At the spectacle that is the annual Reunions ‘P-rade’ this May, when waves of Princeton alumni parade down the central street running through campus by class year starting with the oldest living alumni, hordes of inebriated adults clamored over and partied with a dancing robotic dog, passing by the more than 100 of us protesting Princeton’s complicity in Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians. Yet that same weekend, Israel dropped American-manufactured bombs on refugee tents in Rafah, technology that may have been developed by some of our very own classmates (and faculty). So much of the technology that consumes and drives our daily lives at home and on campus seems innocuous, but simultaneously drives the ever-growing machinery of violence deployed in Israel and exported around the world. Princeton’s relationship to the infamous “Start-up Nation” — as the University has repeatedly lauded it — runs much deeper than what most of us would have reckoned.
University-sponsored research in technology and innovation, notably in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, has deep linkages, both direct and non, with Israel’s systems of apartheid. These research interests are not necessarily purely malicious. But the fact remains that this research would not be funded by a vast array of military contractors and tech companies complicit in or contributing to Israeli violence if they did not find such work valuable. This research would not be feasible without the material support of entities with historical records in creating technologies for war and “defense.” For instance, Princeton’s Center for Network and Security Access partnered with General Dynamics; General Dynamics manufactures the 2000-pound MK-84 used by Israel in the current genocidal campaign in Gaza, as well as during its routine “mowing the lawn” campaigns. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the R&D arm of the US Department of Defense, funded Professor Naveem Veerma’s study into new AI chips capable of handling “defense-relevant AI workloads not achievable with current technology”; Israel is pioneering AI-powered technology for so-called defense to label civilians as targets in Gaza and enforce segregation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. And former Chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin Norman Augustine sits on the Princeton MAE Advisory Council; Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contractor, has historically supplied fighter jets and missiles to Israel, including a recent $3 billion sale of F-35 jets. To paraphrase Noam Chomsky, our faculty believe in what they are researching. But if some were researching something different, they would not be sitting where they are.
Other connections remain, perhaps by design, less subtle. One of the more terrifying technological faces of Israel’s apartheid apparatus is its expanding array of military robots. Intimidating and inhumane, robotic drones and dogs have automated and depersonalized the systematic physical and psychological violence Israel inflicts on Palestinians. Such robots have nevertheless found their way into the laboratories and even classrooms of the University. Professor Anirudha Majumdar’s Intelligent Robot Motion Lab is one such example, conducting long-standing work toward making drones more robust and impervious to winds and physical obstacles, improvements that could eventually enhance Israel’s ability to remotely and automatically surveil, police, and assassinate Palestinians.
Notably, however, swaths of the robotics industry have attempted to expunge its military associations. Both Boston Dynamics and Unitree Robotics signed a pledge to not weaponize their robots. In fact, Professor Morimoto cites this policy as a principal motivation for choosing Spot, the aforementioned infamous P-rade attendee, for his and Professor Alex Glaser’s class on the social and ethical implications of these robot dogs. Some students of the class even used Spot’s choreography package, provided at no cost by Boston Dynamics likely to soften the robot’s image, to coordinate a dance routine with the dog. Yet these commitments to non-weaponization ring hollow after Boston Dynamics supplied the NYPD with two robotic surveillance dogs. They have proven even more farcical after the US navy strapped a rocket launcher to the AI-enabled Unitree Go1 and the French army tested Spot in combat scenarios, prompting Boston Dynamics’ Vice President of Business Development Michael Perry to publicly state that Boston Dynamics was still evaluating Spot’s usage by military customers.
The Intelligent Robot Motion Lab actually taught the aforementioned rocket-launcher-capable Unitree Go1 to navigate successfully an indoor environment. Most starkly, in Princeton’s very own ironically named Safe Robotics Laboratory, Professor Jaime Fisac has conducted research to teach the Ghost Robotics Spirit dog how to survive encounters with adversarial terrain and agents. In a harrowing (and interestingly no longer online) reflection on Fisac’s research, major Israeli military company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems demonstrated the use of the exact same Ghost Robotics Spirit dog to survey an apartment complex for targets. These scenes have become routine throughout Gaza and the West Bank as the IDF continues to expand the use of robot dogs to invade Palestinian homes, schools, and hospitals and to terrorize and kill civilians under the pretext of national security. The IDF has even deployed these automated weapons to enforce apartheid in the West Bank and surveil Gaza’s securitized borders. These robotic dogs are emblematic of the Manichean world of colonialism: On the streets of Princeton’s campus, they are friendly, fascinating toys that dance in sync alongside willfully ignorant humans. In Gaza, they are killers.
In classic Princeton fashion, the construction of a new AI Center is framed around “the service of humanity” and holding “power to account.” Professor Elad Hazan, who is affiliated with the center, is slated to teach a course this fall on AI safety and alignment, in which he will purportedly “[focus] on artificial intelligence with human values. ‘In the context of modern large language models, how do we prevent the language models from helping bad actors?’” And yet, given his articulated positions on Israel, such as his contortionist equivalence of chants for a free Palestine with calls for genocide of all Jews, as well as his notorious comments at the last faculty meeting where he censured peaceful student protestors for victimizing Israeli students and wielding machine guns, it is near impossible to fathom that this course would critically examine Israel as a “bad actor.” Israel remarkably never quite meets that threshold, despite its well-documented role in abusing AI through systems such as “Lavender” and “Where’s Daddy,” which prioritized targeting civilian homes over military buildings, permitted “collateral damage” to civilian life, and encouraged the use of maximally destructive munitions. This points to a grave failure in our curriculum and training; to be “in the service of humanity,” Princeton must make an accurate account of how our technology is actively enabling mass surveillance and genocide, and in this case, the effective erasure of an entire people.
