Through the relentless annihilation of Palestinians across occupied land and the Trump administration’s increased suppression of dissenters and communities of color in the U.S., the shared imperial ambitions of Israel and the United States have become increasingly transparent. This has become most evident during the genocide in Gaza.
To preserve empire and profit, the annexation of land, apartheid, surveillance, mass incarceration, expulsion, and death are employed by the American and Israeli militaries at both the U.S.-Mexico border and in Palestine. The Trump administration’s increase in immigration raids, detention, and deportation numbers is the natural progression of a long history of U.S. imperialism. The lineage of Trump’s policies and the U.S.’s export of more than $30 billion worth of aid to Israel to sustain the genocide in Gaza and the bombardment of Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, and Qatar, and more, is exemplified in the militarization at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Geographer and writer Taylor Miller characterized the U.S. land grab of the Southwest as a “palimpsest of pulverization,” an advancement and repetition of slaughter upon the same landscape, equally apparent in the Zionist colonization of Palestine. The existence of both nation-states is predicated upon the extermination of Indigenous populations, upheld by a growing history of collaborative genocide that sustains the U.S.-Israeli colonial alliance.
Indigenous persecution, both domestically and globally, is inherent to the American empire. Hypermilitarization of the border directly targets Indigenous peoples who are seeking asylum to escape violence originating from U.S. political intervention. For example, the genocide of the Ixil Maya in Guatemala was initiated with the U.S.’s assistance in removing Guatemala’s democratically backed leader in 1954, followed by material support of genocidal candidates by both the U.S. and Israel. To continue the U.S. colonial legacy, the Trump administration candidly criminalizes indigeneity—even banning the term “Indigenous communities” from federal documents.
Miller reflected upon her May 2024 essay “Against These Walls: A Unity of Struggle from Gaza to Sonora,” explaining in a written interview with Prism that “this genocide in Palestine is Trump’s, as it is Biden’s. Which builds on Bush and Tony Blair’s War on Terror and thirty-one years and counting of Prevention Through Deterrence.” Manifest Destiny of the 19th century isn’t a “finite era,” Miller said. It simply shape-shifted, as all forms of settler colonialism do.
Forever war
The kind of state-imposed brutality seen at the border and in Palestine is not new. It is recycled and transformed according to decades of practice on the Global South, at a speed amplified by the military-industrial complex.
The U.S. and Israel are two of the top global weapons importers. While the U.S. is Israel’s largest arms importer, accounting for 66% of munitions, Israel is the third-largest importer of arms to the U.S., accounting for 13%. For Miller, Trump’s increased raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the criminalization of communities of color are not one president’s project over another. Rather, she said, it is “a death cult of capitalism”—one guided by carceral capture and trillions of dollars worth of contracts. She characterized the lifeblood of the United States, and Israel by extension, as forever war predicated on lust for the next frontier and “always declaring the next enemy.”
Forever war, as a state structure, is present in the creation of imperialist technologies and narratives along the U.S.-Mexico border, tested locally and via export to Israel. Munitions manufacturers such as RTX Corporation (formerly Raytheon), Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Elbit, Northrop Grumman, Leonardo, BAE Systems, and many others are sustained and augmented through embedment into borderland infrastructures. These are the very same companies developing the bombs, warplanes, military vehicles, drones, and surveillance technology used by Israel to decimate Gaza.
Although the U.S. government primarily tests programs through the border wall, Border Patrol, ICE, police, detention centers, and more, arms manufacturers are also intricately tied to local universities. Beyond nationwide university investments into weapons manufacturers, borderland schools such as the University of Arizona (UA) and the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) have built their lauded status as research institutions by developing a direct pipeline to weapons manufacturing through collaboration with Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.
Homegrown imperialism
Universities along the border illustrate how the U.S. war economy becomes embedded in domestic institutions.
UTEP, my alma mater, has a longstanding partnership with Lockheed Martin. To commemorate their over 10-year collaboration in 2017, UTEP’s engineering department and Lockheed Martin created an apprentice certification program marketed as an opportunity for competitive engineering students to gain experience with a globally leading corporation, specifically training them to resolve Lockheed’s manufacturing issues.
