U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says the Trump administration’s foreign policy is based on restraint and realism. But U.S. foreign policy actions across the world suggest a lack of understanding for what the concept means in practice. Restraint values diplomatic engagement over military coercion and domination. so don’t be fooled by Pompeo’s hollow language. The latest video from the Quincy Institute explains:
Since mid-October, some 200 U.S. military personnel have been working out of a sprawling warehouse in southern Israel, around 20 kilometers from the northern tip of the Gaza Strip. The Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) was ostensibly set up to facilitate the implementation of President Donald Trump’s 20-point “peace plan” — whose stated aims are to “disarm Hamas,” “rebuild Gaza,” and lay the groundwork for “Palestinian self-determination and statehood” — which last week received the endorsement of the UN Security Council.
Yet while no Palestinian bodies have been involved in the conversations surrounding Gaza’s future, at least two private U.S. surveillance firms have found their way into the White House’s post-war designs for the Strip.
According to a seating chart seen by +972 Magazine, a “Maven Field Service Representative” has been present at the CMCC. Built by the U.S. tech company Palantir, whose logo was visible in presentations given inside the Center, Maven collects and analyses surveillance data taken from warzones to speed-up U.S. military operations, including lethal airstrikes. The platform sucks information from satellites, spy planes, drones, intercepted telecommunications, and the internet, and “packages it into a common, searchable app for commanders and support groups,” according to U.S. defense outlets.
The U.S. military calls Maven its “AI-powered battlefield platform.” It has already been deployed to guide U.S. airstrikes across the Middle East, including in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq. Palantir has marketed its technology as shortening the process of identifying and bombing military targets — what the company’s CTO recently described as “optimizing the kill chain.” Over the summer, Palantir scored a $10 billion contract to update and refine the Maven platform for U.S. armed forces.
Palantir has also worked closely with Israel’s military since January 2024, when the two parties entered into a “strategic partnership” for “war related missions.” The company has been aggressively recruiting employees to staff its Tel Aviv office, which first opened in 2015 and has expanded significantly over the last two years. Justifying its stalwart commitment to Israel in spite of mounting charges of war crimes and genocide, Palantir CEO Alex Karp recently said his company was the first to be “completely anti-woke.”
In addition to Palantir’s Maven, the name of another U.S.-based surveillance firm showed up in recent presentations at the CMCC: Dataminr. The artificial intelligence start-up leverages close ties to social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter) to allow states and corporations to monitor internet users: “Real-time event, threat, and risk intelligence” is how the company advertises its services.
Dataminr got its start in the mid-2010s by offering the FBI access to the entire output of Twitter’s userbase to surveil and alert law enforcement of “criminal and terrorist activities.” Though sold as a tool to monitor violent incidents across major cities in real time, the company offered law enforcement and governments the ability to surveil any social media user’s “past digital activity” and “discover an individual’s interconnectivity and interactions with others on social media.” Twitter referred to Dataminr at the time as an “official partner” and owned a 5 percent stake in the company. The CIA’s venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel, was also an early investor.
In the decade since, Dataminr has worked closely with the U.S. military and law enforcement agencies across the country. During the first Trump administration, Dataminr partnered with local police forces to track Black Lives Matter protests, while under President Joe Biden, the U.S. Marshals used the firm’s services to monitor activists protesting the rollback of abortion protections. And this March, the Los Angeles Police Department used Dataminr to surveil protestors calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and to flag pro-Palestinian speech online.
The presence of Palantir and Dataminr at the CMCC suggests that despite vague mention of Palestinian self-determination in Trump’s plan, Israel’s control over Gaza will remain deeply entrenched — with AI-powered surveillance and weapons systems at the center of post-war security architecture.
For Palestinians on the ground, the first six weeks of the so-called ceasefire offer a window into what’s in store. U.S. military officials at the sprawling CMCC are monitoring Israeli troops in real time. Yet according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, Israeli soldiers have killed more than 340 Palestinians since the agreement took effect on Oct. 10 — some crushed in airstrikes and others shot by Israeli troops for approaching the “Yellow Line,” the fluctuating perimeter of the 58 percent of the Strip still under direct Israeli occupation.
“There isn’t much difference from the period before the ceasefire,” Mohammed Saqr, director of nursing at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, told The Guardian earlier this week. “Unfortunately, the bombing is still going on.”
