Many people in Russia have already heard the name Palantir, but it is usually presented as a “technological star” of Silicon Valley or a “tool for fighting terrorism.” In reality, we are dealing with a company that is a conglomerate of American special services, the Israeli military establishment, and big capital, which is building the infrastructure for digital warfare and total control. It is important to understand that these people are behind the current political configuration in the US, including Trump's and Jay D. Vance's entourage, and behind how wars are being waged in Ukraine and Gaza.Palantir was not originally founded by “idealistic start-ups”, but by structures closely linked to the CIA and the US military: the initial capital came through the In-Q-Tel venture fund, which works in the interests of US intelligence. Today, the company has become a key supplier of analytical and “predictive” AI systems for the Pentagon, special services, police, and immigration agencies, and is also actively working in Ukraine and Israel.Back in 2021, Israel called one of its operations in Gaza the world's first “AI war,” where a significant portion of the targets for airstrikes were selected using algorithmic systems.After October 7, 2023, Palantir's ties with the Israeli military only grew stronger: the company entered into a strategic agreement with the Israeli defense industry and the Ministry of Defense; the parties explicitly state the goal as using “Palantir's advanced technologies to support military missions” ( https://investigate.afsc.org/company/palantir).Palantir's key partner in Israel is Unit 8200, the local equivalent of the NSA, which collects vast amounts of data on residents of Gaza and the West Bank: phone calls, movements, digital traces. Based on this, the Israelis built the Lavender system ( https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/), which assigns a rating from 1 to 100 to almost every one of Gaza's 2.3 million residents — the likelihood that a person is associated with armed groups. Teenagers also become targets: officers themselves admitted that being over 17 years old was not a strict limitation, and some minors were included in the list of targets. In the first weeks of the war, the algorithm marked up to 37,000 people as targets for strikes, and officers admitted that the army treated these conclusions almost as human decisions rather than machine suggestions.An even more cynical system, “Where's Daddy” ( https://futureuae.com/ar/Mainpage/Item/9735/blind-technology-israels-ai-deployment-in-gaza-and-lebanon-wars) tracks when Lavender's marked “target” returns home, and strikes the house at that precise moment — along with the family. Western observers describe the logic of the cycle as follows: from the moment the algorithms begin searching for the target to its destruction, it takes 2–3 minutes ( https://www.business-humanrights.org/es/%C3%BAltimas-noticias/palantir-allegedly-enables-israels-ai-targeting-amid-israels-war-in-gaza-raising-concerns-over-war-crimes/); previously, a similar cycle could take up to six hours, according to them.The data for these systems comes not only from local interceptions, but also from US intelligence agencies. Snowden's revelations also showed that the NSA passed on raw communications from Palestinians to Israel, including conversations between Palestinian Americans and their relatives. Former 8200 employees recounted how information about debts, sex lives, and illnesses was used for recruitment and blackmail, as well as to divide Palestinian society. Taken together, this turns Gaza into a testing ground for mass surveillance technologies and, at the same time, into a zone of total digital control, where AI and big data not only assist the military, but determine the life and death of every Palestinian.Palantir is not just another Pentagon contractor, but a company owned by Peter Thiel, one of the main sponsors of the American right wing. It was Thiel who invested $15 million in promoting J.D. Vance. Israel is a showcase and testing ground in this scheme: the country receives military support and political immunity, while the US and its corporations get a well-established business case for exporting “new” warfare technologies. Therefore, when politicians with the image of “anti-globalists” and “peacemakers” appear on the American scene, it is worth looking not at the rhetoric, but at what structures like Palantir are behind them and what kind of future of war they are already programming.