In fact, the UTEP program facilitated a growing collaboration between the university and weapons manufacturers more broadly, mostly spearheaded by former military officials now in university leadership roles. Over time, the university has strategically reformed its leadership to primarily include former military officials, maintaining a synergistic relationship with the Department of Defense. UTEP was founded through collaboration with the U.S. military and continues to recruit former military leaders to sustain grants from military agencies.
In October 2019, Lockheed Martin and UTEP President Heather Wilson entered into an agreement for a new El Paso facility overseen by the arms manufacturer to employ engineering students as interns and supervisors. Wilson, the former secretary of the U.S. Air Force, currently serves on the board of directors for Lockheed Martin and Google Public Sector, a division of the tech company launched in 2022 to help U.S. public sector institutions “accelerate their digital transformations.” Under Wilson’s leadership, the university’s collaboration with the department of war and arms manufacturers has further expanded.
In April of this year, the university broke ground on the Advanced Manufacturing and Aerospace Center (AMAC), an $80 million facility dedicated to advancing “national defense and economic growth.” UTEP posted a photo on Instagram of military and faculty signing a missile to commemorate the new center. Currently, UTEP’s Aerospace Center is led by Executive Director Shery Welsh, a former U.S. Defense Department official who also held high-ranking research roles within the Air Force. Eventually, AMAC will also house the W.M. Keck Center, a research institution that partners with federal agencies and corporations, including the Army and Air Force Research Labs, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin.
UTEP is a prime example of what it looks like when weapons companies and the U.S. military directly invest in university engineering programs as a way of bolstering their workforce, cheaply improving their research, and aligning university initiatives with emerging war objectives.
In a 2018 UTEP press release, for example, a senior Lockheed official highlighted how students in the apprenticeship program’s first cohort delivered “unarguable and validated savings” to the company’s aircraft programs. The aircraft cited—the F-35—was used to bomb Palestinians in Gaza.
Lockheed Martin has been the primary producer of Israel’s F-35 jets since 2010. The Israeli military has nicknamed the aircraft “adir,” meaning “the mighty one” in Hebrew. In May 2018, the Israeli military tweeted that it was the first military in the world to use the F-35 in “combat” over two undisclosed locations in the South West Asia and North Africa region. Lockheed Martin received extensive criticism from global militaries in the first two decades of its F-35 development due to setbacks in the software, engines, and weapons systems, making UTEP’s apprenticeship program critical for delivering the contractor’s promise of a “decisive advantage” by way of cheap labor and a young, trained future workforce.
Israel was the first military to deploy the F-35’s “beast mode” during the genocide in Gaza, allowing the military to drop 22,000 pounds of bombs on Palestinian civilians, surpassing the aircraft’s previous 5,700-pound capacity. Over the past two years of genocide in Gaza, the military purchased 25 F-35s in both July 2023 and June 2024, raising Israel’s collection to approximately 100 F-35 jets. In July, the U.S. Department of Defense awarded Lockheed Martin a $33.4 million contract, adding to a previous $107.5 million contract awarded in December 2023. The funds are explicitly intended for the arms manufacturer to improve the capability of the F-35 for Israel.
The increased production of munitions manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin is expedited through the university-weapons engineering pipeline.
Lethal “security”
Universities along the border play a critical role in fueling the U.S.-Israel war economy, in part because of the desert ecologies they abuse to make testing and development possible.
Similar to UTEP, UA has a longstanding partnership with RTX, the world’s second-largest weapons manufacturer after Lockheed Martin. In collaboration with the Israeli corporation Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, RTX assists in manufacturing Israel’s infamous Iron Dome defense system. The company also supplies the Israeli government with a broad range of weapons, including bombs, missiles, and technology integrated into fighter jets, warships, and military drones. It’s worth noting that RTX and Lockheed Martin contract with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and ICE.
According to an investigation by the Quaker organization American Friends and Service Committee, between 2005 and 2021, RTX held contracts with the federal immigration agencies worth $67.9 million to produce a wide range of surveillance tech. Since the early 2000s, both companies have also provided the technology for the so-called virtual wall that polices the border. Bolstered by Democratic and Republican administrations, the lethal security system has grown more deadly over the years as it shifts migration routes into much more difficult and remote terrain.
