Tech giants, Gaza genocide: Modern parallel to Chiquita’s past controversies

Israel is purportedly storing data on Amazon’s cloud services to identify targets in Gaza, according to Israeli investigative journalist Yuval Abraham.

Abraham claims that Israel has been employing high-error-rate artificial intelligence technology and sensitive data on hundreds of thousands of Gazans to systematically target and attack these individuals. Technology companies such as Amazon and Google may be held accountable for the Gaza genocide if these allegations are confirmed.

Yunus Emre Erdolen, a writer for the daily Serbestiyet, drew a connection between this situation and a historical precedent involving the American banana company Chiquita. Chiquita contributed $1.7 million to the AUC, a fascist terrorist organization in Colombia, between 1997 and 2004.

The AUC utilized this funding to perpetrate severe human rights violations, such as extortion and homicide. The United States subsequently designated the AUC as a terrorist organization and punished Chiquita with a $25 million fine. This case underscores the repercussions of American corporations indirectly condoning human rights violations in other countries.

As Erdolen emphasized, Israel signed the Nimbus initiative with Google and Amazon in April 2021, providing cloud storage services to the Israeli government. Under the initiative, Amazon and Google host data storage centers in Israel through which Tel Aviv transfers and manages sensitive data. This arrangement raises significant ethical concerns because it allows Israel to identify targets in Gaza more efficiently and rapidly.

According to Abraham, Israel uses AI applications such as “Lavender” and “Where’s Daddy?” to identify targets in Gaza. Despite its high inaccuracy rate, Lavender assigns a score of 1 to 100 to individuals based on their likelihood of being Hamas members.

The familial residences of these individuals are identified by Where’s Daddy?, which results in targeted bombings of these homes. According to reports, the data used by these AI systems is stored in cloud services provided by technology companies, allowing for more extensive and rapid attacks to be executed.

if these claims are accurate, the involvement of technology corporations in the Gaza genocide could lead to severe legal and ethical repercussions, similar to the Chiquita experience. Abraham’s investigations reveal the extent to which these companies’ partnerships with Israel contribute to the ongoing atrocities, raising concerns about the future resolution of this complicity.