Where’s Daddy?
Andrew Brooks & Astrid Lorange
In Silicon Valley, the libertarians are dead. Tech bros have ditched the image of the hoodie-wearing disruptor, left behind the informality of the startup incubator, and no longer espouse capital mobility as their sole objective. In 2023, the king of ketamine, Elon Musk, challenged the coding nerd turned mixed-martial artist Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight in a show of masculine bravado jacked up on the fumes of tech speculation. Behind the flexing of literal and figurative muscles, Meta set to work on dismantling any publishing standards it purported to have by removing content moderators from its platforms in January 2025. The company’s appeal to allow “more speech” on their platforms in ways where the “good, bad and ugly is on display” is barely a dog whistle. Rather, it is an explicit alignment with a reactionary political order whose targets include women, immigrants, queer communities, and pro-Palestine movements. Under the lax new standards, outlined in a January 7, 2025, Meta policy document covering “hateful conduct,” users are permitted to describe queer people as “mentally ill,” trans people as “it,” and women as “household objects.”
The tech sector was never simply about the industrial development of new technological tools. There has always been an ideological struggle over visions of capitalist futurity that plays out in symbolic and discursive realms. This is especially true today, as the sector’s major players lean into fascist signifiers of brutish masculinity and hate speech while embedding themselves in the machinery of war. Musk’s temporary move into the White House in February 2025 signaled the success of tech founders and CEOs in co-opting the government apparatus and harnessing it for capital accumulation in the context of the continued collapse of industrial profits. Companies like Palantir, Anduril Industries, Tesla, and Amazon, seeing profit as tied to foreign policy and state power, seek to entrench themselves directly in the national security state.
The story of the tech sector and the post-war security state is both old and new. The older story involves the fusing of a libertarian ethos with an entrepreneurial worldview: the remaking of the West Coast of America—that final frontier of settler-colonial manifest destiny—into a burgeoning tech hub in the 1970s that went all in on the conservatism of supply-side economics and neoliberal state restructuring. The newer story sees the movement of the tech industry inside the state, jostling alongside conservative think tanks and right-wing accelerationists to shape state formation in a moment of prolonged crisis. This movement can be traced back to the entanglement between the tech industry and state surveillance, with the National Security Agency (NSA) and its Five Eyes intelligence partners in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and Canada directly accessing data on the servers of companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. Snowden’s disclosures showed us the extent of datafied surveillance and large-scale intelligence-sharing between nation states and their allies. A crucial relation in this global surveillance network is the sharing of intelligence between Israel (which includes both state agencies and private firms, such as the NSO Group) and their primary global partner and ally, the United States, through the NSA. The acceleration of datafication that has followed has further expanded surveillance capacity via platform economies. This transfer between tech companies and national intelligence services flows in multiple directions, applying not only to data but also to personnel, with members of the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) advanced cybersecurity and cyberwarfare division, Unit 8200, founding or joining tech startups and venture capital firms in the global tech sector.
Much has been made of Israel’s status as a “Startup Nation,” a descriptor popularized by Dan Senor and Saul Singer’s 2009 bestseller Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle. The book is a celebration of Israeli entrepreneurialism and innovation, tracing the emergence of the country’s tech sector and venture capital incubation through incentivized privatization and direct state investment. As a brand, Startup Nation maps directly onto a self-styled image of Israel as a bastion of techno-capitalist modernity, surrounded by developing economies whose presumed technological backwardness is taken as evidence of a civilizational primitivity that has long been in the racial vocabulary of settler colonial regimes. Senor and Singer’s label has been taken up by Startup Nation Central, aphilanthropically funded, not-for-profit platform that frames the country’s tech sector as driven by “impatient innovation,” promising “global solution seekers an ‘All Access Pass’ to Israel’s bold and determined innovators, to their expertise, and to the solutions they offer.” The platform boasts that the sector is home to seventy-two hundred startups and companies, 414 innovation hubs, and 434 multinational companies.
