The Brooklyn Rail

During the Second Intifada (2000–05), the Israeli military engaged in an unprecedented practice of targeted killing. According to Israeli military analysts, the operation assassinated over two hundred “enemy combatants” using what then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon described as "pinpoint preventive actions against terrorists."¹ These extrajudicial executions—condemned by the international community²—were identified, confirmed, and given the go-ahead by Israeli intelligence joint commands. During this period, Aman—Israel’s military intelligence—was led by Major-General Aharon Ze’evi Farkash, a Romanian-born Harvard Business School graduate. For his “leadership” during this period, Farkash was labeled by the displaced Palestinian journalist Kawther Salam as a war criminal.³ According to Salam’s reporting, Farkash is responsible for planning and ordering the assassinations of 544 Palestinians and the demolition of 2,366 Palestinian homes over his military career.⁴

Following the Second Intifada, and its withdrawal from Gaza, Israel heightened its “border” security systems. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians traveling daily for work from Gaza or the West Bank into Israeli-controlled land were made to wait for six or more hours at a time for clearance. Major-General Farkash, soon leaving his post at the helm of Israeli intelligence for the private world, saw this overtaxed and inefficient security system, and recognized a lucrative business opportunity.⁵

Seven years later, in 2013, tenants in East Harlem and on the Lower East Side came face-to-face with the fruits of Farkash’s inspiration. Management at both Taino Tower—a thirty-five-floor affordable housing complex in Spanish Harlem—and Knickerbocker Village—a twelve-building, 1600-unit apartment complex nestled near the Manhattan Bridge—installed SafeRise biometric security systems, created by Farkash’s company, FST21. These systems use a combination of facial and voice recognition to identify people—and to register their emotional state (to then “summon assistance”—and call the police—if they detect worry or volatility). The system advertises itself as a seamless solution to security issues by creating a database of recognized profiles, keeping out unwanted people, and monitoring tenants’ well-being. Working-class, racialized, and long-term tenants at both of these locations quickly began to organize against the biometric security systems. They did so—according to a report on “landlord technology” put out by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP)—because they understood the newfangled and fancy security to be yet another pinpoint prick of pressure meant to push them out of their homes.⁶ As the AEMP report details, “Whatever the pretext, whether it be convenience or safety, this is an industry that is built to sell profit and surveillance to landlords, not to serve tenants.” FST21 is not a technology meant to improve the lives and well-beings of existing long-term tenants; rather, it is a means for landlords to signal to potential new tenants that they, despite settling in a new neighborhood (possibly “unsafe” and unfamiliar, populated by people who look different and have lived there long before them), are secure in their new homes. Surveillance technologies such as FST21’s SafeRise, act as frontier technologies: methodologies of surveillance meant to situate those acting as the tip of the spear in the processes of displacement.

FST21 is one of many Israeli firms in the lucrative industry of property technology, most often shortened to proptech. Proptech refers to the sprawling array of digital infrastructure and innovation (and the capital invested into these) geared toward making more “efficient”—which is to say more attractive and more profitable—the processes of landlordism and rent extraction. This essay provides an overview of the phenomenon of Israeli proptech, explores its roots and effects, situates it in a broader historical perspective, and by doing so connects the class struggle of working-class New York City tenants to the liberatory resistance of Palestine.

Israel was labeled the “start-up nation,” in a book of the same name published by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in 2009.⁷ Bolstering this label is the fact that Israel attracts more venture capital per person than any other country in the world: 170 dollars per person as opposed to 70 dollars per person in the U.S.⁸ The CFR-published book argues that the success and robustness of Israel’s start-up landscape and its function as an “ideas laboratory” is, at least in part, attributable to its “open immigration policy”—that Jewish people from all over the world are automatically granted citizenship, and the rights and benefit thereto has allowed Israel to become home to the world’s highest concentration of engineers. The book fails to mention the very closed (to say the least) “immigration policy” that denies Palestinians citizenship and access to Israeli venture capital funds, within their indigenous homeland—as Human Rights Watch puts it: “A Jewish citizen of any country who has never been to Israel can move there and automatically gain citizenship, while a Palestinian expelled from his home in what became Israel and languishing for more than 70 years in a refugee camp, cannot.”⁹ More: Palestinians within Israel “have limited ability to move freely, have no right to vote in Israeli elections, and are tried under a completely different legal system.”¹⁰

