'Feminist Readings of the Use of Artificial Intelligence in Israel’s Genocidal War on Gaza'

The Global Studies Seminar presents “Feminist Readings of the Use of Artificial Intelligence in Israel’s Genocidal War on Gaza” by Denison University’s Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies & International Studies Isis Nusair.

According to +972 Magazine and Local Call, “the Israeli army’s expanded authorization for bombing non-military targets, the loosening of constraints regarding expected civilian casualties, and the use of an artificial intelligence system to generate more potential targets than ever before, appear to have contributed to the destructive nature of the initial stages of Israel’s current war on the Gaza Strip”. The investigation reveals that these factors, as “described by current and former Israeli intelligence members, have likely played a role in producing what has been one of the deadliest military campaigns against Palestinians since the Nakba of 1948”. Shtaya analyzes how “tech giants play a pivotal role, deliberately or not, in suppressing, isolating, stereotyping, slandering, demonizing, and degrading Palestinian viewpoints online because of systematic algorithmic biases, biased content moderation, ineffective reporting mechanisms, and a general lack of understanding of local contexts and languages”. Feminist scholars of color have made “powerful critiques of the ways in which artificial intelligence systems formalize, classify, and amplify historical forms of discrimination and act to reify and amplify existing forms of social inequality” (West, 2020). This presentation will focus on how the operation of artificial intelligence is used by the Israeli military in the genocidal war on Gaza and how technology is used to sustain power structures and status quo relations in regard to the Palestinian question. 

Nusair is the co-editor with Rhoda Kanaaneh of “Displaced at Home: Ethnicity and Gender Among Palestinians in Israel” and translator of “Ever Since I Did Not Die by Ramy Al-Asheq.” Her upcoming co edited anthology with Barbara Shaw is titled “Pedagogies of Interconnectedness: Feminist-Queer Collaborative Transformation.” She is completing two book manuscripts on Iraqi women refugees in Jordan and the USA, and on refugees from Syria in Germany. Isis is the co-writer/director with Laila Farah of the one-woman performance “Weaving the Maps: Tales of Survival and Resistance.” She is currently researching the gendered, racialized, and sexualized torture of Palestinians in Gaza, and the body of war in Syrian TV series post 2011. She serves on the editorial committee of the International Feminist Journal of Politics. She previously served on the editorial committee of MERIP and as a researcher on women’s human rights in the Middle East and North Africa at Human Rights Watch and at the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network.