Necro-Economics: Death By Algorithm Eyal Weizman in London Review of Books Excerpt: The killing of civilians and the destruction of civilian property can also be used as an act of terror and revenge. During the 2006 Lebanon War, Israel destroyed fifteen thousand buildings and a large part of the Beirut suburb of Dahiya, a stronghold of Hizbullah. In 2008, it announced that the destruction of cities would be the cornerstone of its deterrence. Gadi Eisenkot – then commander of Israel’s northern front, and, as I write, the man challenging Netanyahu in the Israeli elections on 27 October – explained that the ‘Dahiya doctrine’ would see Israel retaliate with ‘disproportionate power ... and cause immense damage and destruction’. Along with the explicit threat to target civilians, the use of the term ‘disproportionate’ is crucial here. It was meant both literally – Israel is using its overwhelming firepower without restraint to flatten urban areas – and legally: Israel is flouting the laws of war, in which the principle of proportionality is key. If the use of proportionality is taken to suggest support for the ethical, measured, rational waging of war, disproportionate action publicly demonstrates an unwillingness to be restrained by any legal or normative threshold and a genocidal willingness to kill civilians en masse. The Dahiya doctrine was applied in the massive rounds of terror bombing that Israel unleashed on Gaza in the winter of 2008-9, the summer of 2014 and again in the spring of 2021, in which thousands of Palestinian civilians were killed and tens of thousands of homes destroyed. In between those assaults, another form of calculation was imposed on Gaza, with a relentless siege meant to keep Palestinians on the threshold of life. A military document called ‘Red Lines’ set the minimum number of calories required to sustain Gaza’s population at a level just above the UN definition of hunger (2100 calories a day for men, 1700 for women and a varying amount for children depending on gender and age). The total number of calories was translated into the tonnage required to feed Gaza’s then population of 1.5 million and thus the number of aid trucks allowed into the territory. The same went for megawatts of electricity and litres of fuel and water. What was seen as good behaviour was rewarded by an increase in the amounts coming in, any acts of resistance by the tightening of the siege, like a population-scale version of a Milgram experiment ... Yet as one of NAZA’s interviewees confirms, with seventy thousand Palestinians designated as military targets and default collateral damage set at twenty civilians for every low-level operative (and more than a hundred for military and political leaders), ‘in this way you could kill the entirety of Gaza.’ As another interviewee explains, ‘the aim was quantity not quality,’ but – as Stalin said – ‘quantity has a quality all its own.’ Genocide is the sum total of individually targeted strikes. This is what the technology researcher Júlia Nueno Guitart, writing about the use of AI in Gaza, has labelled ‘individuated mass killing’. The killing of civilians and the destruction of homes and infrastructure was the intent, not the ‘collateral effect’, of the bombing; as technologists often say, ‘it was a feature not a bug.’ @weizman_eyal @LRB lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n20/…