The very description of Israel as the “start-up nation” continues a specific and enduring trope of Zionist propaganda: that the—largely white, European—settlers, rather than displacing anyone, are actually bringing with them a bounty of knowledge and entrepreneurship, of business know-how, culture and education, bestowing a future to the backward lands of the Orient. In a correspondence with Palestinian intellectual Yusuf Diya in 1899, Zionist forefather Theodor Herzl responded to Diya’s concerns about the Zionist project’s threat to displace the Palestinian people by writing: “In allowing immigration to a number of Jews bringing their intelligence, their financial acumen and their means of enterprise to the country, no one can doubt that the well-being of the entire country would be the happy result.”¹¹ A similar dynamic, we know, defines gentrification: “blighted,” underfunded, and always-racialized neighborhoods are offered “new starts” (new businesses, new infrastructure, new housing) but only ever through the dispossession—the cleansing—of their current populations and their replacement with always whiter transplants.¹²

Accordingly, Israel has, in the last decade, become an epicenter of this new industry: proptech, otherwise known as platform real estate or landlord tech. Like any industry, proptech is a product of its time. The housing and financial crisis of 2008—in which millions of US homeowners were made homeless and/or into renters—provided an opportunity for large investors to acquire these formerly owner-occupied single-family homes, convert them to rental housing, and thus develop a new asset class based on rent checks. Simultaneous tech advances, such as cloud and mobile computing, digital platforms, and automated, data-driven decision-making tools went hand-in-hand with this capital influx to reshape how housing was bought, sold, rented, and operated across large and geographically dispersed markets.¹³ These digital interventions have also been integral in giving a certain technological aura to, and shoring up confidence in—as the algorithms never lie—a relatively untested asset class.

Proptech is a diffuse industry, but in general, it aims to drive property values up and increase property owners’ rate of returns: that is, to make rental assets and land easier to purchase and manage for landlords while making it more expensive for tenants to live—or, and this is important because proptech is generally sold to landlords, sell the illusion of this phenomena. It’s necessary to understand this industry through the lens of class conflict. Rent prices are, most generally, the result of class struggle between landowner and tenant.¹⁴ Rising rents in a city—and the neglect-fueled dilapidation of its housing infrastructure, the churn of its eviction mill, and the creep of its gentrification—represent a form of ambient class warfare on the working class of that city. It’s through this lens that we understand proptech to be a newly developed weapon in the arsenal of landed capital in this ongoing class conflict and a commodity service sold to real estate. Proptech is, like much commoditized technology, advertised with the language of disruption, transcendence, and problem-solving, while in reality most often placing a glossy technological veneer on long-established practices. These shiny technologies, though, impart to these long-established practices (like the jacking up of rent) an illusion of scientific truth, and present what are in fact choices and actions of landlords (again, to jack up rent) as instead of ‘inalterable laws.’ This technological absolution is eerily similar to the ‘targeted killings’ alluded to in this essay’s introduction and similar too to the artificial intelligence-aided mass-killings happening in Gaza right now.¹⁵

Proptech is a multibillion-dollar global industry. 2021, for example, saw nearly 25 billion US dollars invested into proptech companies. Industry forecasters predict the proptech market will be worth 86.5 billion dollars by 2032.¹⁶ Charlie Federman, a partner at Silvertech Ventures—a venture capital firm focused on proptech, whose twenty-two-company portfolio includes eighteen Israeli businesses—describes proptech as a “trillion-dollar industry.”¹⁷ Israel is home to hundreds of proptech companies worth billions of dollars. These companies, though most often originating within Israel’s “Silicon Wadi”—wadi meaning valley in Arabic—rarely stay within Israel’s (contested) borders. Because of the limitations and pressures on Israel’s real estate market—because Israel is an active and contested settler colony, and small in size and under external geopolitical duress, as its already-limited market is destabilized by the potential and actuality of war—Israeli proptech companies almost ubiquitously aim their sights at, and bank their prospects on, the US market and New York City specifically. This means there is a direct pipeline from the Zionist occupation of Palestine, its military industrial complex, and the technological shifts that reshape and inform the character of tenancy in New York City.

