance of Palestinians”. [^]

19. Yuval Abraham, “‘Lavender’: The AI Machine Directing Israel’s Bombing Spree in Gaza”, +972 Magazine, 25 April 2024. [^]

20. Olivia Solon, “Why did Microsoft fund an Israeli firm that surveils West Bank Palestinians?”, NBC News, 28 October 2019. [^]

21. “Anyvision / Oosto – DIMSE.” n.d. https://dimse.info/anyvision-oosto/. [^]

22. Solon, “Why did Microsoft fund an Israeli firm that surveils West Bank Palestinians?” [^]

23. Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, 2024. [^]

24. Privacy International, The Global Surveillance Industry, July 2016. [^]

25. Steven Feldstein and Brian Kot, Why Does the Global Spyware Industry Continue to Thrive? Trends, Explanations, and Responses, 14 March 2023. [^]

26. Harry Davies and Yuval Abraham, “Revealed: Israeli Military Creating ChatGPT-like Tool Using Vast Collection of Palestinian Surveillance Data”, The Guardian, 6 March 2025. [^]

27. Tariq Dana, “The Military-Industrial Backbone of Normalization”, 21 October 2025. [^]

28. Davies and Abraham, “‘A Million Calls an Hour’: Israel Relying on Microsoft Cloud for Expansive Surveillance of Palestinians”. [^]