The Electronic Intifada 27 December 2024
Students are challenging MIT’s active role in developing technology to advance Israel’s killing machine in Gaza.
SOPA Images/SIPA USAEvery day in Gaza, killer drones constantly buzz overhead.
Since October 2023, Gaza has been a training ground for AI-enabled drone war technology.
Used by the Israeli military, these drones commit heinous, daily war crimes, including the targeted execution of children lying injured in the aftermath of bombings in Gaza.
The development of such technologies raises a critical question: who are the scientists enabling these war crimes through their research?
Israel’s reliance on cutting-edge research for military dominance and genocide in Gaza is grave enough. It is even more damning that a globally renowned academic institution like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) – a self-proclaimed advocate for “shared humanity” and a “better world,” values which the university negates via its Orwellian doublespeak – is actively complicit in facilitating the Israeli military’s objectives.
MIT has terminated research ties to Russia over the invasion of Ukraine, Saudi Arabia after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and even scrutinized its research relationship with China. It has adopted an elevated-risk project review process to evaluate certain international collaborations based on political, civil and human rights violations.
Israel remains a glaring and violent exception to these policies.
And students have taken note. In April 2024, The Electronic Intifada spoke to a senior at MIT who explained the relationships between the university and US weapons manufacturers working to supply Israel with high-tech weapons, and how students were organizing to fight those ties.
MIT has responded to activism against this complicity with harsh repression, most recently by effectively expelling a graduate student for his political expression, as well as censoring and withholding pay from a tenured professor for his advocacy.
These escalated punishments follow many instances of unprecedented sanctions against anti-genocide protesters. These sanctions have violated due process, including the widespread use of temporary suspensions which led to evictions in the spring.
This fall, following a restructuring of the rules and creation of a new, streamlined process to discipline specifically Palestine-centered protests – which deviates strongly from the standard process – students at MIT have been subjected to discipline for everyday actions.
Included in these newly restricted actions are flyering, tabling for student activist organizations and chalking anti-genocide messages on blackboards and public sidewalks.
Despite this repression, the MIT Coalition for Palestine has recently released a comprehensive report exposing MIT’s scientific ties to the Zionist occupation and genocide in Gaza.
A concise version of this report will be presented at the UN Human Rights Council’s 58th proceedings in the spring to expose the critical role of private and industrial entities in Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
Israeli military is only foreign army to sponsor MIT research
According to MIT’s internal “Report of Sponsored Research Activity” (also known as the Brown Book), Israel’s military is the only foreign army to sponsor research at the university.
Ten MIT professors have received direct research sponsorships from Israel’s defense ministry since 2015, six of them actively in 2023.
Three sponsorships were renewed post-October 2023 and are currently active. According to publicly available audit reports, Professor Eytan Modiano has spent over $130,000 in Israeli military funding since 2022 for a project titled “Autonomous Robotic Swarms: Distributed Coordination and Perception.”
Modiano’s work enables drone swarms to use modified, local WiFi networks to track moving targets such as cars.
Since 2020, Professor Christopher Voigt has spent over $900,000 in Israeli military funding for two projects. One Israeli military-funded Voigt publication claims to have developed “sentinel bacteria” that can collect and analyze DNA samples, allowing the digital reconstruction of human faces for surveillance.
Since 2021, Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, has spent nearly $300,000 in Israeli military funding for a project that develops “tracking-and-pursuit” algorithms for low-power drones.
Rus’ research frequently emphasizes the usefulness of these algorithms for real-time, real-world tracking and observation, either with human direction or autonomously.
These projects are easily co-opted for genocide based on their own self-acknowledged use-cases. Furthermore, sponsors like the Israeli military have the right to “shape direction and objectives” of MIT research as well as “to use the research outcomes and deliverables.”
Taking action
Students at MIT are taking action, despite the administration’s repression.
In October, MIT students protested Rus’ contracts with Israel by delivering a letter to her lab demanding that she cut her complicit contracts. These actions reflect the demands of the MIT Scientists Against Genocide Encampment, and represent the majority views of MIT’s Undergraduate Association, Graduate Student Council and Graduate Student Union.
Activists at MIT published an article in the school’s newspaper, The Tech, on Rus’ complicity with genocide.
In response, Rus pressured The Tech’s editorial board to retract the article, claiming that her work with the Israeli military is “not deployable for use in [military] drones.” However, her published work explicitly addresses military-use cases, including surveillance, criminal pursuit, and military and naval operations.
She regularly briefs military leaders at the Pentagon and has spoken at defense conferences on her work’s relevance to military target identification.
Her collaborator, Dan Feldman at the University of Haifa, has presented their algorithm research at Israeli military technology firm Elbit Systems, which supplies 85 percent of Israel’s drones.
Rus has also published papers with AI engineers who work directly for Elbit.
But instead of expanding the scope of the elevated risk guidelines to investigate MIT’s possible role in developing technology to advance Israel’s killing machine in Gaza – which is the standard for outside engagements recommended by the faculty – MIT has chosen to turn its ire on the students who are spotlighting this complicity, accusing them of violating MIT’s rules for student conduct.
MIT’s characterization of protest as student misconduct while refusing to acknowledge its own systemic disregard for institutional ethics is yet another example of an accusation in a mirror, a common tactic across genocides throughout history.
The crackdown on Palestine solidarity activism has been draconian, particularly against students of color. The MIT Coalition for Palestine, which mostly comprises minority-affiliated student organizations, broadly shares these concerns.
Academic repression
Repression at MIT also extends to academic expression.
On 1 November 2024, graduate student Prahlad Iyengar was banned from campus, and the fifth edition of the student-run zine Written Revolution was barred from distribution under MIT police enforcement.
The administration censored Iyengar’s essay, “On Pacifism,” for including a poster made by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and critically analyzing the role of pacifism in liberation movements. The administration labeled the article as “advocacy” for, and “endorsement” of, terrorism.
Iyengar’s case is one of dozens against students over their pro-Palestinian activism.
MIT has also directly infringed on the academic freedom of Professor Michel DeGraff, an expert in decolonial linguistics whose proposed special topics course on language and linguistics for decolonization and liberation was censored by his department.
DeGraff’s continuous advocacy for his course – and for Palestinian liberation – resulted in administrative sanctions, including a withheld pay raise and by removing him indefinitely from his department, classifying him as “faculty at large.”
By repressing pro-Palestinian activism, MIT bends morals in favor of the financial bottom line, aiding and abetting the genocide of Palestinians while evading accountability. MIT’s complicity in war crimes has shattered the illusion that MIT is a beacon of cutting-edge research “for the betterment of humankind.”
The reality is unmistakable: MIT exploits its own students and workers to build the machinery of industrialized violence.
As a precedent-setter for collaborating with an occupying force, MIT warrants a precedent-setting response: Private institutions, including academic institutions, must face accountability. MIT must sever its ties to the Israeli military and redirect its immense power toward rebuilding Gaza and ending the oppression perpetuated by the American military-industrial complex.
The time for action is now. We all owe it to the Palestinian people, and all other wretched of the Earth from Haiti to Sudan to Kashmir, to spread the truth and resist the perversion of the foundational values of academia and science.
The MIT Coalition for Palestine was founded in October 2023 in response to the escalation of the genocide of Palestinians waged by the occupation forces since 1948. Today, the Coalition includes 20 student, staff and faculty groups aligned towards collective liberation for Palestine and all the globally oppressed.
