« Competition, not solidarity: Austin Tseng, ‘First Nations in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Chinese-Australian writings: the lack of settler colonial empathy’, History Australia, 2026

Maimable indigeneity: Amanie Issa, Christo El Morr, ‘Disablement by Algorithm: AI as a Modern Tool of Settler-Colonial Violence in Palestine’, in Christo El Morr, Rachel da Silveira Gorman, Elham Dolatabadi, Laleh Seyyed-Kalantari (eds), AI for a Just World: Power, Liberation, and the People Left Behind, Chapman and Hall/CRC, 2026

30May26

Abstract: In this chapter, we examine how the Israeli military’s deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) systems—most notably the Lavender targeting program—operates as a contemporary extension of settler-colonial power that intentionally produces and conceals mass disablement. Situating these technologies within frameworks of racial capitalism, militarism, and ableism, we argue that algorithmic “precision-targeting” not only effectuates widespread impairment but also naturalizes this violence through the rhetoric of objectivity. Drawing on critical disability studies, crip theory, and settler-colonial critique, our analysis unfolds in three parts. First, we historicize the continuum from rubber-bullet maiming during the Great March of Return to AI-driven decision-support systems, showing how algorithmic thresholds of “tolerable error” encode political choices about whose bodies may be maimed rather than killed. Second, we unpack the epistemic logics of AI models; datasets, predictive heuristics, and minimal human oversight, to reveal how Palestinian lives are rendered killable and maimable data points. Third, we extend our critique globally, linking Palestine’s experience to analogous AI-enabled surveillance and debilitation in other regions. By foregrounding Palestinian disabled experience as a generative site for theorizing the co-constitution of disability, colonialism, and technology, this chapter contributes to peripheral crip critique and disability justice scholarship. We conclude by calling for a radical crip politics and transnational solidarity that rejects techno-colonial violence and reclaims AI futures centered on care, interdependence, and collective liberation.


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