ICE and the Israeli Military Are 2 Sides of the Same Coin — We Must Resist Both

On July 12, 2025, Homeland Security agents shoved Sen. Alex Padilla (D-California) out the door of a department press conference when he tried to ask a question of Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. The secretary had deployed hundreds of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to the sanctuary city of Los Angeles, where they unleashed tear gas on outraged residents. Video of security agents in LA knocking Padilla to the ground, ordering him to “lay flat” while handcuffing him, went viral on social media. Overnight, the son of Mexican immigrants became a symbol of resistance to MAGA race hatred.

Yet, three weeks later, the liberal darling would join Adam Schiff, California’s other senator and one of the biggest recipients of AIPAC largess, to vote against Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vermont) resolution to block nearly $676 million in weapons to Israel. In the midst of overwhelming U.S. public opposition — including 92 percent of Democratic Party voters — to Israel’s military onslaught in Gaza, Padilla sided with a minority of Senate Democrats to continue arming a genocide so inhumane it led to the coining of a new humanitarian crisis term: “Wounded Child, No Surviving Family” (WCNSF).

It was as though the ICE raids at home were separate and apart from Israel’s bombardment and mass starvation of 2 million people in Gaza.

Despite the presence of Palestinian flags at ICE protests, lawmakers and mainstream Democrats often refuse to make the clear connection between ICE agents ethnically cleansing U.S. militarized communities and Israeli soldiers ethnically cleansing occupied Palestine.

In actuality, the Trump administration and the Israeli government are operating from the same playbook to realize their vision of ethnic or racial supremacy. For Donald Trump and his MAGA base, the goal is a white, Christian, cisgender America where the country’s past crimes — Indigenous genocide, African slavery, racial segregation, Japanese incarceration — are erased from the classroom, from the history books, and from the collective memory; for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters, the goal is an ever-expanding Jewish supremacist state purged of Palestinians, their expulsion never taught nor acknowledged, their culture — from falafel to dabke to oud music — appropriated to erase all signs of Palestine, only to resurface under the false name of “Israeli culture.” In this playbook, Israel’s critics are labeled antisemites in order to shut down debate.

Deadly Exchange

In 2017, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) launched the Deadly Exchange campaign to

sever the decades-long collaboration between U.S. law enforcement and the Israeli military. JVP said its Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests revealed that well over a thousand police, sheriffs and federal agents, including the FBI, ICE, and Homeland Security, had flown to Israel for training in surveillance, racial profiling, crowd control, detention, and deportation.

In 2018, Researching the American-Israeli Alliance (RAIA), in partnership with JVP, produced “Deadly Exchange: The Dangerous Consequences of American Law Enforcement in Israel.” In this report, the authors examined how U.S. law enforcement in Israel studied visual monitoring in public places, internet surveillance, racial profiling of communities of color, treatment of protesters as enemy combatants and coordination of media reporting on state-sponsored violence.

Eran Efrati, then executive director of RAIA, told Al Jazeera in 2020 that U.S. law enforcement who travelled to Israel witnessed “live demonstrations of repressive violence in real-time, in protests across the West Bank, patrols in East Jerusalem, and visits to the Gaza border.”

This was not an intercontinental Zoom call. This was on-the-ground modeling and information sharing. Efrati told Al Jazeera, “Delegates meet with the Shin Bet and chief officers in Israeli military prisons to discuss investigation tactics, with Palestinian Authority agents and police, to learn about how Israel uses their collaboration in suppressing Palestinian dissent.”

JVP’s FOIA requests revealed that, in 2015, Peter Edge, then the associate director of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, accepted an invitation from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to attend a “counterterrorism” seminar in Israel. FOIA requests also turned up ADL documents in which Edge, prior to visiting Israel, said he was looking forward to “learning more about how the law enforcement community manages perpetual and elevated threat levels, both internally and from neighboring countries, how/whether they are effective, and how those techniques can be applied more broadly.”

Invoking Biblical Claims

Both the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Israeli Ministry of Defense exploit religious doctrine to legitimize their aims and couch their crimes in lofty yet chilling language.