Princeton even generously offers to its undergraduates the opportunity to contribute to Israel’s growing tech apartheid industry. Under a convincing guise of promoting innovation and entrepreneurship, the Keller Center hosts various internship programs with Israeli tech companies, the majority of which work on technologies with direct applications to “defense,” contract with the Israeli military, or both. Student-led “TigerTreks” — short trips to learn about technological innovation that bear semblance to quasi tech-birthright trips — began in Silicon Valley in 2012. The first such trip outside the US went to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in 2020. Meanwhile, the Princeton Startup Immersion Program (PSIP) sends students to intern at firms in Tel Aviv with stipends of up to $5,000 each. There are direct and incontrovertible links between these PSIP-affiliated firms and the Israeli military; all ubiquitously boast founders and staff who worked for several years in the military. Tel Aviv-based companies for the 2024 PSIP application cycle include Hetz Ventures, which has portfolio deals with military cybersecurity; Starburst Aerospace, which cites the “American defense market” as its knowledge hub for military technological infrastructure development; and Merlin Ventures, which works with senior cybersecurity executives and decision-makers in the US and Israel and aims to expand government-to-government cooperation, as defense companies burgeon due to Israel’s ongoing genocidal campaign. In fact, one of Merlin Venture’s senior leaders operated in the IDF’s top cybersecurity unit, Unit 8200, for more than 10 years. In past years, Tel Aviv-based companies that partnered with Princeton for PSIP have included Aidoc, whose leadership all hail from the specialized tech arms of the Israeli military: Elad Walach led research focused on machine learning with the Israeli Air Force, Michael Braginsky led the R&D department for the Israeli Special Forces including the deployment of technologies in civilian and military contexts, and Guy Reiner began in the IDF’s technology program “Talpiot” and then led algorithmic research projects with Unit 8200.
Princeton is actively funding, supporting, and placing students within Israel’s VC, startup, and cybersecurity space. These industries in effect operate as a digital laboratory for exploring so-called innovative ways to surveil and terrorize the Palestinian people. Beyond internships and immersion programs, Princeton brings recruiters from American weapons contractors to campus through the Center for Career Development; MK-84 bomb manufacturer General Dynamics recruited at Princeton in 2019, and Boeing, which manufactures the GBU-39 bomb Israel used to bomb schools and mosques used for shelter in Rafah and other parts of Gaza, recruited at Princeton in 2022. Princeton is breeding future classes of tech talent to construct and maintain Israel’s digital apartheid system, constructing an impressively effective pipeline from the U.S. to Israel from an early and malleable age.
And that does not stop at the undergraduate level; our faculty, too, breed this talent. Princeton has hired several faculty members from top science and technology hubs in Israel, including Technion (Israel’s Institute of Technology) and Weizmann Institute of Science (named after Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel, infamous Zionist leader, and advocate for Palestinian ethnic expulsion). Notably, Professor Hazan leads Google AI at Princeton and has previous research experience at Microsoft Research in Herzliya, an Israeli city known for its startup scene, built on the ruins of a Palestinian city, and fittingly named after the founder of modern Zionism Theodor Herzl. Google has contracted directly with the Israeli Defense Ministry, which has its own secure access point into Google Cloud’s compute infrastructure and may have used Google’s AI infrastructure for civilian targeting systems. These faculty have often taken on postdocs who are now professors at those same Israeli institutions, who are, in turn, breeding the talent and technology that undergirds the Israeli defense ecosystem. Princeton’s contribution to this cycle makes Princeton Israeli Apartheid Divest’s demand for the academic boycott of Israeli institutions even more salient. Equally, Princeton should take steps to provide funding and support to Palestinian students both at universities in Palestine and the US, especially as Israel has systemically waged war on Palestinian academia even prior to its destruction of the last university in Gaza.
Princeton’s relationship to Israeli apartheid is not just one-way; the products of Israel’s tech industry flows back to our campus as well. Princeton recently invested in a new Nvidia GPU cluster to study LLMs; Nvidia’s Blackwell GPU/AI infrastructure was developed in Israel. In fact, Nvidia has a Tel Aviv lab and has been helping develop Israel’s most powerful supercomputer. Both Nvidia and Intel, whose Israeli fabrication plants are based in a former Palestinian village ethnically cleansed during the Nakba, have contributed equipment to Princeton Professor David Wentzlaff. Moreover, Motorola Solutions, a company named in a UN report for operating in illegal Israeli settlements, provides Princeton Public Safety with wireless communications technology — the same technology it provides to the IDF, Israeli police, and Israeli intelligence to communicate on the battlefield and defend illegal settlements. We name these linkages to demonstrate the ubiquity and pervasiveness of a far larger tech-military-industrial complex and the interconnectedness of movements to divest from Israel and Cop City. From shared tactics, technologies, and training, the techniques that Israel uses to oppress Palestinians filter back to America to violently suppress protests, enable police brutality against Black and brown communities, and more recently inform surveillance on “Muslim extremists,” illustrating just how colonial contexts are typically the testing grounds for future deployment of military, policing, and even apartheid technology. The toys for spectacle and tools for research Princeton boasts here transform into the exact tools for technology-facilitated genocide.
Welcome to Princeton’s own playground.