Israel and the Imperial Boomerang
The Return of Colonial Violence Through Technology
The weapons of the empire are never content to remain on foreign soil. The rifles, shackles, and surveillance mechanisms forged in the colonial periphery always find their way back to the metropole, returning like a curse upon the empire itself. This cycle—where imperial states develop and deploy techniques of control abroad, only for them to be repurposed against domestic populations—is what scholars and critics have termed the imperial boomerang (Césaire, 1955; Fanon, 1961). It is a pattern as old as the empire itself: from Rome’s legions turning their battlefield expertise on dissenters within the capital, to Britain’s colonial policing methods being rebranded for domestic suppression. The boomerang is not an accident of history—it is its logical conclusion.
At its core, the imperial boomerang rests on a simple reality: war and repression necessitate innovation. In the colonies, where empires could act with impunity, new technologies and tactics of subjugation were pioneered, tested, and perfected. The British Empire, for instance, honed its administrative and military machinery in India, deploying mass surveillance networks, curfews, collective punishment, and early biometric tracking (Anderson, 2013). These same tools, once associated with distant imperial frontiers, reappeared in Ireland and even Britain itself, used against striking workers, suffragettes, and political radicals (Elkins, 2005). Colonial rule, it turns out, was a rehearsal for domestic governance.
The French followed a similar trajectory. Their brutal counterinsurgency campaigns in Algeria and Indochina—marked by extrajudicial killings, systematic torture, and mass internment—were not confined to distant colonies. As historian Mathieu Rigouste (2009) details, the very same methods were soon applied against French citizens during the uprisings of May 1968. The military officers who once hunted Algerian revolutionaries found new targets among Parisian students and striking workers. This, in essence, is the nature of the imperial boomerang: the tools of empire, first designed for controlling the “other,” inevitably return home, where the domestic population finds itself redefined as a potential enemy. Empire thrives on adaptation. The decline of European colonialism in the mid-20th century did not mark an end to the imperial boomerang—it simply found new custodians. The United States, emerging as the dominant global power after the Second World War, inherited and refined the methodologies of colonial control, embedding them into its military-industrial complex. While the American empire avoided the traditional colonial model of direct occupation, it perfected a different kind of rule: the management of foreign populations through counterinsurgency, surveillance, and military-backed regime change.
The Vietnam War (1955–1975) was a proving ground for this transformation. Facing a determined nationalist resistance, the United States developed a sophisticated apparatus of counterinsurgency warfare, combining mass pacification programs, aerial bombardment, and psychological operations (McCoy, 2009). Programs such as Operation Phoenix, which sought to neutralise the Viet Cong through targeted assassinations and mass detentions, blurred the line between military intervention and state terror (Valentine, 2017). These techniques did not remain confined to Vietnam. As the war came to a disastrous end, many of its architects found new theatres of operation—most notably in Latin America.
In the decades that followed, American-trained operatives exported counterinsurgency doctrine across the Global South. The infamous School of the Americas, a US-run military training institution, became a hub for disseminating the lessons of Vietnam, instructing Latin American dictatorships in the use of death squads, psychological warfare, and surveillance (Grandin, 2006). Chile under Pinochet, Argentina’s military junta, and the paramilitary forces of Colombia all drew from American expertise to suppress dissent and maintain control (González, 2009). The boomerang effect, however, did not stop at the borders of the so-called Third World. Just as European powers had once turned colonial policing against their own populations, the United States began applying counterinsurgency strategies to its own domestic unrest.
The first major instance of this occurred during the civil rights movement. By the late 1960s, the US government, fearful of revolutionary change, launched COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program), a sweeping FBI-led campaign designed to surveil, infiltrate, and neutralise political movements (Churchill & Vander Wall, 2002). Black radical organisations such as the Black Panther Party, which openly challenged the state’s monopoly on violence, were systematically dismantled using tactics honed in counterinsurgency warfare: informants, psychological manipulation, and extrajudicial killings. Just as colonial forces had labelled anti-colonial revolutionaries as “terrorists” and “insurgents,” the US government applied the same terminology to its own citizens, justifying military-style crackdowns on black, Indigenous, and leftist movements.