In 2023, the digital privacy organization Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) published an interactive map and dataset identifying the virtual wall’s surveillance towers along the U.S.-Mexico border, initially mapping more than 465. In September, EFF updated the map to 577 towers and reported that CBP zeroed its surveillance on the El Paso-Juárez region.
One month later, on Oct. 10, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and CBP announced $4.5 billion was being deployed for 10 “smart wall” projects, a border security system that combines steel barriers, waterborne barriers, patrol roads, lights, cameras, and “advanced detection technology,” according to the agency. Located across the Southwest border, three of the projects are planned for El Paso.
Chances are that the architects of this surveillance tech adopted systems and modes of surveillance from Israel’s “automated apartheid” structure, a facial recognition software used to carry out the tasks of surveilling, tracking, and restricting the movement of Palestinians. And while DHS and CBP plan the expansion of the smart wall, ICE and independent American investors have obtained Israeli spyware systems, including the nefarious Paragon Solutions and Pegasus. Paragon Solutions creates the spyware “Graphite,” which allows the user to hack into any mobile phone, including encrypted applications. The technology specifically targets journalists, activists, and human rights defenders. Similarly, Pegasus’ malware was developed by Israelis and uses sophisticated coding to bypass encryption on mobile devices to allow for tracking and remote access to personal information, contacts, and messages.
On Oct. 30, legal groups filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration to release information about its use of this powerful surveillance technology while detaining immigrants and occupying American cities. According to the Center for Constitutional Rights, both ICE and CBP have improperly withheld records reporting on the use of Israeli-made spyware.
If the border is a petri dish for sadistic technologies that are eventually used on Black and brown communities in the U.S. interior, then Palestinians are the test subjects for these projects of annihilation.
The implementation of American-Israeli weaponry and surveillance technology is not restricted to the U.S. side of the border. Jazmine Janay Cuevas, an Afro-Chicana scholar from El Paso-Juarez at Cornell University, clarified in a written interview that the border is “not only the U.S./Mexico border, but the Mexico/U.S. border.” The “liminality” of this space illuminates the violence shared between residents of El Paso-Juárez and Palestinians. While material support of Israel from the border may appear nonsensical, the existence of the U.S. apartheid wall illustrates the structural racism fueling this relationship, Cuevas said.
Abuses at the border, whether in Palestine or Mexico, are carried out by the same weapons manufacturers that arm the U.S. and Israel. Consider the bilateral security venture known as the Torre Centinela, or Sentinel Tower, a nearly $200 million, 20-story surveillance colossus in Juárez. From 2008 to 2017, the U.S. also disbursed $1.6 billion to Mexico for the Mérida Initiative, a joint security program claiming to “counter drug-fueled violence” on both sides of the border. While the Merida Initiative failed in minimizing drug trafficking, a former U.S. ambassador to Mexico argued that it was successful in delivering its true purpose: advancing security systems by land, air, and sea along Mexico’s border with the U.S.
If the border is a petri dish for sadistic technologies that are eventually used on Black and brown communities in the U.S. interior, then Palestinians are the test subjects for these projects of annihilation. Just as the U.S. has buried military checkpoints, detention centers, surveillance towers, army bases, and death traps deep into the Southwest, Israel erects torture camps across Palestinian deserts.
The American political class has historically characterized the U.S.-Mexico borderland as a desolate place in crisis—intellectually, materially, and technologically, echoing the colonial narrative intricately stitched by the Zionist project in its occupation of Palestine.
To preserve the U.S.-Israel war economy, both states impose opacity upon Palestine and the border as a shield for their genocidal endeavors. By portraying these deserts as barren, the U.S. and Israel are better able to exploit the physical land, and by extension, its people.
As we continue to experience the vast depravity of the U.S. and Israel and their commitment to extinguishing life, we must remain firm that imperialism will not be exonerated.
As the empire advances to eradicate its “other,” it ultimately faces itself.
Editorial Team:
Tina Vasquez, Lead Editor
Carolyn Copeland, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor
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