On January 7, ICE agents shot Renee Good three times through her car window as she seemingly tried to drive away from them in Minneapolis. Then, they blocked ambulances from reaching her for fifteen minutes while she bled out in the driver’s seat with her partner beside her. Within hours, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was calling Good, the woman who had just been executed in broad daylight by a federal agent, a “domestic terrorist,” claiming the agent had acted in self-defense against a woman allegedly trying to run him over with her vehicle.
If this sounds familiar, it should, because it is the exact same play Israel deploys every single time they kill a Palestinian. Take, for example, on December 6, just a few weeks ago, when Israeli soldiers in Hebron, in the southern occupied West Bank, ordered 17-year-old Ahmad Rajabi to stop his car. He stopped and then they shot him dead anyway. They prevented emergency services from reaching Ahmad and shot at them as well. There are countless others just like Rajabi.
ICE and the Israeli army are using the same playbook because they are born of the same system of state violence and white-supremacy – the same machinery of racialized control that has been refined in Palestine and imported to American cities through deliberate policy and corporate profit. As Noura Erakat penned, the ‘imperial boomerang has already made its way back.
Calling victims “terrorists” is how you make the dead responsible for their own deaths. Israel has spent decades making it so that every Palestinian killed at a checkpoint was “trying to ram soldiers,” every journalist shot while wearing a press vest was “operating with militants,” every child killed was somehow an imminent threat requiring lethal force. How else can you justify turning Gaza into a graveyard?
This is what occupation looks like everywhere it exists, in every context where armed agents operate with total impunity over populations denied meaningful legal protection or political power. And beyond the paramilitary forces swarming the streets, the same digital systems of occupation are also migrating back here.
Palantir runs ICE’s case management systems that track and monitor immigrants to enable fast-track deportations, and that same company provides AI-based targeting platforms for Israeli military airstrikes that decide which Palestinians to kill using data that includes private communications between Palestinian Americans and their relatives in Gaza. Israeli companies like Elbit and Paragon provide radar, surveillance, and spyware directly to ICE and Homeland Security. The Anti-Defamation League sponsors law enforcement exchange programs where American police travel to Israel to learn “best practices” in checkpoint management, crowd suppression, and in turning entire populations into security threats.
Hellbound and Down 