Anybody with even half an eye open over the past 23 months will have seen what has been happening in Gaza. Many good people, I suspect, may even be worn down by it, reluctant to read about or see another picture of a dismembered five-year-old.
As of 3 September 2025, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, 64,739 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 2023. Of course, the actual number is much higher – at the very least twice or three times that figure. In this death toll are 217 journalists, 120 academics and 224 humanitarian aid workers.
Israel is currently acting on its promise to starve the inhabitants of Gaza. As of 17 September, 432 people (including 146 children) have starved to death while more than 281,000 people (30% of the population) are experiencing Phase 5 levels of food insecurity (the highest rating).
Read more: Thousands march to Parliament calling for end to genocide in Gaza
We are in a situation where one of the largest military forces in the world, funded and supplied with weapons of slaughter by the richest country in the world, has sequestered two million people in an open-air apartheid prison that is 53 times smaller than the Kruger National Park. Interminable drones fly above the heads of terrified children, while Israeli snipers pick off children and families as if they were playing Call of Duty.
Virtually every movement of every person in Gaza is surveilled in a way that is plausibly unique in history. This is Jeremy Bentham and Michel Foucault’s panopticon at scale and drenched in blood.
The people of Gaza have been demonised by a regime in thrall to their own victimhood, and deliriously drunk on the endless shedding of Palestinian blood. Israel has finally dropped its own façade of morality and decency. And beyond Gaza, Israeli settler gangsters plunder the West Bank, while Israeli war planes attack Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Qatar with an impunity previously only enjoyed by the US during the Cold War.
Israel believes history bestows impunity. I would love to say it doesn’t. But of course, current evidence shows us that impunity is exactly what history bestows.
Read more: Middle East crisis
I believe that one of the lessons of the current genocide in Gaza, its dark portend, is to provide a dress rehearsal for our near future. The roots of the word “portend” are Latin and mean to “foretell, predict, or indicate”. Originally it formed from por- (variant of pro-, meaning “forth” or “forward”) and tendere meaning “to stretch forward”. It entered Middle English in the 15th century by way of the Middle French “portendre” – “an omen or sign of something”. In its early meaning, portend often implied something supernatural in the prediction of future events.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently unwittingly uttered his own portend for the future of Israel. In the face of increasing isolation, he said Israel needed to become “self-sufficient economically” and to do this needed to become a supercharged Sparta. But of course, in the vein of all fascists, his reading of history ventures no further than history as useful political meme. Had Netanyahu read just a little further he would have discovered that Sparta was defeated by Thebes, and in a subsequent invasion the enslaved Messenian population was liberated.
Read more: History will judge Israel ‘very harshly’ for the atrocities committed in Gaza – Ramaphosa
But I want to talk about a different kind of portend. During the “refugee summer” of 2015, European countries were in paroxysms of horror about being “swamped”, even “invaded” by migrants. The World Health Organization has estimated that by 2025 as many as 1.2 billion people might be displaced due to climate breakdown.
Given the increasing antipathy towards migrants in the West, what would happen if just 10% of the approximately 1.2 billion climate breakdown refugees were to arrive at the borders of Europe and the US? Rounding down, that is about 100 million people? Who might they turn to?
Palantir Technologies is an American software company, currently the 22nd-largest company listed on the US stock exchange. It was formed in 2003 by friends Peter Thiel and Alexander Karp. Thiel, at the time, was awash in cash following his sale of PayPal to eBay. He named the company after the “palantíri”, the mystical “seeing stones” in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
The palantíri allow users to communicate over vast distances and to see events happening elsewhere in the world. And of course, it is the evil Sauron, the great Eye, who, wreathed in flame from his seat of power in Mordor, and the commander of the army of Orcs, who weaponises the palantíri as a tool of manipulation and fear.
Karp, the current CEO of Palantir, is one of the more odious human beings to emerge from the Silicon Valley/Tech sewer system. In a single interview, he described the United Nations as “a discriminatory institution against anything good”; said that “our [America’s] enemies need to be scared”; said of other countries that “they do not have our [American] moral compunction”; and that “safe [for Americans] means the other person is scared”. He has also condemned what he called “pagan anti-Israel protests, suggested the protesters be sent to North Korea, and mused about launching drone strikes on his business enemies”.
It is Palantir that is currently enabling the Israeli AI-supported surveillance system that surveils every Gaza resident, and has openly admitted that its technology is used to kill people. Last Monday, the Guardian revealed how Palantir is working with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) to monitor mobile phone use, and track people using air travel and driver’s licences.
The eyes of the world are, in one form or another, on Gaza. And yet, despite the gaze and the slaughter of children and entire families in an open-air prison, nothing substantive has been done to put an end to it. In light of the obscenity that is Israel in Gaza, what happens when 10 million people turn up on the borders of the ever-paranoid Europe and America?
I find it easy to imagine a squadron of drones powered by Palantir’s software lined up along the length of North Africa, shooting migrant boats out of the water. Trump’s fascists are already routinely blowing up boats off the coast of Venezuela – extrajudicial state murder in September 2025. And why not pre-emptively target “potential migrants” as they cross the Darién Gap and the Sahara? Kill them at origin before they even begin their journey. Tracking their communications, triangulating data, and selling this to the highest-paying fascist is exactly what Palantir was designed for. Sauron in the 21st century.
Gaza is the litmus test to establish how many children can be bombed and shot before anybody acts. Gaza is the portend, the terrifying omen. An omen, yes. But an omen far from supernatural. DM