Gulf Countries and Israel as the “Start-Up Nation”: Disappearing Palestine Through Technological Innovation?

The article combines a critical approach to the settler colonialism paradigm with field research examining circuits of technological and security innovation between Israel and a few Gulf states. “Innovation” serves as a cover for new structures of Israeli colonization in Palestine but is also a process that accelerates the real and imagined subsumption of Palestinian spaces into multidirectional capitalist flows. A reading of innovation demonstrates that there are more than Israeli or North American actors shaping the high-tech terrain: Persian Gulf actors (United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain) play an important role in this terrain and have supported projects for Israel such as Start-Up Nation, some of which directly affect Palestinian spaces in the West Bank and transform them into new frontiers of innovation (e.g., Rabawi or Silicon Wadi in Wadi al-Jowz). Thus, these circuits of innovation transcend the binary logic of colonizers-colonized, or of structures of purely territorial dispossession.