Israel's Largest Weapons Manufacturer Is Building Border Tech In The U.S.

Elbit America was awarded the largest chunk of funding for 307 new surveillance towers to be built across the U.S.-Mexico border within the next decade.

By Maurizio Guerrero, Prism

Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, has been central in bolstering the country’s apartheid regime and, in the last 10 months, in helping the military carry out what U.N. experts have called a genocidal campaign in Gaza. In the coming months, Elbit Systems will also be critical in the expansion of the Biden administration’s virtual wall—a series of 479 surveillance towers along the U.S.-Mexico border that forces migrants into inhospitable terrains and likely death.

Along with the U.S. corporations Advanced Technology Systems and General Dynamics, Elbit America—a subsidiary of Elbit Systems—is expected to install 307 new surveillance towers across the U.S.-Mexico border within the next decade, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) documents published last year by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a San Francisco-based nonprofit digital rights group. To fund them, the Department of Homeland Security has requested $101.8 million from Congress for the fiscal year 2025, of which Elbit will be awarded the largest portion—$23.9 million.

a drone on show at an elbit systems weapons fair

“For years, Israeli companies have been at the forefront of developing surveillance technology. They test it out on Palestinians and then export it to the rest of the world,” said Petra Molnar, the associate director of the Refugee Law Lab at York University in Canada, associate faculty at Harvard University, and author of “The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.”

“This is about technologies of apartheid and technologies of control,” she said of the exportation of a particular worldview that countries like Israel and the U.S. espouse.