The success of Israel’s startup economy depends, in Senor and Singer’s telling, on a corporate culture indelibly shaped by the IDF and compulsory military service. Against the classical image of strict, top-down military hierarchies, the IDF reportedly privileges downward delegation and the devolution of responsibility to junior personnel. Senor and Singer cite the military historian Edward Luttwak, who notes: “The IDF is deliberately understaffed at senior levels. It means that there are fewer senior officers to issue commands. Fewer senior officials means more individual initiative at the lower ranks.” Next, they turn to Gilad Farhi, a 30-year-old major in the IDF, who speaks of twenty-three-year-old company commanders, a minor rank that involves responsibility for a discrete territory and the oversight of up to one hundred soldiers: “If a terrorist infiltrates that area, there’s a company commander whose name is on it. Tell me how many twenty-three-year-olds elsewhere in the world live with that kind of pressure.”
“The success of Israel’s startup economy depends, in Senor and Singer’s telling, on a corporate culture indelibly shaped by the IDF and compulsory military service.”
Occupation, apartheid, and genocide turn out to be ideal training grounds for the modern tech entrepreneur, a relation literalized in Unit 8200, whose veterans have gone on to found and work in major private and publicly traded tech companies in both Israel and Silicon Valley. Back in 2016, Forbes Magazine estimated that more than one thousand companies had been founded by graduates of Unit 8200, including Waze and Mirabilis. In 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported that Palo Alto Networks, Check Point Software Technologies, CyberArk Software, Wix.com, and Radware–Nasdaq-listed companies founded by former Unit 8200s–had a combined value of over US$160 billion. The pressures of active military service are regularly invoked by a generation of Israeli tech and venture capital magnates, such as the founder of Glilot Capital Partners, Kobi Samboursky (“I’ve gone through tougher situations, so what’s a deadline? What’s a competitor? What’s an investor? Everything looks kind of easier”) or the CEO of the data security company Cyera, Yotam Segev (“There’s incredible freedom to operate at a young age, and the problems you’re presented with are quite raw”).
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Unit 8200 is the largest military unit in the IDF, a descendant of intelligence operations originating in the British Mandatory Palestine period and formalized through the Military Intelligence Directorate that was established in 1950, two years after the creation of the state of Israel. In its early incarnations the unit was given random numbers (because, per Forbes, they “could be discussed without using words”—515, then 848—so it could be discussed without using terms indexing its function. It was finally renamed 8200 in the wake of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, in which Israeli intelligence was caught off guard by a multi-front surprise attack by a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria. The reported capture of an Israeli intelligence officer by Syrian forces and the subsequent disclosure of intelligence secrets provided the imperative for a reconceptualization of Israeli state security. Unit 8200 became a series of discrete departments, operating in secrecy from each other. This decentralized intelligence network bears some structural resemblance to startup incubators, in which workforces are split into competing teams and race to find “innovative” solutions to a stated problem. The IDF famously recruits for Unit 8200 as early as high school, paying attention to students with an aptitude for coding, programming, languages, and linguistics. Above all, the unit seeks those much-vaunted skills in the age of knowledge economies: competitiveness and flexibility. The tentacular arms of the unit are involved in the collection of signal intelligence, counterintelligence, military intelligence, surveillance and dataveillance, cyberwarfare, code breaking, predictive analytics, and more. With the current genocide in Gaza, it has also turned its energies to automated and AI-driven forms of intelligence-gathering and warfare. Here the soldier is an entrepreneurial problem-solver. Read in the inverse direction, the entrepreneur is a warmonger.
In the soldiers of Unit 8200, we find the contemporary embodiment of an old Zionist archetype, “the fighting Jew,” made famous in the rhetoric of Menachem Begin, former Israeli Prime Minister and commander of the Zionist paramilitary group Irgun. The high-tech soldier combines the pioneer, a figure of colonial mythology whose will and ingenuity transform a primitive land into a productive one, with the policeman or soldier, a defender of the frontier whose courage and strength not only secures but expands territorial boundaries. The so-called New Pioneer, writes Ali Musleh, is “embodied in the weapons designer and the security entrepreneur”—someone like the graduate of Unit 8200. Indeed, much of Israel’s startup economy is scaffolded by a military-industrial complex that involves a fluid interchange between the military, state research and development, universities, the tech sector, and the arms industry. Musleh argues that Israeli weapons manufacturing—including automated and semi-automated arms, as well as technologically sophisticated tools of surveillance and data collection—appeals directly to the nation’s status as an occupier. These “market tested” technologies produce and reproduce an image of Israel as perpetually under threat and victimized by its Arab neighbors while demonstrating the strength required to overcome this threat through a combination of technological know-how, military capability, mobile capital, and ruthlessness. As Musleh puts it, “the Israeli state is not simply selling weapons but is marketing its brand of settler colonialism as an exemplar of twenty-first century warfare.” And the brand is selling well in these times of heightened geopolitical instability, ascendant right-wing populism, and entrenched border anxiety, with Israeli arms exports reaching a record total of $14.8 billion in 2024, an increase of nearly fourteen percent over the prior year. Israel is now the seventh-largest arms exporter in the world, while also relying on massive imports primarily from the US and Germany.
