Israel’s Largest Weapons Manufacturer to Help Expand US’s Virtual Border Wall

Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, has been central in bolstering the country’s apartheid regime and, in the last 10 months, in helping the military carry out what U.N. experts have called a genocidal campaign in Gaza. In the coming months, Elbit Systems will also be critical in the expansion of the Biden administration’s virtual wall — a series of at least 479 surveillance towers along the U.S.-Mexico border that forces migrants into inhospitable terrains and likely death.

Along with the U.S. corporations Advanced Technology Systems and General Dynamics, Elbit America — a subsidiary of Elbit Systems — is expected to install 307 new surveillance towers across the U.S.-Mexico border within the next decade, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) documents published last year by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a San Francisco-based nonprofit digital rights group. To fund them, the Department of Homeland Security has requested $101.8 million from Congress for the fiscal year 2025, of which Elbit will be awarded the largest portion — $23.9 million.

“For years, Israeli companies have been at the forefront of developing surveillance technology. They test it out on Palestinians and then export it to the rest of the world,” said Petra Molnar, the associate director of the Refugee Law Lab at York University in Canada, associate faculty at Harvard University, and author of “The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.”

“This is about technologies of apartheid and technologies of control,” she said of the exportation of a particular worldview that countries like Israel and the U.S. espouse.

CBP’s goal is to create a unified system of surveillance along the U.S.-Mexico border — referred to as Integrated Surveillance Towers — powered by artificial intelligence. Although President Joe Biden has opposed Donald Trump’s wall-building, he has supported, along with many Democrats, a more hidden “virtual wall” and “smart borders” — highly profitable for contractors and more discreet.

CBP did not respond to a request for comment.

Of the 479 towers that EFF has been able to precisely locate and map along the US-Mexico border (it is estimated that more than 800 towers traverse both US borders), at least 55 are Elbit’s Integrated Fixed Towers — structures 80-140 feet tall that can reportedly detect a person up to 7.5 miles away. Only found in Arizona, Elbit’s towers include several controversial installations on tribal lands owned by the Tohono O’odham Nation. The next series of 50 new towers are mostly projected for New Mexico, making the borderlands deadlier.

The virtual wall is integral to the Biden administration’s prevention through deterrence policy, which “intentionally funnels people crossing the border” into some of the most remote and deadly regions in the U.S., a 2023 report from the humanitarian nonprofit No More Deaths stated.

The towers are meant to cast a vast surveillance dragnet. They also create a “funnel effect,” establishing what Sam Chambers, an independent scholar based in Arizona, calls “geographic patterns of mortality” for undocumented border crossers. These patterns create “a labyrinth” that “decreases the chance of a successful crossing and increases the chance of death,” he said. “This is what the towers do and how they function.”

In February 2023, a young man from Guatemala named Martín was trying to avoid detection when he was funneled into the remote Baboquivari Mountains of Arizona’s Pima County, where at least 20 of Elbit’s 55 towers are located. Martín called 911 11 times over three days; his family and local humanitarians also contacted 911 repeatedly. No Border Patrol agents or government rescuers ever arrived to save him; it was local humanitarian volunteers who rescued Martín. Not everyone is that lucky.

The number of migrant deaths at the U.S.-Mexico border has skyrocketed since 2014. At least 5,402 individuals have been reported missing in the last decade — making it the deadliest migration land route in the world — according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Almost 1,000 are believed to have died as a result of harsh environmental conditions, without adequate shelter, food, and water. In 2023, at least 628 people perished attempting to cross to the U.S. — one of the largest numbers on record and a gross undercount, said Chambers, as many human remains are never recovered.

Global Apartheid

The first towers were installed along the U.S.-Mexico border in the mid-2000s — a $1 billion project that would eventually be shut down due to technical problems, costs, and delays. Elbit was among the initial subcontractors. In 2014, CBP awarded Elbit America a seven-year contract worth $218 million to deploy its own towers along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Founded in 1966, Elbit Systems currently provides up to 85% of the land-based equipment to Israel’s military, from mortar bombs, high-tech munitions, and drones to night vision goggles, land surveillance systems, and electronic warfare technology. Elbit advertises its products as “battle-proven” in operations in Gaza and the West Bank, where its weapons have caused numerous casualties and mass destruction of homes and civilian infrastructure, an AFSC Investigate report shows. Elbit’s weapons have been used in war crimes committed by Israel in Gaza at least since 2008, several human rights organizations have documented.

Strident protests at Elbit’s facilities have occurred routinely in Britain in the last few years and more recently have spread to the U.S. This past March, activists targeted an Elbit factory in New Hampshire, following a protest at a so-called innovation center in Massachusets, where protesters defaced the building with graffiti reading “ELBIT PROFITS FROM GENOCIDE.” Dozens of banks, universities, and national pension funds have dropped the company from their portfolios. The Norwegian government pension fund excluded Elbit in 2009, citing “the company’s integral involvement in Israel’s construction of a separation barrier on occupied territory.”

Nonetheless, the company’s market value has consistently grown in the last two decades. In March, Elbit announced its expectation for further sales this year — building on its $6.1 billion revenue from March 2023 to March 2024, which was already 10.5% higher than the previous year. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

Elbit is vying to get a share of a lucrative market — the border surveillance-industrial complex, estimated to be worth U.S. $68 billion by 2025. To make sure its sales pitches are heard, Elbit has spent more than $1 million lobbying Congress and $17,500 on political campaigns, primarily of Republicans, during the 2024 election cycle, according to Open Secrets.

“Israel’s Palestine laboratory thrives on global disruption and violence,” Antony Loewenstein noted in his book “The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World.” What this means for the border, he explained, is higher walls and tighter borders, greater surveillance of refugees, facial recognition, drones, smart fences, and biometric databases. Amid this landscape, “Israeli companies like Elbit are guaranteed to be among the main beneficiaries,” he wrote.

Activists in Arizona have seen how Elbit has linked the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and Palestine through settler colonialism and apartheid. The Arizona Palestine Solidarity Alliance was created in 2014 to expose and oppose the U.S.-Israeli militarization both in the Arizona borderlands and the Tohono O’odham lands, which were put under “persistent surveillance” by Elbit’s towers. Mohyeddin Abdulaziz, cofounder of the alliance, said in an interview with Prism that the U.S. provides the Israeli military with billions of dollars of unconditional support; then, it buys from Israel technology perfected on Palestinians.

As deadly as it is, the virtual wall has not deterred border crossings. Migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border hit a record high in December 2023, as the federal government reported nearly 250,000 encounters with migrants.

“We are spending billions of dollars in solutions of control that mostly benefit corporations,” Abdulaziz said. People are going to keep fleeing violence, poverty, and climate disasters. The virtual wall will do little to dissuade them. However, it will still force people to their deaths when attempting to cross the border, Abdulaziz said, enforcing with technology a violent system of global apartheid.

Prism is an independent and nonprofit newsroom led by journalists of color. We report from the ground up and at the intersections of injustice.