Settler colonies and occupations are, among other things, laboratories of social control and incubators of technological innovation toward this end. As settler colonialism is a totalizing social structure, the methodologies and technologies developed to enforce and sustain it necessarily operate at various scales. Innovations emerge and are tested and deployed in one location at one time and, if successful, can quickly spread within imperial zones, across imperial projects, and back home to metropoles.

After the 2018 assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudi regime, it was discovered that a novel piece of cellular spyware, Pegasus, had been employed to surveil and locate the journalist; there was a subsequent flurry of reporting on the Israeli cyber-intelligence firm NSO Group, the software’s architect. The NSO Group is the largest and most well-known firm in Israel’s sprawling, multibillion-dollar cybersecurity industry, itself the peculiar product of the entrepreneurship of the masses of military-intelligence functionaries that the conscription-occupation produces and the utility that highly-advanced military technology and spyware provide for Israeli geopolitical interests. That is to say, the Israeli military occupation of Palestine is highly technical; its infamous Unit 8200—Israel’s surveillance and espionage agency and the IDF’s largest military unit—is simultaneously a project of technological social control and a start-up incubator; it has been described as “the nation’s equivalent of Harvard, Princeton and Yale” and “one of Israel’s most powerful business brands.”¹⁸ An article about Israel’s importance to the industry, in the internal-industry publication Proptech Connect describes the role of Unit 8200 as “responsible for a range of highly technical operations, including clandestine ones. It also conducts signal intelligence and code decryption, counterintelligence, cyberwarfare, military intelligence and surveillance. The unit is credited with turning out some of the top technological talent in the world.”¹⁹

Unit 8200—according to ashamed and outraged former enlistees—routinely violates the human rights of the Palestinian people: surveilling not only “potential combatants,” but their family members, friends, and associates; collecting, analyzing, and weaponizing troves of data and personal information; in many cases, seeking out specifically alienating or potentially-harmful personal details, such as people’s sexuality and sexual practices to blackmail potential informants.²⁰

Tellingly, Unit 8200 is organized in a manner that “resembles that of a start-up … Soldiers work in small groups, with limited resources, to crack challenges that—literally, in some cases—are life-and-death matters.”²¹ Major-General Farkash, founder of FST21 mentioned above, was the head of Unit 8200 from 1990–93.²² The NSO Group sold its Pegasus spyware—with the Israeli defense ministry’s approval—to nefarious actors around the world, including US police forces and the FBI, as well as “repressive, dictatorial governments such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan, or to semi-democratic countries that have bad reputation for oppressing political dissidents, social activists and journalists, like Mexico, India, Rwanda and Hungary.”²³ The rationale for the Israeli government is simple: reliance upon Israeli spyware technology by geopolitical actors ingratiates Israel within certain sectors of the international community and buys it explicit support on the international stage; for the firm itself, it’s a question of revenue, but also the more data these technologies process the “better” their data get. The New York Times has reported how, soon after purchasing Pegasus, certain countries intervened on Israel’s behalf in contentious diplomatic matters.²⁴ For example, in 2010, Panama voted against the release of the infamous Goldstone report following the 2008–09 incursion into Gaza; in 2019, India voted in support of an Israeli motion to deny observer status to a Palestinian human rights organization, a first for the nation.