On the eve of Israel’s October 2023 ground invasion of Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked the biblical image of the nomadic nation of Amalek, which — according to the ancient text — ambushed exhausted Israelites escaping slavery under Egypt’s Pharaoh. During a televised press conference, Netanyahu boasted about the determination of Israeli soldiers to avenge the murders of October 7th. “They are committed to eradicating this evil from the world,” he said. “Remember what Amalek did to you,” he added, quoting the biblical tale of how Amalekites killed the weakest Israelites — the old, the sick — before Moses could lead his people to the Promised Land of Canaan.

On the eve of Passover in April 2024, six months into Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, Netanyahu delivered a speech in which he compared Hamas to the brutal Egyptian Pharaoh, who in the Book of Exodus calls on Egyptians to hurl Hebrew boys into the Nile River.

In reference to Hamas, Netanyahu exhorted, “It hardens its heart, and refuses to let our people go. Therefore, we will land additional and painful plagues upon it — and this will happen soon.” Though Netanyahu never calls himself the modern-day Moses, he alludes to the analogy when he speaks of the Hebrew prophet who, as the Torah describes, stretched out his hand to part the Red Sea so Israelites could escape the Pharaoh’s army.

Similarly, the Facebook page of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), depicts immigration agents as saviors protecting the people from dark forces. In a recruitment video, men in military uniforms — helmets, infrared night vision goggles, holding big guns — hunt down faceless people hidden in the shadows of some underground hell.

Ominous music plays in the background. A caption reads, “THE WICKED FLEE WHEN NO MAN PURSUETH; BUT THE RIGHTEOUS ARE BOLD AS A LION.” (Proverbs 28:1) In the Old Testament, the sage Solomon teaches that the wicked are fearful and constantly on edge, while the righteous are confident and courageous because they walk with God at their side.

In other words, “wicked” people — non-U.S. citizens on U.S. soil — can only hide underground in the shadows for so long; eventually the fierce lion, the border patrol agent, whose point of view we share in the video, will hunt them like cornered prey.

One need not be a Madison Avenue huckster to understand why politicians and their PR teams grab the Bible to promote otherwise repugnant messages. The Old Testament lends authority, gravitas and the Lord’s nod to racist propaganda while the propagators build rapport between the institutional power and the fanatical base. In this case, the base is white supremacists, Zionist Jews, and the estimated 30 million Christian fundamentalists in the U.S.

How Israel Models Racial Profiling for ICE

If the Trump administration envisions a white Christian nation, it need only look to Israel for a model of an ethno-supremacist state that institutionalizes racial profiling to subjugate an entire population.

In Gaza, Israel indiscriminately bombs and starves civilians simply for the crime of being Palestinian, blocking hundreds of truckloads of water, food, and medicine. On October 9, 2023, two days after the Hamas-led raid into Israel, Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, said, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” adding, “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”

Israel also targets Palestinians on the basis of their ethnicity in Occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank city of Hebron, where Israel’s massive biometric surveillance network — 1,000 cameras with AI-driven software — tracks, monitors and spies on Palestinians in public spaces, including checkpoints, where Palestinians’ faces are scanned without their permission or even knowledge.

Israel calls this Orwellian system Red Wolf, in keeping with similar names for Israel’s other surveillance technologies, such as Wolf Pack, a gargantuan database that profiles Palestinians, including photos of their family members, and Blue Wolf, a smartphone app that sends Israeli soldiers a color-coded signal to order the Palestinian either detained or free to pass.

In 2016, following a mass shooting in Florida, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump took a cue from Israel, telling Face the Nation that the U.S. must consider racial profiling: “Other countries do it, you look at Israel and you look at others, they do it and they do it successfully.”

In July 2025, Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, went a step further to endorse racial profiling while appearing on Fox News: “Look, people need to understand, ICE officers and Border Patrol, they don’t need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them, and question them. They just need the totality of the circumstances, right?”

Wrong. A Central California lower court ruled that prohibited agencies like ICE and CBP from arresting and detaining people based on their race or ethnicity, language, or accent. After the Trump administration kicked and screamed and appealed the lower court ruling, the US Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, sided with the White House to lift the temporary restraining order that restricted immigration agents from racially profiling. The high court ruling was issued as an emergency stay of the lower court ruling, leaving the underlying case unresolved as masked ICE agents abducted brown people in broad daylight.

