This article was originally published in Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

The idea of Palestine as a testing ground for military and surveillance technologies has gained increasing attention in recent years. Analysts and researchers have pointed to how systems developed in the context of occupation are later exported globally and marketed as “battle-tested” tools for policing, border control and warfare. 

Hassan El-Tayyab, legislative director for Middle East policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation, moderated an online salon focused on the use of Israeli technology tested on Palestinians and its global implications. The salon, held on April 19, was co-hosted by Nonviolence International and Voices from the Holy Land with the War Industry Resistors Network as a cosponsor.

For El-Tayyab the phrase “battle-tested” is not a metaphor; it is a mechanism. “When we describe Palestine as a laboratory,” he said, “we’re naming how surveillance tools, artificial intelligence targeting systems and weapons are tested on a civilian population living under occupation without any consent or accountability.”

And crucially, he added, these tools do not stay there. “Surveillance and weapons systems come back into our own policing, our own borders and our own wars.” 

Jeff Halper, Israeli-American anthropologist and director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, situated these developments within the broader framework of settler colonialism. “You can’t come and take over another people’s country without genocide of some kind,” he said, pointing to both “cultural genocide” and “physical genocide,” the latter visible today in Gaza and, in a more incremental form, in the West Bank.

For Halper, this is not a conventional war with a beginning and an end. It is structural. He calls it “a permanent war against the Palestinian people,” one waged not only with weapons but with systems designed to control, surveil and “pacify.” Resistance, he argues, is not incidental to this history; it is built into it. “If you look at this as settler colonialism, it makes sense that a people would resist the takeover of their own country.” 

Jalal Abukhater lives inside that reality in Jerusalem. “I cannot overestimate how much this regime of surveillance has control over Palestinians,” said Abukhater, who is a Palestinian writer and a policy manager at 7amleh (the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media). What he described is not simply a matter of checkpoints or movement restrictions. Surveillance, he explained, now reaches into the most intimate decisions of daily life. In Gaza, he noted, it is used to determine whether a family will be killed in their own home. Targeting decisions are made through machine learning, fed by the vast data Israel collects on Palestinian populations. 

The impact is both physical and psychological. El-Tayyab, who has visited the West Bank repeatedly, described the physical toll of witnessing this up close. “Every time I’ve gone, I leave feeling very stressed. It really gets into your body. I just don’t understand how Palestinians can have so much tenacity.” For Abukhater, that tenacity is not surprising, it is exactly the point. “They want to make us feel so afraid that we stop acting, or resisting, or writing against them. But what it makes us do is become more smart about how we do our engagement, how we mobilize.” He listed what Israel has tried: annihilating villages, assassinating political leaders, jailing thousands. “But we’re still here, and it’s still ongoing.” 

The infrastructure behind these systems is military and involves corporate complicity. Abukhater named Microsoft, Google and Amazon as holding contracts with the Israeli Ministry of Defense, providing services, he said, during a time of genocide. Accountability, he argued, must extend to them. And pressure can work, particularly from within: employees can organize, refuse to work on technologies of oppression and speak publicly. Beyond that, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions remain powerful tools available to ordinary people. 

Yet corporate complicity does not operate in a vacuum. It is reinforced by an apartheid legislative framework designed to entrench the same asymmetries. Halper pointed to recently approved legislation including an Israeli death penalty law for terrorism that, by design, can only be applied to Palestinians. In cases of documented settler violence against Palestinians, he noted, conviction under that same law would be effectively impossible. 

And yet, all these structures do not exist in isolation from the broader architecture of control. They are part of a system in which the line between military force and civilian governance has been deliberately, and dangerously, dissolved. “Historically, there was a clear distinction between the military and domestic policing, between outside and inside,” Halper said. That wall, he warned, is coming down. In Israel’s case, its “military and policing systems are one.” The result is what he calls the “security state,” a formation in which democracy is preserved in name while security overrides everything in practice. “You can have a democracy, but security trumps everything.”

In different ways, both speakers returned to the danger of normalization, the process by which the unacceptable becomes unremarkable. “There should be a campaign against normalizing Israeli apartheid,” Halper said. For Abukhater, the stakes are explicitly global. “We’ve seen how genocide is normalized and accountability mechanisms suddenly mean nothing. The danger is that this would become normalized elsewhere too.”