Working with the architect Dallas Rogers, critical geographer Desiree Fields—a scholarly expert on this new field of proptech—sorts the industry into three categories, differentiated by their function and accumulation strategy (though individual firms often operate in more than one register). These are: trading platforms, operational platforms, and data platforms. Israeli companies produce all of these.²⁵

Trading platforms are the digital infrastructures that allow for the compilation and aggregation of massive and formerly fractured real estate markets across the world. These are platforms that allow for instantaneous (or near-instantaneous) buying and selling of the real estate of anywhere, from anywhere. These firms, like the Israeli companies Stoa Fund and Lendai, often participate in the financing of real estate transactions as well, making the close ties between proptech and fintech (financial technology) evident.

Lendai, based in the south of Tel Aviv, is a platform that provides financing for foreign investors interested in purchasing US real estate (particularly as investment vehicles, rather than to live in). Lendai’s founder Yair Benyamini was a team commander with the 401st Brigade of the IDF from 2007–09 and served with its reconnaissance and patrol unit; this means he most likely led surveillance in the lead up to and during Operation Cast Lead, a brutal Israeli incursion into Gaza toward the end of 2008.²⁶ The infamous UN Report into Operation Cast Lead (the Goldstone Report) described Israel as intentionally committing “disproportionate destruction and creating maximum disruption in the lives of so many people as a legitimate means to achieve military and political goals,” and that its actions were “designed to have inevitably dire consequences for the non-combatants in Gaza.”²⁷ The 401st Brigade Commander, one Yigal Slovik, said a couple weeks after the military operation, “I have no qualms about the manner in which I operated. At worst I'll be denied entry to a few European countries. My subordinates and I have chosen this profession out of faith in the righteousness of our path; we sacrifice much more than a trip to London.”²⁸ In 2022, Benyamini was listed as one of the top influencers in Israeli fintech; in May of this past year, he was a featured speaker at International Management Network’s 11th annual “Single-Family Rental” forum in Miami, Florida.

Stoa Fund, also based in Tel Aviv, provides financing and transaction opportunities to potential real estate investors. Founded by Or Agassi, Stoa has a subsidiary technology called FlipOS which expedites the process of buying and rehabilitating rental properties. Agassi moved from Israel to Scottsdale, Arizona to help the roll-out of FlipOS in the rapidly gentrifying urban markets of Phoenix and Scottsdale. Agassi frames FlipOS’s utility explicitly in terms of consolidation: “Inventory is king,” he says and “we’re creating inventory.” And, to be clear, Agassi and Stoa are not and have not been building anything. When he says creating inventory, he means creating access to already-existing real estate and land.²⁹

These platforms play an integral role in the consolidation of the rental market. Coming out of the 2008 foreclosure crisis, we saw with the single-family rental market the construction of this new asset class. But the elaboration of a new market like this is not natural or organic; it requires support and intervention. Real estate is—by nature of its use-value—inherently a local, space-situated commodity; the purchase and sale of real estate, in most areas, is legislated by specific and often arcane regulation.

Real estate magnates and tech folk alike understand the emergent “industry’s biggest bottleneck” not to be funding or inventory (for these both overflow in stock) but technology.³⁰ That is to say, these platform technologies provide the infrastructure to consolidate the incredibly fractured and disparate rental market into a cohesive, navigable behemoth. This allows massive amounts of capital to flow into this market with increasingly less friction. Proptech companies understand both this localism and these regulations as impediments to be disrupted. While foreign purchase of real estate is nothing new (Marx in Capital, Vol. III wrote of the globe-trotting absentee landlord), these technologies exacerbate the phenomenon. And, again, we have to understand these technologies and developments through the lens of class struggle and class conflict. The faster that real estate transactions can be made, and the further away and less accountable ownership of rental real estate becomes the more the oppressive burden—both of higher rents and lower life quality—falls onto the backs of tenants, specifically of working-class tenants, who we in the tenant union movement call worker-tenants. Working people, renting homes, are increasingly squeezed and seeing the buildings they live in deteriorate. This is precisely why and how we in the tenant union movement organize for and around a locus of working-class protagonism. Our tenant union’s historical protagonist is the worker-tenant: it is through the collective, conscious, organized agency of working-class tenants that the oppressions that proptech exacerbate can be countered.