As part of Trump’s plan, the United States will oversee the creation of an International Stabilization Force (ISF) composed of soldiers from various unnamed countries. The use of Palantir’s Maven system and Dataminr’s platforms will provide the United States and the ISF with capabilities comparable to key elements in Israel’s arsenal.
Maven mirrors the AI-assisted targeting systems Israel has relied on to guide airstrikes and operations on the ground across Gaza since the war began. Dataminr’s AI-powered social media scraping tools resemble the platforms Israel’s intelligence agencies have deployed to monitor Palestinian internet users for the last decade. And given the United States’ history of sharing and bolstering Israeli surveillance efforts across the Palestinian territories, it is unlikely the data compiled by Palantir and Dataminr will remain under Washington’s exclusive purview.
In 2013, American whistleblower Edward Snowden released a cache of documents revealing how the NSA transferred raw intelligence to Israeli intelligence units, including “unevaluated and unminimized transcripts, gists, facsimiles, telex, voice, and Digital Network Intelligence metadata and content” regarding Palestinian civilians. Under the first Trump administration, the two intelligence agencies operated “in virtual lock step” across the Middle East, according to the New York Times.
That collaboration has only deepened since October 7, with the United States sharing massive amounts of its own intelligence on Hamas activity in Gaza with Israeli forces — including “drone footage, satellite imagery, communications intercepts and [AI-powered] data analysis.” These intrusive surveillance measures are posed to continue under Trump’s peace plan, as U.S.-manufactured technologies like Maven will scale up the ability of U.S.-backed forces to conduct surveillance and reconnaissance across the Strip.
Beyond facilitating intelligence cooperation, Palantir and Dataminr may also play a role in U.S.-Israeli security coordination in Gaza. Indeed, key among the Trump plan’s recommendations is the mass transfer of Palestinians from the areas of Gaza under Hamas control into compounds inside the Israeli-occupied enclaves, and collaborating with Israeli troops and intelligence agencies to manage them.
These “Alternative Safe Communities” would house approximately 25,000 Gazans, according to reports. Each enclave would be surrounded by patrol roads, fences, surveillance cameras, and military outposts managed by the ISF, which would coordinate with Israeli forces to determine who enters each compound — and once admitted, Israeli officials have proposed, Palestinians should not be able to leave.
Israel is further seeking that entry be contingent upon approval by the Shin Bet (Israel’s internal security agency), and the main criteria will be whether a person or their relatives have ties to Hamas, according to one Israeli official quoted in The Atlantic. But because Hamas has governed Gaza since 2007, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have ties to the organization by virtue of working in the public sector, whether in healthcare, education, or policing.
Israel has already relied on an AI-assisted surveillance tool called Lavender to identify all known and alleged Hamas affiliates as targets for assassination, including public sector workers like police officers, as previously reported by +972 Magazine. Lavender uses predictive analytics to rank Palestinians’ likelihood of being connected to Hamas and other militant groups, based on an opaque set of criteria. The new plans give Israeli intelligence agencies the incentive to continue amassing this information, and U.S. firms and platforms could further bolster these efforts.
Maven and Dataminr will allow U.S.-managed forces to carry out surveillance on behalf of Israeli authorities, within and beyond internationally controlled compounds. The firms’ products can map connections between civilians and militant groups, compile lists of those to be detained or killed in military operations, and monitor the movement and communications of Palestinians en-masse. The use of similar technologies by Israeli forces over the last two years has turned Gaza into a site of unremitting horror, accentuated by endless aerial bombardment and dragnet surveillance.
A bullet point in Trump’s plan that has garnered the ire of Israel’s ultra-right-wing government is the vague promise to phase out the Israeli military’s control of the Gaza Strip and facilitate the establishment of a Palestinian state. Yet this should be treated with skepticism, not only because of the absence of any real commitment to achieve Palestinian self-determination, but also because past plans that ostensibly aimed to bolster Palestinian sovereignty have only sharpened Israel’s domination over the occupied territories.
The Oslo Accords of the 1990s enshrined Israeli control of Palestinian telecommunications infrastructure, ensuring Israel’s intelligence units have almost limitless surveillance powers over the West Bank and Gaza. Israel’s “disengagement” from Gaza in 2005 allowed the Israeli military to maintain control via aerial surveillance and a policy of targeted assassinations — what Air Force officials at the time called an “aerially enforced occupation.”
