The trouble with doing business with Israel — or any foreign government — is you can’t really say anything when they do terrible things with technology that you may or may not have sold to them, or hope to sell to them, or hope to sell in your own country.

Such was the case with Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir Technologies, in this recently surfaced video, talking to the Cambridge Union back in May. See him stumble and stutter and buy time when asked what he thought about the use of Artificial Intelligence by the Israeli military in a targeting program called “Lavender” — which we now know has been responsible for the deaths of an untold number of innocent Palestinians since Oct 7. (See investigation here).

Starts at 1:07:18

Here’s the text of his response through our translating tool (emphasis mine):

Look again….I’m not ….I’m not…you know, you know…with… without, without going into all the… you know I’m not on top of all the details of what’s going on in Israel, because my bias is to defer to Israel. It’s not for us to to second-guess every, everything. And I believe that broadly the IDF gets to decide what it wants to do, and that they’re broadly in the right and that’s, that’s sort of the perspective I come back to. And if I, if I fall into the trap of arguing you on every detailed point, I’m actually going to, I would actually be conceding the broader issue that the Middle East should be micromanaged from Cambridge. And I think that’s just simply absurd. And so I’m not, I’m not going to concede that point.

Sources from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) told + 972 Magazine back in April that military personnel ignored “Lavender” AI’s 10% false positive rate and, using the technology with little human input, intentionally targeted alleged militants in their homes with unguided “dumb bombs,” despite an increased likelihood of civilian harm.

According to the magazine, “Lavender” relied on sprawling surveillance networks and assigned a 1-100 score to every Gazan based on the likelihood the person was a Hamas militant. This is used by another software program called “Where’s Daddy?” that warned when one of these “militants” were in residence. Voila! Aim and fire. More than 37,000 Palestinians were on this so-called “kill list” in the first months of the war, according to + 972’s reporting. From the magazine:

“We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told + 972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”

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