Proptech firms like Stoa claim to help get more people into homes (thus fixing a problem). Referencing a (dubious) shortage of housing in this country, Agassi says in an interview with Bloomberg, “By speeding up the process … we’re able to start closing that gap faster. That means more renters will be able to move into safe, comfortable homes sooner than they would have otherwise.” He does not—in this interview—address that one-bedroom rents in Phoenix rose 117 percent between 2020 and 2021.³¹ The speeding up of transactions—like those Stoa facilitates—does not alleviate any pressure tenants face, and it does not decrease our rents nor make tenants’ eligibility for whatever affordable housing exists more feasible; rather, the opening up of capital flows only exacerbates the state of working-class tenancy, to tenuous and precarious extents. A broad structural note: settler colonialism is and has always been about opening up new land to capital flows (with an emphasis on overcoming and erasing relevant obstacles): this is its raison d'etre, and this is why settler colonial ventures are always financed by corporate capital, with Israel and real estate-led gentrification being no exception.

Rogers and Fields’s second type of proptech firm—operational platforms—are technologies that facilitate the maintenance of rental properties, with an ever-emphasis on cutting labor costs and providing “security” for an increasingly absent landlord and aspirationally wealthy (and white) tenants. Fields writes:

Operational platforms allow investors to outsource or automate many aspects of the rental and property management process. In the context of remote property transactions, such platforms fulfill a need to market, lease, and manage real estate at a distance from the product. Operational platforms mediate between property owners, tenants, and vendors.³²

If transactional platforms allow for the increasingly abstract exchange of land and building ownership, operational platforms tether this abstract market necessarily back to the ground, allowing for the income flow of rent to enter into global financial markets as seamlessly as possible.

Operational platforms are, more brazenly than trading platforms, technologies of social control; these include the Israeli-founded FST21 and its biometric services, the anecdote about which opened this essay; these include also Gate Guard, a company founded by Ari Teman—whose earlier tech company Friend or Fraud was named one of Israel’s most dynamic startups. These technologies—both in their function and that which they advertise—are instrumental to processes of gentrification and displacement. Though they advertise as security, they are more often used to surveil and displace. In Brooklyn, in neighborhoods like Crown Heights, Brownsville, East New York, and Flatbush where there are large Caribbean and Latin American tenant communities, it isn’t unusual for a tenant from one of these places to visit family for upwards of six months, every five or ten years. A rent-stabilized tenant in New York City is required to physically be living in their apartment for at least six months a year. These technologies—these biometric cameras, these fob-key systems—allow landlords and management companies to hyper-surveil their tenants, to track their movements to evict them. Tenants in Brooklyn will return home from visiting their families abroad and be faced with imminent eviction.

As AEMP’s report shows:

Black and Brown residents are nevertheless disproportionately subjected to surveillance-induced harms in the space of their homes and neighborhoods. New partnerships between landlord technology companies, landlords, and developers incite racial profiling, augmented policing, automated evictions and fines, gentrification, and real estate speculation, particularly in contexts of crisis.³³

Here we can draw a clear line: the security innovations cooked up by Israeli occupation forces in and around Gaza and the West Bank are repackaged with startup aesthetics and soon arrive in Black and Brown neighborhoods in cities in the US and play a similar twofold role: on one hand, they function to police and surveil the Black and Brown tenants in their homes and in their neighborhoods; on the other, they provide veneers and aesthetics of safety and security to newly arrived, whiter gentrifiers. FST21-founder General Farkash sums it up clearly: “Cities are crowded, often dangerous places, with the gap between rich and poor growing … We need a way to live safely but also comfortably next door to one another.”³⁴ The specter of dangerous urban landscapes predicates the securitization that then facilitates the dispossession that makes realizable the speculation of urban rental real estate. These security systems enable landlords to shed their maintenance and security costs, with those outsourced externalities being picked up (as always) by the police. FST21’s biometric system is programmed to call the local police if and when disturbances and irregularities are registered. These surveillance programs make more intertwined the already mutually vested projects of private property, landlordism and policing. The outsourcing of security and safety reifies the (seeming) necessity of bloated police budgets. This is a system in motion, one whose logic mirrors the policing of Palestinians by the Zionist occupation and, as such, whose technologies and methodologies can be similarly traced.

