For twenty-two months, a pattern for most, while scrolling through the day’s atrocities, perpetrated by the Israel Occupation Forces (IOF) in Gaza and across the entirety of Palestine… 1) repost the catchy infographic (Whose metrics? Who is profiting? Who is genocide-influencing?) 2) toggle to something – an app, a “self-care” account, a network show – that assuages guilt 3) post on whatever platform:
There are no words.
It’s a phrase rife with concurrent exacerbation, apathy and defeatism. One used ad nauseum… and as an excuse to avoid abrading for the lexicon to amply hold this horror. The words, I insist, are the shareholders, financiers, politicians’ names… the words are in the Quarterly Results and Annual Outlook … they are in the specifications of the bombs, ordnance and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that prey on Palestine and its people. By enumerating and explicating the genocidaires and their everyday operations, we find the words.
Take, for example, a now deleted post by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems on X that circulated on July 12, 2025:
SPIKE FIREFLY: Proven Precision, Redefining the Tactical Edge
We mark two years since SPIKE FIREFLY was first operationally deployed-ushering in a new era of precision for the tactical fighting forces.
Since that first use, FIREFLY has proven itself in some of the most challenging environments-delivering pinpoint strikes with minimal collateral damage, even in GPS jamming environments and under adverse weather conditions.
A tactical loitering munition within the SPIKE family, FIREFLY is compact, intuitive, and remarkably agile-giving the tactical levels – the company and the battalion, a unique, lightweight, backpack carried air power companion that enhances lethality while reducing risk to friendly forces.
Across multiple combat zones, FIREFLY has become a game-changer-supporting operational success, force protection, and tactical overmatch on the modern battlefield.
Tested. Trusted. Tactical. #SPIKEFIREFLY
Language that’s by now so prosaic we seldom pause our feeds; most challenging environments… operational success. Finding words…I can’t tell the difference between something I made up to satirise the horrific, banal language of industrial murder and the language of denial, obfuscation. The small print of precision killing and trade agreements. Although no particular operation or army is mentioned in the tweet, the accompanying video makes Rafael’s imperatives crystalline; the 14-second clip depicts the drone targeting, firing at, and presumptively slaughtering a Palestinian man in Gaza.
Stills from the (now-deleted) Rafael promotional video, via Quds News Network on X
According to Middle East Eye, open-source analyst Anno Nemo geolocated the footage in Rafael’s post to the al-Tawam area of northern Gaza, ““Based on 2 Google Earth satellite images the video appears to have been taken between 4 June 2024 and 1 December 2024,” Anno Nemo said, adding that possible changes are visible in the area on Sentinel satellite imagery from November 2024.”” Necessary to underscore:
Article three of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that: “Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces… shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction.”
The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines “intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities” as a war crime.
This isn’t the place to try and condense decades of the IOF’s UAV-led terror on Palestinians, nor the theoretical and psychological knottings of remotely-controlled weaponry for perpetrators and victims – where video gaming fantasy and the settler colonial impetus for deathmaking bleed together. These technologies have a range of capacities including espionage and surveillance, issuing displacement orders and frightening civilians with loud noises (including the unfathomable wickedness of emulating infant crying noises, to lure families and caregivers from safe spaces into firing range). Elemental to the occupier’s methods – drone warfare on Palestinians well-predates October 2023; Al Mezan Center for Human Rights documents that the IOF began using drones for extrajudicial killings of Palestinians in 2004, though testing likely began long before, and Defense for Children International-Palestine found that during 2014’s Operation Protective Edge, drones murdered at least 164 children.This genocide ripped any shred of remaining mask off the IOF and its constellation of colluders; no more hiding behind lies of “two-state solutions” or “peace now” – the jaws of zionism showing clearly that the aim is profit maximalization, concurrent ongoing land theft, resource pilfering, and the elimination of Palestine’s Indigenous peoples. So while this marketing maneuver by Rafael was met with fleeting consternation online, Rafael – an Israeli-owned company worth nearly $5 billion (2024, up 27% from 2023) – is showing us, spelling out for us, their endgame: to hunt and kill Palestinians, while posting record sales.
Cover image from Rafael SPIKE FIREFLY brochure
The promotions for this UAV aren’t necessarily anything out of the ordinary across the breadth of munitions manufacturers’ materials – and this is exactly the point. The “anywhere-ness” of the video is in the north of Gaza, whose besiegement includes the very most heinous perpetrations of this genocide by the IOF and its US/UK/EU/UAE collaborators. The background of the brochure is, more than likely, an aerial image of Nablus, near the former site of the al-Na‘ama Flourmill. The history of fertile plains, centuries of trade and culture, as attempted erasure by the Rafael graphics department. Their “Smart and to the Point” slogan signposts the persistent surveillance of Palestinian communities not just in Gaza but across the West Bank – elemental to the voracious division, demolition and imprisonment of the land and its people.