No Tech for Apartheid — or Surveillance at Home

Ethnic supremacists in Israel and the United States rely on the tech behemoths — Google, Palantir, Amazon, Microsoft, and Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons developer — to surveil the movements of Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories, as well as the movements of immigrant communities and Palestinian rights activists in the United States.

Since 2008, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE and CBP, has signed $235 million in contracts with Elbit Systems. That includes a $23.9 million contract with Elbit’s U.S. subsidiary for new surveillance towers, complete with cameras and radar systems, for an integrated virtual border wall, awarded during former President Joe Biden’s tenure. Sam Chambers, a research associate at the University of Arizona, notes that immigrants wishing to avoid the virtual wall traverse isolated and mountainous paths, where some never make it out alive.

Another DHS-Elbit contract for night vision goggles would allow the CPB to track immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexican border in darkness or fog. The words “REAL. RAPID. READY.” are headlined across Elbit America’s website that boasts of AI-powered technology for a 98 percent detection rate of illegal border crossings. “Our fully autonomous systems are field-proven, rapidly deployed, and ready today,” reads the website.

While Elbit positions itself as the “warrior” protecting the border from invaders, Google adopts a more nuanced approach to high-tech surveillance of people resisting colonization. Google engineer recruitment ads tout cultural pride and innovation, not facilitation of Israel’s military’s occupation.

Google’s 86,000-square-foot Tel Aviv campus, featuring panoramic views, colorful rooms and recessed lighting, occupies eight floors of a building with a mythological name: Electra Tower, named after the Greek mythological figure. In the Oresteia trilogy, Electra plots with her brother to kill their mother for conspiring to kill their father. At the Tel Aviv campus, employees who develop AI technology for the Israeli military can avail themselves of yoga and wellness classes.

In the United States, however, Google employees are anything but well.

Since April 2024, Google has fired 50 employees for conducting sit-ins at offices in California and New York. Organized by No Tech for Apartheid, the protesters demanded Google abandon Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract Google and Amazon signed in 2021 to provide Israel with AI-driven cloud computing. Critics charge the technology is used to surveil Palestinians in the West Bank and select bombing targets in Gaza.

Follow the money all the way to the Arizona-Mexico border. In April 2025, The Intercept reported that Google will collaborate with the Trump administration to provide a central database for video surveillance at an upgraded “50 towers with up to 100 cameras across 6 sites in the Tucson Sector.” Although CPB is tasked with arresting immigrants at the border, the agency also shares its data with ICE for abductions, detentions, and deportations in the interior, 100 miles from the Mexican border.

Co-founded by billionaire Trump supporter Peter Thiel, Palantir collaborates with intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense for war and surveillance. In June 2025, the Department of Defense, according to The Software Report, signed a $1.3 billion contract for Palantir’s Project Maven, which analyzes drone footage of so-called enemy combatants to “enable units to make hundreds of real-time decisions per hour using AI-driven tools.”

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese released a report in June 2025, calling out the “corporate machinery” of 48 companies profiting from complicity in Israel’s occupation and genocide in Palestine. According to Albanese’s research, there was “reasonable grounds” to believe Palantir supplied Israel with predictive policing software to make on-the-spot battlefield decisions, including to generate hit lists through AI systems with benign sounding names like “Lavender,” “Gospel,” and “Where’s Daddy?”

Palantir co-founder Alex Karp, the self-described “progressive warrior” and son of civil rights activists, appears unfazed by accusations of complicity in genocide. Celebrating a stock market valuation of Palantir at $300 billion, Karp told investors in February 2025, “Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world, and when it’s necessary to scare our enemies and, on occasion, kill them.”

For Karp, Thiel, and other co-founders, the cash keeps rolling in, as the Trump administration awards Palantir a “$30M contract to track ‘self-deportations’ and identify priority deportation cases, particularly visa overstays.”

Resistance

In a victory for insurgent tech workers, Microsoft announced on September 18, 2025, that it would no longer allow Israel’s elite cyberwarfare agency Unit 8200 to employ its cloud products to conduct mass surveillance of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. A blog post from Microsoft President Brad Smith came after an investigation by The Guardian, +972 Magazine and Local Call, a Hebrew news site, revealed that the Israeli military intelligence unit for signals intelligence, decryption, and cyberwarfare had relied on Microsoft technology to store recordings of Palestinian civilian cell phone calls that would otherwise overload Israel’s storage systems. The goal of Unit 8200? Store “a million calls an hour.”