Comedian and entrepreneur Ari Teman developed GateGuard after discovering, much to his dismay, that his apartment, which he rented out as an AirBnb, had been used for a large-scale orgy. Similar to FST21, GateGuard employs facial recognition technology to surveil tenants, with GateGuard’s speciality advertised as guarding against illegal subletting. Teman brags on his LinkedIn of Gate Guard’s utility in increasing rental income despite increased rental regulations; he also brags that Gate Guard helps maximize evictions.³⁵ The assumption by landlords that tenants are criminals mirrors the assumption by Zionists of Palestinians as terrorists. In both registers, this assumption rests on the erasure of class and colonization; and this assumption then sets the conditions for ongoing histories of harassment and displacement. Technologies like GateGuard and FST21’s biometric surveillance, like technologies employed by Unit 8200, both play on (and profit from) as well as concretize these assumptions. The faster displacement can be ensured—in both US tenancy and Palestine—the quicker more lucrative profits can be generated. The veil of security concerns—again, in both locations—when lifted, reveals a fervent and uncaring capital seeking quicker and less obstructed investment and return. The accumulation of capital is a project adjacent, but not identical, to the ethnic cleansing that both gentrification and Zionist occupation entail. The mass departure of Black tenants from neighborhoods in New York City like Crown Heights, Bedford Stuyvesant, and Harlem is a violence not reducible to the mere reaping of profits by greedy real estate developers and landlords, though one inseparable from that process. Cultural genocide and ethnic cleansing are not coincidental to accumulation but are both prerequisite and symptomatic of it.

The Israeli AI startup Qira (formerly Rentigo and HelloRented), founded by Revital Gadish, combines disparate property management activities into a single platform (payments, marketing, operations, and tenant communications). In September 2022, the software provider announced a partnership with the Rent Stabilization Association, an organization that (despite its name) is not interested in protecting rent-stabilized tenants as much as it is in ensuring the profits of landlords of rent-stabilized rental buildings.³⁶ The partnership between Qira and the RSA includes an integrated alert system for HPD (Department of Housing Preservation and Development) violations, the ability to pull data from over forty sources to screen low-income renters with poor credit, and a payments-tracking dashboard to monitor payment status and rent payments. Tenant advocates claim this results in faster and larger late-payment penalties and more frequent evictions.

The implementation of these technologies of social control, these innovations that facilitate extraction and displacement, is regularly contested, and often too defeated. Organized tenants at Atlantic Towers, a rent-stabilized building complex in Brownsville, Brooklyn successfully stopped the installation of a facial recognition security system similar to FST21’s.³⁸ The Atlantic Towers Tenant Association organized for nearly two years to win their struggle. Tenants at Taino Towers in East Harlem and Knickerbocker Village on the Lower East Side both organized vociferously against the implementation of FST21’s biometric security. These are all pitched and drawn-out struggles—and these are, we have to understand, class conflicts and expressions of class struggle. It’s through this lens that we understand that these localized contests need to be integrated—organizationally and programmatically connected—into wider class struggles. The implementation of FST21 in both the Taino Towers and Knickerbocker Village came within the context of surrounding gentrification: the neighborhoods around both these complexes were growing whiter and rents were (and are still) rising. The successful rejection of draconian and carceral security systems does not alleviate the broader systemic, and atmospheric pressures of displacement.