This militarisation of domestic law enforcement would only deepen in the decades to come. The War on Drugs, initiated in the 1980s, saw the widespread deployment of military-grade weaponry and tactics against American communities—particularly those of colour (Alexander, 2010). The boomerang had fully returned: the United States had become its own counterinsurgency battlefield, with the very strategies it once used to control foreign populations now turned against its own citizens.
History does not merely rhyme—it returns with a vengeance. The imperial boomerang, once an instrument of colonial suppression, has not only shaped US foreign policy but has deeply embedded itself in the architecture of domestic governance. What began as a set of tactics for controlling foreign populations has been seamlessly integrated into American policing, surveillance, and legal frameworks. The logic of empire, honed on battlefields from Vietnam to Iraq, now defines the modern security state.
The post-9/11 era accelerated this transformation. The War on Terror, ostensibly a campaign against jihadist insurgencies, became a justification for a sweeping expansion of state power. The Patriot Act (2001) normalised mass surveillance, indefinite detention, and the erosion of civil liberties, with legal frameworks crafted for counterinsurgency warfare now turned against American citizens (Greenwald, 2014). Technologies once used to track, detain, and assassinate foreign combatants soon found their way into domestic law enforcement. The militarisation of the police, an ongoing process since the War on Drugs, reached new heights as military-grade equipment—armoured vehicles, drones, and predictive surveillance software—became standard in urban policing (Balko, 2013). The 1033 Program, a Pentagon initiative that allows local police to acquire surplus military equipment, has ensured that US streets increasingly resemble occupation zones, particularly in Black and working-class communities.
Perhaps the clearest example of the boomerang’s return came in the summer of 2020, when mass protests following the murder of George Floyd were met with overwhelming military force. Tear gas, rubber bullets, and “less-lethal” munitions, long deployed in counterinsurgency campaigns abroad, were unleashed on protestors across the United States (Holland, 2021). The very tactics used to suppress resistance in Fallujah were now being deployed in Minneapolis. Surveillance drones, first used over Afghanistan, were repurposed to monitor domestic dissent (Stanley, 2021). Protesters, much like resistance fighters in occupied territories, were labelled as threats to national security, reinforcing the same colonial logic that had justified imperial violence for centuries.
But counterinsurgency is not merely a question of force—it is a totalising system of control. The legal frameworks pioneered during the War on Terror, including the use of terrorism designations and pre-emptive policing, have been increasingly turned against environmental activists, Indigenous land defenders, and labour organisers (Bramble & Minnite, 2022). This is the final evolution of the imperial boomerang: a world in which the techniques of occupation are no longer just exported abroad but become permanent features of life under late capitalism. The cycle has completed itself. The tools of repression designed for colonial subjects have come home to discipline the empire’s own population.
This trajectory is not an aberration—it is the inevitable consequence of imperialism itself. The boomerang does not return by accident; it is an intrinsic feature of empire’s survival mechanism. As the United States faces growing domestic unrest—driven by economic decline, climate catastrophe, and social inequality—the logic of counterinsurgency will continue to shape how the state interacts with its own citizens.
Few nations in modern history have so thoroughly transformed war into an industry as Israel. The state’s decades-long occupation of Palestine has provided the perfect conditions for refining and commercialising the tools of military domination. Unlike other global arms exporters, Israel does not merely sell weapons—it sells proven weapons, advertising them as “battle-tested” in Gaza and the West Bank (Halper, 2015). From advanced missile defence systems like the Iron Dome to sophisticated cyber-surveillance tools such as Pegasus, Israeli technology is marketed with the assurance that it has already been used against real populations. The occupied territories serve not only as a laboratory for new weapons but as a showroom floor, where clients can observe their effectiveness in real-time (Loewenstein, 2017). This model has turned Israel into one of the world’s foremost exporters of counterinsurgency tactics, supplying weaponry and surveillance technology to regimes across the globe. The same crowd-control weapons used against Palestinian demonstrators in the West Bank—tear gas, rubber bullets, and skunk water—have been adopted by security forces from Chile to India (Abunimah, 2014). The digital tools developed for monitoring Palestinian society have been integrated into predictive policing systems in the United States and Europe. At every level, the occupation of Palestine has become a blueprint for authoritarian governance elsewhere. But Israel’s role extends beyond just selling weapons. Through military training programs, it actively exports the doctrine of permanent counterinsurgency. American police forces regularly train with the Israeli military, learning the same techniques of repression used against Palestinians (Kuzmarov, 2019). From Ferguson to Minneapolis, officers who have undergone these programs employ methods indistinguishable from those used in occupied Palestine: knee-on-neck restraint tactics, no-knock raids, and pre-emptive surveillance of political activists. In this way, the Israeli model does not remain confined to the battlefield—it is imported into domestic law enforcement, reinforcing the cycle of the imperial boomerang.