If, as Frantz Fanon famously pointed out, the colonial world is “a world divided into compartments” that are enforced by the soldier and policeman, then the settler colony has always been the template for the security state. Israel has built the state around the principle of permanent security: the conviction that it is under continuous threat from a perpetual enemy. That conviction animates ongoing Israeli aggression and the expansion of its dispossessive occupation. For Anthony Dirk Moses, permanent security is marked by a form of paranoia that seeks to preempt perceived “imminent threats” while preventing “future threats.” Israel has historically done this through a strategy called “mowing the grass,” which refers to the periodic deployment of asymmetrical force against those who resist Israeli occupation in order to temporarily reduce their capabilities rather than eradicate them. Mow the grass, wait, mow it again. The doctrine of permanent security has seen Israel build a high-tech brand that is exported across the world in a movement that Aimé Césaire called the imperial boomerang, a term he coined in the mid-twentieth century to describe the return of violent techniques perfected in the relatively unregulated colonies to the metropole, where they can be deployed to enforce the racialized class hierarchies central to capitalist accumulation. While permanent security remains the prevailing logic in which all Israeli violence is framed as defense, the current moment shows a shift in strategy towards prolonged genocidal aggression. Permanent security allows Israel to position itself as world leader in securitization while acting as a hostile aggressor.
Advanced technological capabilities and weapons design are not only central to Israel’s material occupation of Palestinian territory but, as Musleh points out, serve an important symbolic function in Zionist ideology by positioning industry and innovation as a revival of back-to-the-land narratives in which the occupier-turned-entrepreneur is an Indigenous defender of the Jewish homeland. The success of the settler-colonial brand has seen Israeli security technologies and arms exported across the world and companies like Elbit Systems and Magal Solutions contracted to build border infrastructures such as Trump’s wall between the US and Mexico. The current state of affairs is a feedback loop: Technologies developed in the settler colony and tested on the Palestinian population are exported to meet the racialized anxieties of contemporary security states; weapons and component parts of weapons are exported to Israel from other Western military-industrial complexes. The outcome of this continuous flow of exports and imports is the bolstering of a capitalist economy in which techniques of colonization drive value creation and accumulation while simultaneously supplementing Israel’s genocidal military capacity.
“It is no longer simply that the pressurized environment of colonial occupation equips the soldier with the creativity, flexibility, and independence so valued by startups, but that the logics of securitization, prediction, and preemption are central to an increasingly fascistic tech industry.”
The settler colonial brand extends beyond the hardware and software that are brought to market and can be increasingly found in a global tech sector that has abandoned its rhetoric of anti-statism in favor of movement inside, and integration into, the national security state. Companies like Anduril, SpaceX, and Palantir index this realignment, cozying up to the US government as funding continues to be stripped from that historic site of tech research and development, the university. The rallying cry of a subset of Silicon Valley’s billionaire class, crystallized in The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Palantir CEO Alexander Karp and Head of Corporate Affairs Nicholas W. Zamiska, is a turn away from what they call “the trivial and ephemeral” concerns of a technology industry focused on consumer culture in favor of one dedicated to war industries and national security. Palantir, which holds active contracts with Israel’s Ministry of Defense to supply technology that is being used in the war on Gaza, condensed the book into a twenty-two-point manifesto published on the social media platform X in April 2026 which naturalizes the building of AI weapons as a race between cultures that have produced “vital advances” and those that are “dysfunctional and regressive.” The Unit 8200-to-Silicon Valley pipeline is part of the same trajectory. It is no longer simply that the pressurized environment of colonial occupation equips the soldier with the creativity, flexibility, and independence so valued by startups, but that the logics of securitization, prediction, and preemption are central to an increasingly fascistic tech industry.