We can consider, then, what’s meant by loitering munition, beyond how it suits the colonizer’s cache. Merriam-Webster defines loiter: to delay an activity with idle stops and pauses: dawdle; to remain in an area for no obvious reason. These ‘battle-ready’ devices bent on “enhancing lethality” can only remain airborne for 15 minutes; 30 minutes with additional batteries. While that is obviously ample time for this genocidal regime to pursue (and murder) their targets, I challenge us to consider these capabilities, compared to Palestinians who, for generations, remain steadfast on their land. Perhaps an inversion of loitering’s disparaging intentions – the occupier’s tools are no match for the triumph of sumud.
It’s no happenstance, of course, that these graphics and catchphrases feature a visual culture of empire’s intent to desensitize us to the site-specificity of these companies’ research, development, prototyping and testing; photographs and clips of largely ambiguous arid and/or mountainous regions that gesture towards an ‘other’, an ‘enemy’, the ‘target’, as someone trespassing into (or lurking amongst) the sovereign ethnostate. The mountains of Achin district in Afghanistan are rendered no differently than the San Ysidro Mountains near Tijuana, Mexico, through the scope of forever warfare. These vignettes and their captions numb us to understanding the intricacies of place, of each other – by collapsing the ‘other’, the ‘terrorist’ and ‘threat’ into something and somewhere disposable, and profitable. We could consider Nicholas Mirzoeff’s “banality of images” as building on Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil,” whereby ““the banality of images is no accident, but the result of a deliberate effort by those fighting the war to reduce its visual impact by saturating our senses with non-stop indistinguishable and undistinguished images.”
We can notice this, too, in Israeli-owned Elbit Systems’ “Next Gen Border” visualizations of surveillance technologies and tactical operations across the United States. By now, we should all be keenly aware of Elbit’s products and methods of “field-testing” on Indigenous, racialized, occupied communities globally and the task to dismantle Israel’s war machine. The flows and circuits of these products attest to the borderlessness of capital and its demands for carceral capture – and much of Elbit’s lifeblood, rather, nearly $7 billion revenue, stems from the weaponization of the Sonoran Desert and the hyper-fortification of the US-Mexico border(wall). As one of Elbit’s landing pages states:
WE MAKE THIS LOOK EASY
We understand information is life. Elbit Systems of America creates a single operating picture for U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents.
We handle the data, so agents can virtually be anywhere along the U.S. borders…
We provide all domain situational awareness using advanced Autonomous Threat Detection in the air, on the ground, underground, and Border Wall Enforcement Zone. Our multi-mission Mobile Surveillance Systems and Relocatable Integrated Surveillance Towers provide decision-quality information, no matter the terrain.
The sheer volume of necropolitical violence – how life and mortality are defined as the deployment and manifestation of power, as packed into we make this look easy – a moment we would otherwise ignore – begs the question: what is THIS?
THIS – holds in it the 4,399+ migrants (as of July 2025) who’ve died attempting to cross through the Sonoran Desert because of the 31-year (and counting) policy of Prevention Through Deterrence, and the thousands more who’ve been disappeared, extorted, detained… whose remains haven’t been discovered. THIS – includes the Integrated Fixed Towers, and their vast footprints in the matrix of border surveillance technologies across occupied Tohono O’odham Indigenous land that cuts, carves, splices the terrain in settler colonial interests, pilfering the waterways and fragile desert ecology. Agents ‘virtually anywhere’ along the so-called US borders collapses both the “virtual” and physical walling (scarring) of the land and its people into a limitless spatio-temporal enigma; corralling and torturing bodies is no longer limited to the immediacy of The Wall and the Roosevelt Reservation – but now very much includes data mining, biometric stalking (with help from LexisNexis)… Elbit (and others, such as Palantir and Anduril) contracting with the US Department of Homeland Security to scrape IRS and Social Security data… hospital, school, Medicare, social media platforms, and banking records (and so much more) to monitor (hunt) those with precarious status (and, US citizens) and those with dissenting sensibilities. Meaning – the border is everywhere, always.
Graphic of Elbit America’s “multi-mission capabilities,” from their website
The border is systematically embedding in every body – but if we wait here for one moment: the virtually anywhere is exacting. It is the stolen lands of the O’odham, Yaqui, Xawiƚƚ kwñchawaay, Kumeyaay, Diné, Chiracahua Apache, Tiwa and beyond. The cholla cacti, creosote scrub and caliche soil are distinctly parts of the Sonoran and Chiracahua deserts; the saguaro cacti – pictured here as about to be backed into by an Elbit-branded truck (likely a photoshopped stand-in for the green and white Customs and Border Patrol trucks that raze the earth) are considered elders of the region; their lifespan is approximately 150-200 years. Saguaros grow nowhere else on this planet except the Sonoran Desert. Elbit’s depiction of ‘anywhere’ is right here, in my community. Ask – demand of yourself – how have we been anesthetized by what we’re consuming, sharing, grieving by those responsible for this worlds-ending damage? How are they profiting from this? Our wordlessness, that oft materializes as non-action. Our charge is to name this nefariousness – because to not only find but use the words – the names of these stakeholders, their actions – and the specificities of their weapons – commits us to better understanding, and ultimately ending, this horror.