Palestine, he said, is not only a crisis. It is a warning. “We are a warning. We are a laboratory. It’s like cancer, and if it’s ignored, it’s going to take over if we don’t address it now.” His conclusion was direct: “Don’t let this warning not be heard. The time to act is now.”

Video recordings of this and 69 other Online Film Salons can be found at the VFHL website: <voicesfromtheholyland.org/salonrecordings>.

Nonviolence Is Not Weak. It Must Be Re-imagined for This Moment

As critics question its effectiveness, the real issue is not whether nonviolence works, but whether we are willing to practice it seriously and deploy it strategically.

There is a common belief that nonviolence is too slow, too soft, or simply not enough for the world we are living in. Serious questions are being raised about whether it works, not from outsiders, but from within movements themselves. Writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates have questioned whether nonviolence alone can confront deeply entrenched systems of power. Voices like Cornel West have warned that it is sometimes used to contain resistance, asking the oppressed to remain calm while injustice continues. And thinkers such as Arundhati Roy have pointed to its limits in the face of militarized states with little accountability. These critiques reflect a real and growing frustration.

Photo: Nayef Hashlamoun Bilin, Palestine

In places like Palestine, that frustration is lived every day. In the open air prisons of the West Bank and Gaza, people are not simply navigating a conflict. They are living under a system that controls movement, resources, and daily life. Within these conditions, communities have committed to nonviolent resistance for decades—through protests, organizing, boycott campaigns, and international solidarity—yet the reality on the ground often remains unchanged. This leads to hard questions: Is nonviolence being ignored? Is it dismissed because it does not threaten power in the same way? Is the cost too high for too little change? You hear it clearly: we marched, we organized, we told our stories, and still nothing changed. If the world does not respond to nonviolence, what are we left with, militarism or international law? These questions are not rejections of nonviolence. They are demands that oppression much stop  and we need answers that adapt to the realities we face today.

That skepticism about nonviolence also comes from a misunderstanding of what nonviolence actually is—and of the structures that sustain oppressive systems.If we look more closely, many oppressive systems are not sustained by internal control alone. They are upheld by external support. In the case of Palestine, Israeli policies are reinforced by powerful international alliances, particularly with the United States. This means nonviolent resistance cannot remain local. It must expand to confront the broader systems—political, economic, and ideological—that sustain injustice. The issue is not that oppressed communities are not nonviolent or strategic enough. The issue is that nonviolence has not been scaled to challenge the full structure of power. The terrain of struggle must widen.

My recent speaking tour across the United States, titled From Occupation to Empire: Rethinking Resistance, created space for these conversations from California to Florida. What became clear is that nonviolence cannot remain localized, or practiced by a few, or framed as a moral posture. It has to become a tool of the people. That requires restructuring how we engage it—grounding it in strategy, expanding its reach, and applying it not only in distant conflicts but also against the systems of violence in our own backyards that feed the violent systems in other parts of the world. 

NVI’s global database of nonviolent tactics and the book Civil Resistance Tactics of the 21st Century expands our tool kit and helps us re-imagine nonviolent action to include music, visual arts, poetry, video, theatre, disruptive mutual aid, all kinds of creative interventions to unjust global trade and social contracts, non-cooperation by consumers and businesses and workers and pre-figurative resistance where we set the example today of the world we want tomorrow. Indeed riding a bicycle, in a world burning fossil fuels, is a daily act of pre-figurative resistance.

It is also important to name this clearly: systems of oppression understand the power of nonviolence. They do not ignore it because it is weak. They respond to it because it is a threat. They crush it with force when it begins to grow, and they discredit it when force alone is not enough. They frame it as naive, ineffective, or unrealistic so that people abandon it on their own. This is not accidental. It is strategy. Undermining nonviolence—through repression or narrative—is part of how power protects itself.