This brings us to Israel’s use of automated and AI technologies in its genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. In April 2024, the English-language +927 Magazine and the Hebrew-language Local Call jointly published an investigation that revealed the Israeli military has been using Lavender, an AI tool developed by Unit 8200, in its current siege of Gaza. An example of semi-supervised machine learning, Lavender mines large surveillance datasets, assigning numerical scores to Palestinians that predicts the likelihood they are connected to resistance groups (or, to Israel, terrorist organizations) such as Hamas. The use of AI technologies in warfare builds on pattern-of-life analysis perfected by the US in its imperial adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, which saw the data harvested from communications activities, spatial movements, financial transactions, and more fed into algorithmic systems that generated strikes to be executed using drones and other semi-autonomous weapons.
The success of these technologies relies upon enormous data collection and surveillance operations which, in the case of Gaza, are facilitated by what Helga Tawil-Souri has called Israel’s “high-tech enclosure” of the strip following its formal disengagement in 2005. The extent of the digital surveillance of Palestinians is reflected in a 2022 deal between Unit 8200 and Microsoft that allowed the IDF “customized and segregated” storage on the company’s Azure cloud platform such that the telecommunications activities of the entire strip could be recorded and stored at the rate of “a million calls an hour.” While the old colonial ambition of total data collection remains a fantasy, the scale and speed of these activities is increasing at an exponential rate. All this data is put to work inside automated systems such as Lavender, which is reported to have generated up to thirty-seven thousand strike “targets” in the first weeks of the siege on Gaza alone, augmenting human intelligence via machinic means. Aviv Kochavi, former Chief of Staff of the IDF, commented on the acceleration of warfare facilitated by these technologies: “[I]n the past we would produce 50 targets in Gaza in a year. Now, this machine created 100 targets in a single day, with 50% of them being attacked.”
Lavender joined an arsenal of automated war tools, which includes programs codenamed the Gospel, the Alchemist, Where’s Daddy?, and Depth of Wisdom. Many of these programs were first deployed in Gaza during the 2021 campaign dubbed Operation Guardian of the Walls, which the IDF has described as the world’s “first AI war.” Here we must attend to the contradictory logics of automation and AI. Israel’s embrace of automated and AI weaponry feeds into an image of techno-capitalist modernity linked to rhetorics of efficiency, precision, and optimization that promise more humane forms of warfare. That tools like Lavender supposedly generate “targets” that, when actioned, necessitate and legitimate a certain amount of “collateral damage” obscures the fact these technologies are developed and deployed inside a logic of genocidal intent in which the entire Palestinian population has a priori been rendered a target for elimination. The language of precision targeting cloaks the fact that Israel has rained a torrent of cluster bombs (otherwise known as dumb bombs) on the besieged strip, reducing it to rubble. So, too, does the rhetoric of automation disguise the presence of humans in the system—as designers, decision-makers, actioners of outputs. Grand narratives about automation come to function as a humanitarian shield in which the terms of humanity are set by a genocidal regime. These techno-utopian narratives also function to reanimate colonial notions of civilization as yoked to progress, however tenuous these may be more than thirty months into the genocidal campaign.
“Israel’s collection of automated warfare technologies seeks to dispense with narrative explanations for individual strikes and genocidal acts at the same time as it mobilizes generic technological narratives to affirm its status as Western-style democracy practicing warfare with neoliberal efficiency.”