Officials at the CMCC are now hashing out yet another paradigm of Israeli control over Gaza, and this one may outsource the work to U.S. military forces and their partners in the private sector. It is a mutually beneficial relationship: Companies like Palantir and Dataminr are eager to amass data and refine new military technologies with real-world testing. Israel’s military is keen to offload the work of aerial and ground occupation from its run-down and dwindling supply of reservists, all the while maintaining control of broad swaths of the Strip through intelligence sharing and security coordination.
For the last decade, and certainly since October 7, U.S.-based firms like Palantir and Dataminr, alongside Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, have seized on the catastrophe of war as an opportunity for capital investment and growth. Israel’s unchecked power over Gaza converted it into the ideal incubator for an increasingly militarized AI industry. The unprecedented scale of destruction Israel inflicted over the last two years hinged in no small part on the steady supply of weaponry and computing power from the U.S. and its tech titans.
It is clear that this innovative ethos remains despite the ceasefire; U.S. officials describe the CMCC as a “chaotic start-up.” Meanwhile, the military tech industry’s corporate interests — namely, unfettered data extraction and lethal experimentation — will be permanently etched into the region’s political reality.
Palantir and Dataminr did not respond to requests for comment.
This article has been republished with permission from +972 Magazine.
Weeks have passed since the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 2803, endorsing a U.S.-backed plan that creates a “Board of Peace” to run Gaza for at least two years and authorizes a new International Stabilization Force (ISF) to secure the territory after a ceasefire.
Supporters call it a diplomatic breakthrough. For many Palestinians, it looks like something else: Oslo with helmets, heavy on security, light on rights, and controlled from outside.
This isn’t happening in a vacuum. In September, the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry reported that Israeli forces have committed genocide in Gaza, citing “direct evidence of genocidal intent,” and urging states to halt arms transfers and support accountability.
A UN Special Rapporteur, in a report to the General Assembly titled Gaza Genocide: A Collective Crime has likewise described the ongoing destruction as genocide sustained by the complicity of powerful states.
None of this will be easy. For decades, members of Congress who tried to place concrete conditions on U.S. policy toward Israel or on security assistance have faced concentrated pushback - from the Israeli government itself, its diplomatic outreach on the Hill, and a dense ecosystem of advocacy groups, donors, and lobbyists that track these issues closely.
Lawmakers know that even modest efforts to introduce guardrails can trigger campaigns, fundraising threats, and primary challenges. That history has produced a strong incentive structure: defer to the executive branch, avoid anything that can be framed as “pressure on Israel,” and support security-first approaches with few explicit constraints.
Recognizing those dynamics does not weaken the case for conditioning U.S. participation in implementing 2803; it clarifies how far current practice falls short of what is needed to prevent this mission from sliding into a de facto protectorate, the political doorway to a U.S.-run occupation.
If Congress moves now and addresses four key areas, they can still shape how 2803 is implemented.
First, Congress should condition U.S. participation on Palestinian co-ownership, not passive consultation. Resolution 2803 welcomes the Board of Peace as a transitional authority with sweeping control over Gaza’s reconstruction, borders, and security, and the ISF operates under that umbrella. Palestinians are promised a possible “executive committee,” but the resolution does not guarantee them any real share of power in this structure. Congress should draw a red line: no U.S. political or financial support without Palestinian co-ownership on paper and in practice.
That means Palestinians holding at least half of the voting seats on the Board of Peace, with those seats including representatives from Gaza’s municipalities, professional unions, civil society, and women’s networks, not only from the Palestinian Authority. Any Palestinian governance body under 2803 must be chosen by Palestinians, anchored in PA/PLO institutions, and include independent Gaza-based actors so it supports unified governance between the West Bank and Gaza.
Second, Congress should make the sunset real and tie any extension to Palestinian consent and a clear political horizon. Both the Board of Peace and the ISF are meant to end by 2027, for now they exist mainly on paper; their composition and mandate are still being negotiated. In practice, Resolution 2803 leaves space for renewals if “conditions” are not met, the same loophole that turned Oslo’s interim phase into decades of drift.
Congress has leverage here. It can make U.S. participation contingent on a public sunset clause for U.S. involvement, and on a rule that any extension requires explicit Palestinian consent, expressed through elections or another representative mechanism, not just a deal between Washington and a narrow leadership circle.
