The Wrong Trajectory

Section 219: the fusion

On July 22, 2026, the House passed H.R. 8800 — the $1.15 trillion FY2027 defense bill — by 216–212. Buried in it is Section 219, the “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative.” It directs the Secretary of Defense to designate a permanent executive agent whose job is to synchronize and expand U.S.-Israel defense-technology cooperation — joint research, co-production, shared supply chains, licensing, and pathways for Israeli-origin technology to enter U.S. weapons programs.

The domains it covers read like a list of the future of warfare: artificial intelligence, quantum technology, autonomous systems, cyber defense, electronic warfare, missile and air defense, counter-drone systems, directed energy, biotechnology, advanced sensing, and defense manufacturing. It folds in the FUTURES Act, and the funding tables authorize $300 million for Israeli Cooperative Programs.

Supporters say it merely coordinates cooperation that already exists. Critics say that’s the point: an executive agent is permanent bureaucratic machinery — it outlives administrations, and a statutory mandate to “expand and accelerate” only runs one direction. The Quincy Institute called it “significantly different” from America’s defense arrangements with any other ally. Rep. Thomas Massie, who tried to strip it: “This goes well beyond our pre-existing military relationships… This is an unprecedented escalation of foreign involvement.” His amendment was denied a floor vote; the bill passed without any standalone vote on Section 219 itself.

Status check: this is House-passed only — it is not law. The Senate conference is the next fight, and Rep. Ro Khanna has said he’ll try to remove it there. What it would mean in practice — procurement preferences, tech transfers, shared classified programs, intertwined supply chains — is exactly what deserves scrutiny before it becomes permanent.

Lavender: the scoring machine

To understand what America would be fusing with, start here. In April 2024, +972 Magazine and Local Call — drawing on six Israeli intelligence officers — revealed Lavender, a machine-learning system the Israeli military used to generate kill lists in Gaza.

How it worked: Lavender analyzed mass surveillance data on Gaza’s population — phone metadata, messaging-app usage, social associations, movement patterns — and assigned people a score from 1 to 100 for how closely they resembled a militant. At its peak it had flagged 37,000 Palestinians as suspected operatives, most of them junior. Human reviewers spent as little as 20 seconds per target — one officer called it a rubber stamp: “The machine did 80 percent of the work. We basically approved everything.” The system’s own estimated error rate was around 10% — roughly 3,700 innocent people flagged as legitimate targets by its own math. A companion system, chillingly called “Where’s Daddy?”, tracked targets to their family homes so they could be bombed there.

The IDF denied it: “does not use an artificial intelligence system that identifies terrorist operatives.” The officers who operated it described the opposite.

This is what a social score that determines whether you live or die actually looks like in practice. Not a theory — a deployed system, used at scale, with a measured error rate in the thousands.

Pegasus: the phone hijacker

The other half of the apparatus is collection. Pegasus, built by the Israeli firm NSO Group, is spyware that takes over a phone with zero clicks — no link to tap, no attachment to open. A missed WhatsApp call, a message you never open: that’s enough. Once in, it sees everything: your camera, your microphone, your messages — including encrypted apps, read off the screen before encryption — your location, your passwords, your files.

It has been found on the phones of journalists, activists, lawyers, and politicians worldwide — the 2021 Pegasus Project investigation identified 50,000 phone numbers on a leaked targeting list. The U.S. Commerce Department put NSO on its Entity List in November 2021, blacklisting it. The FBI reportedly considered buying it.

So: one Israeli system silently vacuums up everything about you from your phone. Another Israeli system scores human beings 1–100 for killing. Whether the data flows directly from one to the other in every case, the architecture is the same: total collection feeding automated judgment.

It’s already here: Cellebrite

The spillover isn’t hypothetical — it’s contracted. Cellebrite, an Israeli digital-intelligence firm, sells phone-cracking tools to roughly 7,000 customers, and its biggest ones are American: the Department of Homeland Security is awarding it a five-year contract with a $100 million ceiling; ICE uses it for immigration enforcement; the FBI used it to crack the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone in 2016; the Secret Service used it on the phone of the man who shot at Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.

The same company’s tools were used by Israel to harvest data from the phones of thousands of Palestinian detainees in Gaza — most of them civilians. The company itself acknowledges its products “may be used by customers in a way that is, or that is perceived to be, incompatible with human rights.” When Oakland’s city council approved a $140,000 Cellebrite contract for its police in May 2025, all 23 public comments opposed it. The council approved it 6–2 anyway.

This is the trajectory, already in motion: tools built for one government’s occupation become another government’s policing — with your city council voting on it while nobody’s watching.

The pipeline: from your phone to a kill score

Put the pieces together and the shape is unmistakable:

• Collection: Pegasus-style spyware and Cellebrite-style extraction pull everything off devices — silently, or after a seizure.
• Scoring: Lavender-style systems turn that data into a number — 1 to 100 — measuring how much of a threat you are.
• Action: the score becomes the authorization. Twenty seconds of human review. A bomb at the family home.

Section 219 would pour America’s AI capacity, quantum research, and cyber capabilities into this apparatus — fluidly, with no meaningful barrier, through a permanent office whose mandate is to expand the fusion. And the norms are already flowing the other way: Israeli phone-cracking tech in DHS’s hands, in ICE’s hands, in your local police department’s hands.

A government carrying out a genocide while grading human beings for survival should not be handed the keys to America’s technological future — and its methods should not be laundered into American policing as neutral tools.