At the same time, automated and AI technologies have produced a qualitative change in the speed and scale of contemporary warfare. The capacity to harness high-speed computation processes to transform vast amounts of data into continuous operations of tracking and striking feeds into the production of what Antoine Bousquet has termed “the martial gaze,” which “encompasses the entire range of sensorial capabilities relevant to the conduct of war” and “threatens anything that falls under it with obliteration.” Michael Richardson extends this line of thought, arguing that “militarized perception is as much about defining geographic or atmospheric zones of violence as it is about seeing individual targets.” The use of automated technologies both speeds up and obscures the operations of military strikes, simultaneously appealing to intensification and individualization in its actions. Ultimately, they feed the production of martial gaze that renders the Gaza strip a zone of violence. Here we might note the structural resonance between the logic of permanent security and the logic of automated media, which Mark Andrejevic diagnoses as defined by preemption (which displaces causality) and operationalism (which dispenses with understanding in favor of action). Israel’s collection of automated warfare technologies seeks to dispense with narrative explanations for individual strikes and genocidal acts at the same time as it mobilizes generic technological narratives to affirm its status as Western-style democracy practicing warfare with neoliberal efficiency.
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At this point, we want to return to the notion that the development of new technologies is at once a technical endeavor and an ideological struggle to capture common sense, both of which are shaped by political economic conditions. The symbolic and libidinal dimensions of technology function to produce collective investments in phantasmatic notions of warfare as “more” humane or “more” ethical while also working to naturalize colonial capitalism and its violent grammars of racialization. Taking these symbolic dimensions seriously, we offer a psychoanalytically inflected reading of the military naming conventions of contemporary automated technologies of warfare deployed by the IDF in which the manifest and latent meanings of the names comprise a portrait of settler colonial anxiety about and fantasies against Palestinian futurity, sexuality, and masculinity. We focus on two tools, both briefly described earlier: Lavender and Where’s Daddy? The former designates Palestinians in Gaza as terrorists and is used in conjunction with the latter, which is a mobile phone-tracking tool that enables IDF personnel to follow “targets” to specific locations, often family homes, and action strikes. These tools have been used as part of an ongoing genocidal campaign that unsettles our established analytic and political categories with a scale of violence that we are yet to fully comprehend, even as we are forced to watch it unfold daily. In the names of these two tools, we find a shifting set of signifiers in which the Israeli is protector, pioneer, innovator, and avatar of queer futurity, and in which the Palestinian is terrorist, threat, primitive, animal, and a figure of unrestrained sexual excess and pathologized queer anti-futurity. In reading these tools for their particularly libidinally charged names, we find an attempt to affirm Israel’s status as a startup nation that naturalizes the subjugation of Palestinians as a condition for the nation’s flourishing; we find, in other words, a sexual fantasy of settler sovereignty.
Military naming—of operations, weapons technologies, strikes, units—mediates public perception of conflict and, as Dalia Gavriely-Nuri has written, performs a kind of “annihilative” function, in which the material reality of war is concealed by symbolic language. Military operations are often named to appear as necessary, just, and righteous and are laundered through associations with natural beauty, divine right, metaphors of rebirth and renewal, and increasingly, technological precision. Thus, while military naming shares a certain stable logic across time and space as part of the ideological operation of Zionist warfare, analyses of military names are specific to their situation.
In Gavriely-Nuri’s reading of Israeli warfare since 1948, military naming has deployed naturalizing, euphemizing, and legitimizing language—often all at once. By this framework, warfare is seen as inevitable/ubiquitous, yet, at the same time, mediated by a series of symbolic displacements that move it away from the scene of violence. The effect is the normalization of “war,” itself a euphemistic distancing from the reality of occupation and ethnonationalist regimes of law and order, as well as, or via, its very abstraction. While Gavriely-Nuri’s analysis emphasizes the “symbolic annihilation” at work in military naming, it does not contextualize this annihilative practice against the actual annihilation fantasies of the settler state. It is not just, in other words, what the names conceal (in Gavriely-Nuri’s terms, the moral, legal, and economic costs of war) as much as what they reveal about the settler colonial logic of elimination that is at stake.
Writing in this magazine, Hussein Omar considered the “newly emergent sense of Israel’s world historic mission” in the wake of October 7, which, to the state’s leaders and allies, is nothing less than the “salvaging the universal project of civilization itself.” Omar’s essay considers how a nominally liberal conception of sexuality has become an avatar for the universality claimed by western civilization and how, in the specific case of Israel, sexuality has been used to draw the shape of the racialized other. The libidinal dimension of the Israeli settler colonial project has, over time, produced a contradictory portrait of the Arab, most frequently imagined as a man. On the one hand, he has been seen as requiring the civilizing discipline of Western gender and sexuality norms to bring him out of nature and into history; on the other, he is today seen as adhering to rigid, outdated norms of gender and sexuality that are portrayed as contrary to the self-image of Western liberal values. Sexuality, and the gender that it implies, is one front on which settler colonial violence is waged.