Fields’s third category of proptech is data platforms. These, she writes, “offer more continuous market monitoring than traditional real estate data, which is often reported on a quarterly basis and (in the US) is notoriously fragmented or “dirty,” i.e. incomplete, containing outdated or duplicate information, or otherwise inaccurate or inconsistent.” This third category mines the other two: transforming the activities of both into valuable data to be consolidated, repackaged, sold, and exploited. Whereas the other two categories are technological sharpenings of already-established landlord practices—of buying, selling, renting, and managing—this third category represents a departure of sorts, a shift to a new level of abstraction of real estate extraction.

More: Paraspot mines online content and listings to generate data about properties and locations, to improve matchmaking between home seekers and the advertisement industry. SolidBlock offers a platform for transforming real-estate portfolios into digital shares that can be traded. The specter of machine learning and technocratic objectivity looms large: here large algorithmic models can legitimate and “rationalize” historical forces of dispossession and extraction in new innovative, morally-neutral terms of the market. In 1979, geographer Neil Smith introduced the concept of the rent gap. A rent gap, he writes, is the difference between what a current tenant pays and what a future (given displacement and/or renovation, both within buildings and in the surrounding neighborhood) tenant would pay. Where and when a rent gap exists, gentrification occurs.³⁹ Large datasets of residential real estate facilitate high-level manipulation of rental and real estate markets. Companies like Zillow—and Israeli-founded WeWork!—utilize massive datasets and vast reserves of invested (speculative) capital to identify and shape “emerging” neighborhoods and real estate locations. Companies such as Snapland, founded in Israel, analyze global data to offer “untapped urban renewal opportunities worldwide.” By quickly analyzing and underwriting real-estate, these platforms work to maximize profits by providing calculative agency at the cost of longtime tenants and homeowners. Data platforms are also increasingly sold to large, corporate landlords—like Blackstone’s Invitation Homes—to facilitate their market consolidation projects. Data trading and operation platforms ultimately work together, Fields writes, to enable “investors to aggregate ownership of resources, extract income flows, and securely convey these flows to capital markets.”⁴⁰

The movements and developments of proptech companies are the corporate machinations that become the ambient atmosphere of rising rents, of class warfare. These forces cannot be contested, much less defeated, by singularly valiant localized struggles; one tenant association alone cannot reverse the dispossessory pressure of decades of rising rents. But the technologies of control and the innovations of class warfare that proptech represent are sites of contest; the victories that individual tenants and tenant associations achieve—such as the Atlantic Tenants Association and the Hell’s Kitchen tenants that sued their landlord to remove their digital lock system—can be disseminated and shared across the class through organization.⁴¹ Organization, too, can transcend the local and contest these technologies of class warfare at their various levels of abstraction through economic and political means. But only if our organization is up to the task. The connections between Zionist occupation technologies and those of US landlords and real estate are evident and material, more than just symbolic—the very same capital that spurs occupation also funds the increasing pressures of dispossession faced by working-class tenants here. But, for now, the solidarity between US worker-tenants and the Palestinian resistance to occupation is, unfortunately, largely symbolic. The task of worker-tenants in the US is to build an organized movement that can transform symbolic solidarity into material support. Identifying that the struggle is shared, that the antagonists are alike and collaborating, is instrumental toward this end. But it is, at the end of the day, a question of organizational fortitude and the cultivation of a mass movement. Only the people, as Chavez says, will liberate the people.

In the Brooklyn Eviction Defense Tenant Union, of which the writers of this article are members and organizers, we recognize these indissoluble ties between our work and the struggle of Palestinian liberation. As a Tenant Union, and particularly as members of the Union’s Palestinian Solidarity Caucus, we understand our task to be twofold.