The reporters’ investigation followed protests by the worker-led “No Tech for Apartheid,” as well as another group called No Azure for Apartheid, named after Microsoft’s “Azure” cloud computing program. The organization posted on Instagram in August 2025 that current and former employees of Microsoft, Google, and Oracle occupied the offices of Microsoft President Smith at the company’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters. The post read, “This is part of a global call for the Worker Intifada: an uprising of workers who refuse to allow their labor to be used for genocide.”

No Azure for Apartheid demanded Microsoft cut ties with Israel and pay reparations to Palestinian victims. Seven people were arrested, with another 18 later rounded up on trespassing and malicious mischief charges after allegedly splashing red paint, symbolizing blood, over the company’s stone sculpture logo in Microsoft’s Redmond plaza, where a makeshift body bag also doused in red paint sat atop the base of the sculpture.

No Tech for ICE, a project of the intersectional Latinx organization Mijente, organizes with college students to stop Big Tech’s career recruitment for the deportation and surveillance industries. Another resistance campaign, Purge Palantir, argues Palantir seeks to “lay the groundwork for algorithmic governance via a system built and controlled entirely by them.” In a San Jose Mercury op-ed, Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the non-profit Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the collaboration between Palantir and the Trump administration for personal data capture was “a dream scenario for both authoritarians and thieves.”

In California, rank-and-file teachers have launched CalSTRS Divest from Genocide to petition the country’s second largest pension fund, sitting atop a $374 billion teacher portfolio, to sell off its Palantir shares, valued at $79 million, and its General Dynamics (Elbit subcontractor) shares valued at $115 million, among others. Endorsed by United Teachers Los Angeles and the California Federation of Teachers, the CalSTRS Divest 4 Palestine campaign is not taking no for an answer after receiving a letter from CalSTRS “respectfully” declining further meetings to discuss divestment. “This is not over for us until CalSTRS takes meaningful action to end its complicity in the Gaza genocide,” reads the campaign’s Instagram account.

In the UK, Palestine Action — which the government has proscribed under purportedly anti-terror laws – occupied Elbit’s rooftop and blockaded its facilities, while activists in the U.S. chased an Elbit subsidiary out of Cambridge, Mass. The subsidiary’s exit followed months of pro-Palestinian protests, in which outraged residents brought signs that read, “Shut Elbit the F*** Down” and “Elbit Profits from Genocide.”

Paragon Solutions

Meanwhile, Amnesty International in Europe is sounding the alarm over Paragon Solutions’s Graphite spyware, which the human rights group says targets journalists by infecting electronic devices to access text messages. Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister of Israel, co-founded Paragon with Ehud Schneorson, a former commander of the Israeli military’s cyber warfare agency Unit 8200. Undeterred, the Trump administration announced in 2025 that it will move ahead on a stalled contract with Paragon Solutions for spyware to hack into cell phones and read messages on encrypted apps like Signal.

What Is to Be Done

It is time to break free from our movement silos and connect the dots.

Trump and his billionaire cronies want to make the United States into a white Christian nation, just as Netanyahu and his fellow Zionists want Israel to be a Jewish supremacist state. Their soft power lies in biblical analogies and victim narratives; their hard power in a wired dystopia ruled by billionaire tech bros, evangelical fanatics and grifter politicians.

Activists must show how these two fascist plots are interwoven by issuing a unified call for demilitarization and decolonization. “No Kings Day” protests must broaden their scope to challenge the U.S. surveillance state that targets the innocent abroad and at home. Take the signs that scream, “No Kings in America, No fascists in America” to the doorsteps of Google and Amazon to unmask their alliance with authoritarians in the U.S. and Israel.

No longer should politicians — like Senators Padilla, Schiff, or marathon emoter Cory Booker — get away with challenging ICE raids while voting to arm Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Make these performance artists say, “Genocide!” Demand federal, state and local electeds refuse money from AIPAC and other organizations in the orbit of the Israel lobby. No platforms for the PEP — Progressive Except for Palestine — lawmakers who rail against Trump while pushing censorship legislation in California and elsewhere to police instruction on Palestine.

No union campaign endorsements for genocide funders and duplicitous censors who conflate antisemitism with criticism of Israel.

The ruse is over.