The name “Where’s Daddy?” can be parsed in different ways. Most directly, it can be read in relation to the tool’s stated aim of locating a “target” in his home. In a reversal of logic afforded by the racialization of the Palestinian, the tool’s name implies that the putative target is responsible for his own death and for the annihilation of his family. Daddy is the Palestinian man who would risk his family by turning their home into a conflict zone; Daddy is a fanatical operative who would use his family as a human shield; Daddy is a terrorist who reproduces the next generation of terrorists. Every child born in Gaza, stated Israeli politician Nissim Vaturi in January 2025, “is already a terrorist, from the moment of his birth.” Since “Where’s Daddy?” is a question ostensibly addressed to the child, the tool’s name evokes a game of appearance and disappearance, a perverse version of fort-da. The tool facilitates the slaughter of entire family units while casting the death of women and children as collateral damage; its name betrays its role in the larger settler colonial project in which children are specifically targeted by a violent program of “unchilding,” to use Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s term, in which Palestinian children are dehumanized and demonized as racialized enemy others and legitimate objects of state force. Its name further betrays the degree to which Palestinian men are subject to a form of humiliation that takes a presumed attachment to masculinity as the primary target: “Where’s Daddy?” attempts to emasculate the man who is its nominal address, while simultaneously issuing a death threat to that man’s child.
The name can be read from the other direction, too, where “Where’s Daddy?” is a rhetorical question akin to the statement “here’s Daddy.” In this reading, the IDF is Daddy and the rhetorical question an echo of the vernacular phrase “who’s your Daddy,” which is a way of claiming the role of the symbolic Father–that is to say, claiming a relation of domination over the other. “Where” is important, too: In this reading, the territorial dimension to settler colonial occupation is apparent in the locatedness of the annihilatory rhetorical question. The annihilation of people and homes is a claim to land, a claim that is genocidal and ecocidal. The informal expression emphasizes the relation of domination and submission while adding a certain libidinal charge. “Who’s your Daddy?” can be part of an erotic call-and-response as well as a statement of violent intent. “Who’s your Daddy,” “where’s Daddy,” and the implied “here’s Daddy,” are all part of the same symbolic language, in which the capital-F Father, the one who is outside the law and who inaugurates it, is a myth that is nonetheless a condition of subjective identification in the patriarchal social order. The one who makes paternal law is necessarily outside it; the one who is subject to it is necessarily castrated by it. Thus, the mythic Father enjoys what the actual father cannot, because the fantasy of the all-enjoying, all-possessing Father is just that: a fantasy. Father is nowhere, but Daddy—the name we might give to the father as symbolic function and our relation to it—is everywhere. Thus, Trump can be called “Daddy” by the chief of NATO for apparently breaking up the schoolyard fight between Israel and Iran in June 2025 (“Daddy has to sometimes use strong language”) while the IDF can be Daddy through its determination of family homes as suitable targets for airstrikes.