It can also insist on a clear political horizon, including possible U.S. recognition of a Palestinian state once agreed benchmarks are met. Congress can require timelines for governance and reforms, so benchmarks cannot be stretched indefinitely to justify prolonging the mission. If this is a transition, it needs an exit based on time, consent, and direction.
Third, Congress should tie all U.S. funding and support to genocide-prevention and accountability. Taken together, the Commission of Inquiry, the Special Rapporteur, and Human Rights Watch have urged states to halt weapons transfers and other assistance that risk enabling further genocidal acts, to support international prosecutions, and to stop contributing to what Human Rights Watch describes as the crimes against humanity of extermination in Gaza. They warn that third states risk complicity if they continue with business as usual in the face of these findings.
Congress can and should write those concerns directly into U.S. policy on 2803 by requiring the administration to certify that the U.S. role in the Board of Peace and ISF does not obstruct UN investigations, the International Court of Justice, or the International Criminal Court; that no U.S. personnel, contractors, or funds are used to shield suspects from accountability; and that any military or security assistance linked to Gaza complies with genocide-prevention obligations. If lawmakers ignore those warnings, the United States will be seen, accurately, as helping to manage the aftermath of atrocities it was warned about in advance.
Fourth, Congress should make protection of civilians central, not an afterthought to “security.” Resolution 2803 focuses on demilitarization, border control, and training Palestinian police. A stabilization plan that is only about security will be experienced by Palestinians as policing, not safety. Congress should require a protection system centered on civilians, not only an ISF focused on armed actors.
That means building in a civilian protection portfolio within the Board of Peace with real authority and resources, and creating Palestinian-led, unarmed protection teams in communities across Gaza, including women’s groups, youth networks, and civil society, to monitor violations, accompany those at risk, and feed into accessible complaint mechanisms.
Congress cannot amend Resolution 2803, but it controls the funding, oversight, and political authorization that determine how the United States is implicated in its outcome. If lawmakers use that leverage now, they can help ensure that 2803 stabilizes Gaza in a way that reduces long-term risks, prevents further atrocities, and supports a credible path toward political resolution.
That is squarely in the U.S. interest. If Congress stays passive, it will also share the costs and the consequences when the mission fails.
As a freelance writer, I know I have to produce copy that meets the expectations of editors and management. When I write opinion pieces, I know well that my arguments should closely align with the publication’s general outlook. But I’ve always believed that if my views on any particular topic diverged from an outlet I’m writing for, it was acceptable to express those viewpoints in other publications.
But I’ve recently discovered that this general rule does not apply to criticism of Israel.
In fact, it appears that publications I’ve had an ongoing relationship with up until recently have canceled me for articles I wrote in other media outlets that were critical of the Israeli government and the Israel lobby in the United States.
In recent years, I penned more than 100 columns for prominent right-leaning publications, including The Wall Street Journal, the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, and The Daily Telegraph. I’ve covered woke corporations, illegal immigration, inflation, foreign policy, the State Department, censorship, Florida politics and a host of other issues. I never once pitched a column concerning Israel to the aforementioned publications because I know the editors and leadership at those outlets are staunch backers of unlimited U.S. aid to Israel, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and his merciless assault on Gaza, not to mention President Trump’s efforts to deport foreign critics of Israel, his administration, and other related issues.
I have never seen an opinion column in The Journal, City Journal or The Telegraph expressing compassion for Palestinian victims of Israel’s military assaults. In fact, quite the opposite. For example, Ilya Shapiro, a contributing editor and the Director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute, said in a since deleted tweet, “Ethnic cleansing would be too kind for Gaza.” That comment isn’t an outlier. The prevailing wisdom at these publications is to excuse and defend the behavior of the Israeli government, regardless of the situation.
And so, when I wanted to express my disgust at the outrageous number of civilian casualties in Gaza — the Israeli military has killed at least 70,000 Palestinians according to the U.N., including more than 18,000 children — and lament the Trump administration’s efforts to deport people for criticizing Israel, I never considered pitching editors at those three publications.
Between November 2023 and May 2024, I published several columns, including for The Spectator and on my personal Substack, Unpopular Opinions, criticizing Israel and U.S. policy toward Israel. I think my critiques were mild — for example, I never categorized Israel’s actions as a genocide. Given Israel’s flagrant human rights violations, my commentaries were well within the boundaries of how most Americans feel about the carnage in Gaza. For example, in a column I wrote in November, 2023, I noted that:
“I was horrified by the October 7 Hamas attacks. And I was disgusted to see some self-proclaimed pro-Palestine advocates celebrating or justifying the barbaric attack act. This was a horrific act of terrorism, and there’s no excuse for it.”
