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Meta's Head Of AI Policy Is Ex-IDF Along With One Hundred Other Meta Employees

Nate Bear

More than one hundred former Israeli spies and IDF soldiers work for tech giant Meta, including its head of AI policy, who served in the IDF under an Israeli government scheme that allows non-Israelis to volunteer for the Israeli army.

Shira Anderson, an American international rights lawyer, is Meta’s AI policy chief who voluntarily enlisted for the IDF in 2009 under a program which enables non-Israeli Jews who aren’t eligible for military conscription to join the Israeli army.

Through this program, known as Garin Tzabar, many non-Israelis who have fought for the IDF have been implicated in war crimes and crimes against humanity since Israel’s genocide of Gaza began in October 2023.

Anderson served as a non-commissioned officer in the IDF for over two years where she worked in the Military Strategic Information Section, writing dossiers and public relations propaganda. She was also the liaison between the IDF and foreign military attaches stationed in Israel, and liaison to the Red Cross. 

With AI a critical emerging technology for tech giants and militaries, Anderson’s role at Meta is an important one. She develops the legal guidance, policies and public relations talking points concerning AI issues and regulation for all of Meta’s key areas, including its product, public policy and government affairs teams.

At Meta, Anderson, who is based in Meta’s Washington DC office, is in familiar company. More than one hundred former Israeli spies and IDF soldiers are employed by the company, my new investigation shows, many of whom worked for Israel’s spy agency Unit 8200. 

These ex-IDF members are based evenly across Meta’s US offices and its Tel Aviv office, and a significant number of them, like Anderson, have a specialisation in AI. Given that Israel has made extensive use of AI not just to conduct its genocide, but to establish its prior system of apartheid, surveillance and occupation, Meta’s recruiting of IDF AI specialists is particularly insidious. Did these former Israeli spies use their Unit 8200 connections to help the tech giant collaborate with the IDF to build kill lists? According to a report last year, Unit 8200 infiltrated WhatsApp groups and marked every name in a group for assassination if just one alleged Hamas member was also in the group, no matter the size or content of the group chat. 

How did Israel’s spy unit gain access to WhatsApp user data held by Meta? 

Meta has serious, war crime-related questions to answer. 

Questions that Anderson has no doubt drafted PR responses for.

Anderson has a long-standing allegiance to Israel. She joined the IDF after studying for a history degree at the University of California, Berkley, then completed a law degree at Duke University before returning to Israel where she worked for an Israeli thinktank run by the former head of the IDF. After this she became a legal assistant to the head of Israel’s Supreme Court. It was Israel’s Supreme Court that two weeks ago rejected a petition to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, effectively greenlighting the use of starvation as a weapon. This is a war crime under the Geneva Convention.

Anderson herself is a strident denier of the genocide. During a podcast appearance last year she said, “I absolutely do not think genocide is happening” and denied Israel was deliberately targeted civilians. During the interview she called Hamas “a death cult” and said “Gaza is a failed state,” despite it not being a state, the central fact that underlies Palestinian resistance. This is something you’d hope an international rights lawyer would know. She made numerous genocidal statements during the interview, including that “the challenge in the West Bank” is that “international law doesn’t permit Israel to do what it does in Gaza” because the West Bank is occupied. As a result, she lamented, “different rules apply.” She invoked the trolley problem to argue why killing large numbers of civilians is justifiable and appears from her time as IDF Red Cross liaison to have a particular grudge against the aid organisation, saying it “acts like a country” in Israel. You can hear it all here.

Anderson’s path to serve in the IDF, via the Garin Tzabar program, is also highly controversial. This initiative has enabled non-Israelis (known as ‘Lone Soldiers’) to join the IDF, murder Palestinians, commit war crimes, and then re-integrate into their home societies. Legal cases against Garin Tzabar volunteers who have returned to their homes after serving in the IDF are moving forward in a number of countries. In the UK evidence of war crimes committed in Gaza by ten Britons living in London has recently been submitted to London’s Metropolitan police.

How many possible war criminals are employed by Meta?

You can find the Tel Aviv-based Meta employee names here and here. You can find the names of the US-based employees and their locations here, hereand here. 

Some of the former Israeli spies now working for Meta spent significant amounts of time in Unit 8200, in some cases jumping straight from the IDF to Meta. Guy Shenkerman, for example, spent over a decade in Israel’s spy unit before moving to the US to join Meta in the summer of 2022. Miki Rothschild, a vice president of product management at Meta’s Sunnydale campus, spent three years during the second intifada as a commander of the IDF’s Moran Squad which controls long range missile strikes. Maksim Shmukler who works for Meta in Menlo Park and has also worked for Google and Apple, spent six and half years in Unit 8200 before moving to Texas.

Shenkerman, Rothschild and Shmukler are Israelis, while Shira Anderson volunteered to use her skills to launder the legalese that Israel relies on to whitewash genocide. The fact that the person who volunteered her professional services for an AI-powered apartheid state now helps determine how Meta will use our data to power an AI future should worry us all. It should especially concern us in light of America’s brutal crackdown on those who speak against genocide.

In November we saw Meta’s vision for this AI future when the company announced it was making its ‘Llama’ AI tools available to the US and its so-called ‘Five Eyes’ allies for national security applications. In the announcement Meta said it was “thrilled” to be working with America’s preeminent weapons manufacturers and national security state corporations including Lockheed Martin, Palantir and Anduril. 

To recap. A former IDF officer is the head of AI policy for Meta, where she works alongside more than one hundred other former IDF and Israeli spies, and they are all now directly mobilised to work with America’s national security state apparatus and alongside a federal government disappearing and detaining dissidents who speak out against genocide.

The news that large numbers of former IDF members are employed by Meta comes after my investigations earlier this year revealed the former Unit 8200 AI specialists working on AI for big tech companies, and the former spies imported into Google via its acquisition of Wiz.

With the proliferation of former Israeli spies and solders into US big tech we are looking at the complete capture of the US national security state by pro-Israel voices. By voices who deny genocide as we watch journalists burn to death in tents. Who deny genocide as we watch headless babies carried aloft through the rubble and ruins of once vibrant streets. Voices who deny genocide as Israel’s highest court waves through starvation policies. By voices who, in Trump, appear to have found the ideal man to execute the Zionist wish-list.

As an AI future advances, the people who constructed the digital architecture enabling total surveillance and control of the Palestinians, and who wrote the code that enabled their genocide, are now determining that future for all of us.

The prospect is truly terrifying.