On one hand, this is the continued project of building and growing democratic, deliberative worker-tenant-led collectives in our buildings and in our neighborhoods—these are tenant associations and Union chapters through which working-class tenants become mass protagonists. In these bodies, which are independent (from the state, from nonprofits, and certainly from landlords and management companies) and forged through struggle against landlord deprivation, we create the space for people to actually practice democratic politics, to be active protagonists in the movements of their lives, and to do so alongside their neighbors. It is within the context of this sort of organization, within the context of these movements, that we in the Union who support Palestinian liberation can engage our neighbors substantively, transparently, and intentionally on the subject of Palestine. We are not interested in television or twitter debates or casual arguments or, even, merely showing up in the streets to showcase our support (though we of course do the latter). Rather, we recognize true class organization—like ours, like rank and file spaces within labor unions—as the site in which the discursive project of spreading the good word of Palestinian liberation must take place. Research like the kind found in this paper is helpful to this end: look at what we in the Union have discovered.

On the other hand, our task is vertical: anchored to the patient and dedicated growth just described, the Union itself and the worker-tenant movement more broadly becomes increasingly relevant at higher levels of political struggle. This requires adept and conscious, democratic, and participatory organization-building. We cannot, we stress, put the cart before the horse. We are building an ecosystem of democracy, from the ground up—and certainly up! But we cannot allow aspects of our organization to drift off unaccountably, without democratic tether to the base of organized working-class tenants that is our Union’s power. Despite the vast majority of our Union’s active organizers expressing deep solidarity with the Palestinian people, we haven’t—as a whole Union—yet endorsed or pledged explicit support for the cause. This is because we haven’t yet garnered, established or recognized active and engaged support for the cause from the base of organized working-class tenants in the more than seventy tenant associations that currently compose the Union. This is not so much a blight or a dark mark on the Union but a conjunctural reflection of where we are at. Ignoring this and superficially, undemocratically plastering onto the edifice of our Union expressions of Palestinian solidarity—despite our desire to support the Palestinian cause in any way we can—only undermines the actual, and long-term project of the Union and it is only through that long-term project that our solidarity with Palestine can be made truly material and consequential.

1. Avi Kober, “Targeted Killing during the Second Intifada: The Quest for Effectiveness.” Journal of Conflict Studies, vol. 27, no. 1, 2007.
2. Amnesty International: “Israel and the Occupied Territories: Israel must put an immediate end to the policy and practice of assassinations.” Amnesty International, 4 July 2003, https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/mde150562003en.pdf
3. Salam, Kawther. “The Daily Life of Kawther Salam:” http://www.kawther.info/ 2007 - Internet Archive link [the original website has been taken off the servers] + cited also here; her Wikipedia page here.
4. Helena Cobban, “Brahimi on how to understand Syria.” Just World News with Helena Cobban, 2014. - https://vintage.justworldnews.org/2014/05/
5. Elizabeth MacBride, “Born Of World’s Most Intractable Conflict, This Technology Could Speed Airport Security Lines.” Forbes, 28 Feb 2017 https://www.forbes.com/sites/elizabethmacbride/2017/02/28/born-of-conflict-with-palestinians-israeli-technology-could-dominate-30-billion-biometrics-market/?sh=1ebe86106877
6. Erin Mcelroy, Manon Vergerio, and Paula Garcia-Salazar. “Landlord Technologies of Gentrification: Facial Recognition and Building Access Technologies in New York City Homes,” Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, 2022.
7. Dan Senor and Saul Singer, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle. Grand Central Publishing, 2009.
8. Bar Moran and Reut Shechter, “Beyond Israeli Army Unit 8200 – that’s not what Startup Nation is all about.” Geektime, 31 May 2015.https://web.archive.org/web/20190517100500/https://www.geektime.com/2015/05/31/beyond-israeli-army-unit-8200-thats-not-what-startup-nation-is-all-about/.
9. “75 Years Later, Israel Blocking Palestinian Refugees’ Return,” Human Rights Watch, May 15, 2023. https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/05/15/75-years-later-israel-blocking-palestinian-refugees-return
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14. Marx in 1844: “Now, however, let us consider the rent of land as it is formed in real life… The rent of land is established as a result of the struggle between tenant and landlord. We find that the hostile antagonism of interests, the struggle, the war is recognized throughout political economy as the basis of social organization.”
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27. Quoted in Finkelstein’s Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom
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