But I added that I was disappointed with “how many conservative politicians and conservative media refuse to articulate any concern for thousands of innocent Palestinians killed or the more than one million rendered homeless.”
In subsequent columns, I criticized the Republican Party for its fixation on Israel and argued how hypocritical many on the right are in conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism in order to silence critics of the Jewish state.
None of my editors at The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Telegraph or City Journal ever said a word to me about what I wrote in these columns. But my relationships with these three outlets deteriorated rapidly and dramatically after I started covering the topic. Prior to being cut off by the Wall Street Journal, I published 34 opinion columns for them since 2017. My relationship with the opinion editor, James Taranto, was good enough that when he visited Tampa, where I live, in 2022, he and his wife took me out to dinner.
I knew where Taranto stood on Israel, having once called Rachel Corrie, an American citizen who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer while protesting Israel’s settlement policy, a “dopey…advocate for terror.” Prior to writing critically of Israel, my success rate in pitching columns to Taranto was roughly 30-40% positive. Since then, he has rejected 12 consecutive pitches, all on topics unrelated to the Middle East. Previously, he would send a generic one-liner when he rejected an idea. “I won't be able to use this, but thanks for letting me see it.” Lately, my pitches don’t even merit a formal rejection. I went from being a regular contributor and on friendly enough terms to socialize after-hours, to being ghosted.
My apparent dismissal at City Journal, where I contributed 62 columns from 2020-2024, took longer and my editor there, Paul Beston, was kinder, but the result was the same. Rather than ignoring me, Beston would apologetically respond to my pitches weeks or even months later once the idea was too late to publish. He also stopped asking me to write columns for the website. Around the same time, the Manhattan Institute, which produces City Journal, fired prominent conservative economist Glenn Loury for being too critical of Israel, so perhaps there was a purge of Israel critics afoot. At least one other Manhattan Institute fellow who was critical of Israel, Christopher Brunet, was also fired last year.
My seeming dismissal at the rabidly pro-Israel Daily Telegraph, where I contributed 30 columns from 2023-2024, was similar to the City Journal experience. My editor there, Lewis Page, was cordial enough, but he, too, started to ignore my emails and stopped asking me to write for his publication. In one case, he asked me to write a column but then never published it.
Is it a coincidence that these three prominent, pro-Israel publications all stopped publishing me last year as I started to criticize Israel in other outlets? It’s conceivable, but quite unlikely given the zero tolerance for dissent on Israel that now permeates much of conservative media.
RS asked Taranto whether the Journal had stopped publishing me because of my views on Israel. Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot — whom I did not work with — responded that Taranto had passed on our inquiry and said, “I don't recall ever reading a piece by Mr. Seminara on Israel or Gaza, so I have no idea what his views on those subjects are.”
Lewis Page at the Telegraph said my version of this story is “false” and that neither he nor anyone else at his publication knew that I had been critical of Israel. He added that the paper has not “consciously stopped using” my copy.
A spokesperson I do not know and never worked with at City Journal said that they are unaware of my position on Israel. Of course, I don’t expect any of these publications to say, “We stopped commissioning you because we don’t agree with your position on Israel.”
The bottom line is that my views on Israel and U.S. policy toward Israel are in line with those of the majority of Americans and even of a majority of American Jews. According to a Washington Post poll conducted in October, 69% of American Jews think Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza and 39% believe it is guilty of genocide. A Pew Research poll released around the same time revealed that 59% of Americans have a negative opinion of the Israeli government. And in a September New York Times/Sienna poll, 35% of Americans said they sympathize with Israel, while 36% said they side with Palestinians.
I am not sorry for criticizing Israel even though it has cost me professionally. In fact, I was probably too cautious and diplomatic in my critiques. But I think it’s a very sad statement on conservative media when news outlets that many Republicans trust have so little tolerance for dissent on a critical issue that undermines American national interests and damages our credibility around the world.
During the crazy, cultural revolution days of 2020, when statues were being toppled and progressives were claiming scalps on a weekly basis, I thought it was just the left that embraced cancel culture and silenced enemies through intimidation. Now I know better.
Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.
