Settler colonial AI: Ihab Maharmeh, ‘AI as a tool for settler-colonial projects: how Israel employs AI to intensify colonial dominance under the pretext of counterterrorism’, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonial AI: Ihab Maharmeh, ‘AI as a tool for settler-colonial projects: how Israel employs AI to intensify colonial dominance under the pretext of counterterrorism’, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 2025

23Dec25

Abstract: This paper offers a critical examination of how Israel employs artificial intelligence (AI) technologies under the pretext of counterterrorism to intensify the Zionist settler-colonial project and capitalist accumulation in Palestine. It focuses particularly on how AI has become integral to Israel’s settler-colonial regime, serving ideological, geopolitical, and commercial objectives while presenting these aims as neutral, technical procedures embedded within its counterterrorism strategy. This paper builds on scholarship that shows how settler colonies have historically used stigmatisation, classification, and the delegitimisation of Indigenous resistance as terrorism to eliminate Indigenous peoples before raising questions about how, more recently, AI has intensified this colonial logic. By focusing on Israel’s use of AI, this paper offers an analysis of how AI is intensifying genocide, displacement, and the erasure of Indigenous peoples’ voices. It also demonstrates how Israel’s use of AI supports capitalist accumulation, as security technologies tested on Palestinians under the pretext of counterterrorism are commercialised and exported to global markets.

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