The sexual undertone of “Where’s Daddy?” is, in fact, an overtone. In the images that IDF soldiers have taken and shared of themselves posing suggestively with lingerie in Palestinian homes, the Arab woman is turned into an absent object of sexual conquest and illicit pleasure, while the implied humiliation of her private life-turned-public depends on stereotypes of her sexual conservatism that stand in opposition to the aggressive marketing of the IDF as the “sexiest army in the world.” “Where’s Daddy?” is thus also an address to the Palestinian woman, or, rather, to the man through whom she is spoken to: To humiliate and possess the woman is to humiliate and dispossess the man. The Palestinian woman is presumed to be the property of the Palestinian man at the same time that the Palestinian man is queered through the racial and sexual grammar of Orientalism. Quoting Edward Said, Jasbir Puar writes in Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times that as “the space of ‘illicit and dangerous sex,’ the Orient is the site of carefully suppressed animalistic, perverse, homo- and hypersexual instincts. This paradox is at the heart of Orientalist notions of sexuality that are reanimated through the transnational production of the Muslim terrorist as torture object.” In the case of the eroticized and dehumanized Palestinian man, as Puar shows with reference to an account by a former IDF soldier, sexualization is central to the objectification of man into a terrorist target. Objectification works at cross purposes according to the Orientalist fantasy of the Arab: It casts him as homosexual and punishes him for his presumed homophobia. Sexualization is a form of torture and the repressed enjoyment of it. “Violence is naturalized,” writes Puar, “as the inexorable and fitting response to nonnormative sexuality,” where “nonnormative” is assumed to be a kind of queerness at odds with Western liberal sexual identity—a queerness that is seen as fundamentally anti-future, as opposed to what she terms the “homonationalist” politics of reproductive futurism. The terrorist is against life itself.
For all this, it is precisely Palestinian life—then, now, and tomorrow—at which the settler colonial project of genocide takes aim. It was reported that, amid forced starvation and massacres systematically carried out in so-called humanitarian corridors where aid is distributed, Israel was vetting any food let into the besieged strip to ensure it didn’t contain seeds, pits, or anything that can propagate; this news came the same week that Israeli forces bulldozed a seed bank in Hebron in the West Bank. The United Nations warned in May 2025 that bans on fishing and attacks on fishing vessels in the Mediterranean were part of the systematic buildup of starvation as a weapon, which we are today seeing with devastating consequences. Such acts are rightly represented as attacks on the capacity to sustain and to ensure future Palestinian life that violate the Genocide Convention–from the wholescale slaughter of a population to the confiscation of an olive pit, the genocidal project is total. In the case of “Where’s Daddy?” genocidal nomination seeks to separate out the target from his lifeworld, to bring him into the arena of a just war, so to speak, while at the same time reinserting him into his very lifeworld in order to kill him and everyone around him. This can be presented as an achievement of military technology only if the arena of war includes the Palestinian lifeworld itself. As Lara and Stephen Sheehi put it in Psychoanalysis Under Occupation,
despite the sustained and structural ferocity of Israeli Apartheid and despite the profound pain and suffering the Israeli state intentionally inflicts on Palestinians, the Palestinian people, as articulated by the clinicians who see and treat them, interrupt settler-colonial logic and “sovereignty” by the mere fact of living and by the mere fact of being desiring subjects indigenous to the land, from the River to the Sea.
“Lavender” evokes a number of associations. The herb is native to the Mediterranean region, including the Levant, and its essential oil has long been used for food, medicine, and cleaning. To name a military tool “Lavender” is to draw on these associations, which are ancient and potent: Lavender’s relationship to cleanliness (evident in its English name, which is thought to derive from the Latin verb lavo, meaning “to wash or bathe”) lends the tool a certain precision, even morality, in the sense that “clean” can mean both “exact” and “right” in the context of military operations. “Cleanliness,” too, suggests that something is being purged or eliminated—rhetoric that is reflected in the representation of Palestinians as “human animals” and “cockroaches” and in the very notion of settler colonialism as a civilizing mission. Ethnic cleansing is, after all, animated by racialized anxieties of pollution, contamination, and miscegenation.
“If the target of the Lavender Scare was the homosexual subject whose desires and proclivities were read as a danger to the reproduction of the US nation, then Israel’s use of the word to name an automated tool of genocide might be read as another move in its attempt to queer the national security state itself.”