To understand Israel’s role in global warfare innovation, one must first understand Gaza—not just as a geopolitical flashpoint but as a technological petri dish where the future of military control is being engineered in real-time. Unlike traditional battlefields, where two opposing armies engage in combat, Gaza serves as a unique testing ground where an advanced, Western-backed military force experiments on a largely defenceless civilian population. The wars on Gaza are not merely conflicts; they are live demonstrations of military hardware, surveillance technology, and urban warfare doctrine (Puar, 2017). Since the early 2000s, Israel’s assaults on Gaza have been punctuated by major military operations—Operation Cast Lead (2008–09), Operation Protective Edge (2014), and the ongoing war in 2023–25—each of which has introduced new technological advancements that later make their way into the global arms market. In 2014, Israel showcased the use of autonomous drone strikes, conducting one of the first large-scale demonstrations of AI-assisted targeting systems in urban warfare (Weizman, 2017). In 2021, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) deployed what it called the world’s first AI-driven war, using a machine-learning system to generate bombing targets and optimise kill efficiency in real-time (Bachmann & Gunneflo, 2022).
Perhaps most disturbingly, Gaza has become the epicentre of automated border enforcement, a model that has since been exported to the United States and Europe. The Smart Wall system along Gaza’s perimeter, powered by AI-assisted surveillance towers and remote-controlled machine guns, is now being mirrored on the US-Mexico border, where Elbit Systems, one of Israel’s largest defence contractors, has supplied similar technology to US Customs and Border Protection (Jones, 2021). The techniques honed in controlling Palestinian movement—biometric databases, predictive analytics, and algorithmic policing—are now standard components of Western immigration enforcement. The logic behind Gaza as a weapons laboratory is straightforward: if a technology works against the most densely populated enclave on earth, it will work anywhere. Every war becomes an opportunity for Israel to refine its tools of occupation, and with each refinement, these technologies inch closer to global adoption. Yet, the most chilling development in recent years has been the rise of fully autonomous warfare, where human decision-making is increasingly removed from the equation. At the heart of this transformation lies Project Lavender—Israel’s foray into AI-driven combat systems that will redefine the future of military and domestic repression.
The integration of artificial intelligence into military operations has long been inevitable, but Project Lavender marks a chilling escalation. Developed by the Israeli military, Project Lavender is an AI-driven targeting system designed to autonomously identify and eliminate threats with minimal human oversight. Unlike previous drone-based warfare, where human operators retained the final decision to strike, Lavender shifts this burden onto an algorithm, drastically reducing the time between identification and execution (Bachmann & Gunneflo, 2022). During Israel’s 2023–24 war on Gaza, Lavender played a central role in facilitating mass-casualty airstrikes, accelerating the process of military decision-making to a scale previously unseen. This shift represents more than just technological advancement—it marks the dawn of algorithmic warfare, where kill decisions are determined not by battlefield conditions, but by the data inputs of an AI system. The consequences of this are staggering. By outsourcing lethal force to machine intelligence, Project Lavender eliminates human hesitation, legal accountability, and ethical considerations. The software’s ability to “suggest” thousands of targets at once means that mass civilian casualties are no longer collateral damage; they are data-driven inevitabilities (Weizman, 2024). The Israeli military’s use of this technology has already raised alarms among international legal scholars, who warn that such systems will make war crimes functionally unprosecutable—if no human presses the button, then who bears responsibility? (Benjamin, 2023).
