Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, wanted for war crimes under an International Criminal Court arrest warrant, announced on Sunday the launch of a national artificial intelligence program, declaring that Israel would transform itself into a global AI power. Standing alongside Erez Askal, the reserve brigadier general heading the newly created National Artificial Intelligence Directorate, Netanyahu said the program's aim was to turn Israel into a global AI powerhouse and to bring prosperity to the Israeli economy. "We are in a historic window of opportunity, but it is a very short one," he said. "The future is not waiting for us. We are creating it."
The announcement was striking less for what it promised than for its timing. For nearly two years, as artificial intelligence reshaped the global economy and governments and corporations poured hundreds of billions of dollars into the race to lead it, Israel devoted its own resources, its budget, its manpower, and its technology, to killing. Since October 2023, Israel has waged a genocide in Gaza that has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, imposed famine and collective punishment on the enclave, carried out mass imprisonment and daily raids across the occupied West Bank, invaded Lebanon, and joined a war on Iran. The state now presenting itself as a future AI leader spent the AI era engineering one of the century's gravest catastrophes.
Those two years were among the most transformative in the history of the technology. In the months after October 2023, the field advanced at a pace few had anticipated. In early 2024, a new generation of frontier models arrived, followed by systems that fused text, images, and audio into a single real-time interface. Late 2024 brought the first models trained to reason step by step through complex problems, and by 2025 autonomous AI agents capable of carrying out multi-stage tasks had moved from research labs into everyday products. Global venture funding for AI surged past 100 billion dollars, national governments announced sovereign AI strategies, and states from the Gulf to Asia moved to position themselves as AI powers, building data centers and securing the computing hardware on which the new economy depends. While the world was writing the opening chapter of the AI age, Israel was flattening Gaza.
Netanyahu's sudden pivot to AI comes only after the wars he prosecuted began to wind down under sustained international and American pressure to halt the regional escalation, with ceasefires reached over Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. Having spent the technology's defining years on the battlefield, Israel now finds itself playing catch-up, announcing a national directorate and grand ambitions at the very moment the leaders of the field are already consolidating their advantage.
The move has been read inside Israel in large part as political theater. Netanyahu faces an election within months in which his coalition is trailing badly in the polls, and the AI launch offers him a forward-looking, prosperity-focused image to set against a record defined by war, international isolation, and an ICC warrant for his arrest. Presenting himself as the architect of a high-tech future is a way to change the subject from the genocide that has come to define his government, and to appeal to Israeli voters weary of years of war with a promise of economic renewal.
The contrast at the heart of the announcement is difficult to escape, because Israel did not merely neglect the AI age while it waged its wars. It weaponized the technology against Palestinians. Throughout the genocide, and still today, Israel has deployed artificial intelligence systems to hunt and kill Palestinians in Gaza on a mass scale. According to investigations by the Israeli outlets +972 Magazine and Local Call, the Israeli occupation military used an AI system known as "Lavender" to generate kill lists, marking tens of thousands of Palestinians as targets with minimal human oversight and a knowing tolerance for large numbers of civilian deaths. A companion system chillingly named "Where's Daddy?" was used to track marked men and alert the army when they had entered their family homes, so that Israel could bomb them there, at night, together with their wives and children. Other automated tools were used to help select and process targets at a speed no human chain of command could match.