Lavender is a flower, too, and a striking one at that: It grows atop tall, thin, silvery stalks; en masse, lavender creates a veritable cloud of purple. It is hard not to be reminded of the Zionist slogan “making the desert bloom” in relation to the military tool that bears the plant’s name. The slogan justifies settler colonial occupation by implying the under- or non-use of land prior to the creation of the state of Israel (therefore erasing both Palestinian people and Palestinian land practices). It invokes the history of Labor Zionism, a once predominant tendency of Zionism that argued the pathway to a Jewish state was not simply via appeals to the international community but through the immigration of diasporic Jews to the region of Palestine (a process termed aliyah) where they would build a productive state through the symbiotic relation between the agricultural labor of rural kibbutzim and moshavim and the industrial labor of an urban Jewish proletariat. The use of lavender as a floral symbol to name a tool used by the IDF reminds us that military force has always lurked behind socialist tendencies of Labor Zionism. The settlement must be secured before the desert can be made to bloom. It suggests, as well, a historical claim to that same land. It amends the slogan such that there is an implicit return: Make the Desert Bloom Again! This is an example of the legal fiction terra nullius justifying the expropriation of land and the elimination of the native, and a narrative of homecoming: When the desert blooms again, it is because of the labor of the soldier—including in their guise as tech entrepreneur—who protects the land that will be (re)made in the image of the settler ethnostate.
There are yet other associations with lavender: In the automated technology, we read an echo of the mid-twentieth-century witch hunts known as the Lavender Scare, a subset of Cold War moral panic in which queer people in the US were imagined to be either Communist sympathizers or susceptible to Soviet blackmail and were driven from state employment. The term riffs on the US Republican Senator Everett Dirksen’s pejorative description of gay men as “lavender lads” in the 1950s, his feminized dismissal of homosexuality taken up by the infamous senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, whose conspiracy theories around the infiltration of the State Department by Communists and deviants were central to the Republicans moving into the White House in 1953 on the back of a campaign slogan that is once again reverberating in the age of Trump: “Let’s Clean House.” On April 27, 1953, recently inaugurated President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, which rendered “[a]ny criminal, infamous, dishonest, immoral, or notoriously disgraceful conduct, habitual use of intoxicants to excess, drug addiction, or sexual perversion” as a threat to national security. The final category in that list—the sexual pervert—produced the discriminatory sacking of thousands of queer people from federal employment.
If the target of the Lavender Scare was the homosexual subject whose desires and proclivities were read as a danger to the reproduction of the US nation, then Israel’s use of the word to name an automated tool of genocide might be read as another move in its attempt to queer the national security state itself: The surveillance of yesterday—now understood to be a tragic event in the progressive march to liberal sexual politics today—lends its name to a surveillance apparatus that claims to act in accordance with liberal democratic ideals. Historic homophobia is turned into a tool for the conquest of contemporary homophobia, embodied by the Palestinian man (even at the same time that he is queered as terroristic other). As Puar has pointed out, Israel is a pioneer of homonationalism, with the decriminalisation of consensual same-sex activity in 1988 and the IDF’s legalization of homosexuality in 1993. Israel’s particular brand of neoliberalism has seen some rights of its queer subjects expand as more and more constraints have been placed on Palestinian life. The nation’s image as “the only democracy in the Middle East” turns on its (selective) tolerance and celebration of a form of queerness that cannot be separated from Zionism. Puar draws our attention to a pinkwashing poster campaign produced by the San Francisco-based Zionist lobbying group BlueStar PR that reads, “Where in the Middle East can gay officers serve their country?” The heavy-handed subtext: Colonial occupation, apartheid, and genocide are the conditions for the flourishing of a distinctly Israeli brand of queer life that reinscribes the Palestinian as a terroristic figure who is simultaneously a perverse form of anti-reproductive queerness and a signal example of homophobia.
Techno-capitalist modernity and the neoliberal rights-bearing subject come together as a regime and subject in need of defense by tools like Lavender and Where’s Daddy? The ultimate fantasy of the settler is the fantasy of defense, born as it is from the foundational anxiety that arises from an illegitimate claim to land. For Patrick Wolfe, this condition of illegitimacy and the constitutive anxieties it produces can only be resolved in the drive to eliminate the nativethat is, in genocidal logics and genocidal acts. The startup nation and its appeal to progressive, queer inclusivity is predicated on the continued extermination, erasure, and denial of the Palestinian whose sexual subjectivity is rendered primitive, barbaric, and in need of containment. In the sexualization of these automated tools of contemporary warfare we find the rottenness of western liberalism as an ideology that is, and always has been, dependent on the unfreedom of the other. Yet as Lara and Stephen Sheehi remind us, “settler colonialism and military occupation are predicated on Palestinian presence, both psychological and physical, not the opposite.”