Yet, the most disturbing aspect of Project Lavender is not only its use in Gaza, but its potential to be exported and integrated into domestic security frameworks. Israel has long been the world’s premier supplier of police and military technology, and there is no reason to believe that AI-assisted counterinsurgency will remain confined to occupied Palestine. If AI can be used to pre-emptively eliminate “threats” in Gaza, how long before it is deployed in Western cities under the guise of counterterrorism? The infrastructure for this shift is already being built. Israeli firms like Elbit Systems and NSO Group—the same companies that supplied weapons and spyware to repressive regimes worldwide—are leading the charge in developing predictive policing software and AI-driven border control (Jones, 2021). Project Lavender may in the eyes of a less sympathetic audience “only threaten gazan’s”, but its implications extend far beyond Western-Asia. With increasing Western investment in AI-enhanced security measures, the methods pioneered in Palestinian repression are poised to become standard tools of urban policing in the very nations that funded their creation.
Which leads to the final, inevitable stage of the imperial boomerang: when the technologies of colonial violence return home to be used against the very populations that once felt immune to them. History has shown time and again that the mechanisms of repression perfected in colonial peripheries do not remain confined to distant battlefields. They return, repurposed, refined, and redeployed against the very populations that once felt protected by them. This is the essence of the imperial boomerang—a process through which methods of control, surveillance, and violence used to subjugate foreign populations eventually become standard practice within the heart of empire itself (Césaire, 1955). The United States, the United Kingdom, and other Western powers have long relied on external wars and occupations to hone their techniques of domination. But as the wars abroad shift from conventional occupations to algorithmic warfare, from boots on the ground to predictive AI policing, the line between military and civilian application is being erased at an unprecedented rate.
Consider the trajectory of post-9/11 counterterrorism policies. The warrantless surveillance, indefinite detentions, and extrajudicial killings that were first trialled in Iraq, Afghanistan, and drone wars across the Global South soon found their way into domestic law enforcement. The militarisation of American police forces, the expansion of digital surveillance networks, and the rise of predictive policing all stem directly from tactics refined in foreign interventions (Gilliard, 2022). The US-Mexico border today is patrolled by the same AI-powered watchtowers that enforce Gaza’s siege; facial recognition and algorithmic threat assessment, once used to hunt insurgents in Baghdad, now determine police responses in New York, Los Angeles, and London. Israel’s Project Lavender is merely the latest iteration of this process. The shift to AI-driven combat in Gaza is not just about refining efficiency in military operations—it is about developing the next generation of domestic repression tools under the guise of security. Once tested and perfected in the dehumanised laboratory of occupied Palestine, these technologies will inevitably be marketed to Western governments as solutions for “domestic extremism,” “border security,” and “public order”. AI-assisted drones that bomb apartment blocks in Gaza today may one day surveil and pacify dissenting crowds in Paris or Washington. The kill lists generated by algorithms in Rafah today may become the foundation for mass profiling and automated arrests in Western cities tomorrow. The ultimate irony of empire is that it cannot contain its violence. The more it externalises its brutality, the more that brutality metastasises within its own borders. The West’s uncritical embrace of Israel’s warfare innovations is a foreboding signal—not just for those suffering under occupation, but for those who assume that such technologies will never be used against them.
The imperial boomerang is no longer just a theory—it is a lived reality. The repression seen in Gaza is a preview of what awaits the rest of the world if current trends continue unchecked. But history also reminds us that empires, no matter how technologically advanced, are not invincible. Resistance has always been the counterforce to oppression. Just as colonial subjects once led the struggles that dismantled empires, the fight against algorithmic warfare and AI-driven repression will require new coalitions, new strategies, and an unwavering commitment to justice.
The weapons of the empire will return home. The only question is whether the people will be ready to disarm them while they are being used against communities that aren’t their own. Empathy and action are the only avenues to stop the imperial boomerang before it is too late.
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