The question, then, is not whether nonviolence works in theory. The question is whether we are willing to invest in it in practice. The frustration many feel is real, but abandoning nonviolence is not the answer. Strengthening it is. Nonviolence is a disciplined method of struggle that confronts injustice without reproducing the same cycles of harm. It is not about being nice, and it is not about including every voice at the expense of justice. It is about building power differently—power that can challenge systems of domination without becoming them. That means treating it as a serious method of struggle—one that requires training, coordination, discipline, strategy, and long-term commitment. 

Nonviolence is not the easier path. It is the most demanding one.

Dear Friends,

From March 20 to 23, NVI Co-Directors, Michael Beer, Sami Awad, and board member Mohammed Abunimer, joined the Nuestra América Delegation to Cuba as part of a much larger international convoy of more than 600 people from around the world. We came as activists, artists, influencers, faith leaders, and community organizers, united by a simple conviction: the Cuban people should not be left alone under an embargo that continues to punish ordinary life.

The delegation was supported by CODEPINK, Progressive International, Global Health Partners, and Busboys and Poets, alongside a wider network that included The People’s Forum, Cuban Americans for Cuba, and Global Exchange.

It was our first time in Cuba! What we witnessed was not theoretical, was not news reports, was not propaganda. 

Havana looks like a movie set from the 1950s! The cars and buildings are stunning -- but so run down. During our time there, Cuba continued to experience major electrical outages, part of a broader energy crisis that has left entire neighborhoods in darkness and placed immense strain on daily life. The blackouts are tied to the suffocating impact of the U.S. embargo, including restrictions on oil and essential resources.

In Cuba, this is not an abstract policy debate. It means hospitals under pressure, food and medicine at risk, transportation disrupted, garbage piled in streets, markets shut, restaurants closed, and families forced to survive with less and less.

And yet what we encountered was not defeatism. It was resilience. Generosity. Dignity.

People gathered in the dark. They shared what they had. They played music and sang in the streets. We played spirited mixed-gender ultimate with them (with donated frisbees that Michael brought). That spirit stays with us.

For those of us Palestinians, this was deeply personal. We met with and were inspired by Cuban students and others from around the world including Palestinians. We know what it means to live under systems designed to isolate, weaken, and break a people. We know what it feels like when your suffering is discussed from a distance while you are still living inside it. In Cuba, we recognized something painfully familiar: a people being made to pay the price for refusing to submit.

That is why this trip was not only a solidarity visit with medical relief and aid but also an act of nonviolent defiance.

This said, the convoy defied the embargo and carried real material support. Around 20 tons of aid were delivered, including food, medicine, solar panels, and bicycles. The delegation we were part of brought thousands of pounds of medical supplies and over a hundred suitcases and boxes of humanitarian aid, all going directly to hospitals and health workers facing severe shortages.

After we returned, the delegation faced attacks and accusations meant to discredit the trip and turn solidarity into suspicion. We reject that. People can debate politics from afar, but we know what we saw. The US has no problem engaging and trading with the communist parties of Vietnam, China, Nepal, and Laos. We saw a country under enormous pressure. We saw communities enduring blackouts and shortages. We saw doctors, families, churches, and neighbors doing their best to hold life together. And we saw hundreds of people from across the world choosing not to look away.

The embargo is not just policy, it is collective punishment.

What we carried back from Cuba was more than memory, it was clarity.

The Palestine and Cuba siege are connected, and so must be our response.

What can you do?

• Learn. Stay informed. Support organizations like the ones mentioned above.
• Refuse the narratives that justify collective punishment and oppose US unilateral sanctions on Palestine, Cuba and many other countries.
• Use your voice—in your communities, your platforms, your spaces.
• And find ways—big or small—to stand in real solidarity, including joining future delegations. Visit CUBA!

With Nonviolent Defiance,
Mohammed Abunimer, Michael Beer & Sami Awad

P.S. Please remember to attend our round table Field Testing Israeli Occupation Tech: The Palestine Lab on Sunday, April 19, 2026 3pm ET and see films in advance. This Round Table centers the human impact of this experimentation, examining how Palestinian lives are used as testing grounds for weapons, AI platforms, and policing tactics later exported worldwide. Join the Q&A discussion with: Omar Zahzah, Jeff Halper, Antony Loewenstein, Hassan El-Tayyab

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