VC Bell Restructuring ANU from her Ivory Tower

Exposing Genevieve Bell’s Ties to Israeli Apartheid

On the 3^rd of October, more than 3,000 ANU staff attended an online authoritarian All Staff Address run by the so-called ANU senior “leadership”. All senior leaders sounded like robots with speeches that felt like they were scripted by ChatGPT. The ANU Vice Chancellor ended the online call with a hand gesture and a sigh indicating her relief at ending the address; that gesture was deleted from the recording. The patronizing address included laughable slides, finance terminology and a massive restructuring of Australia’s national university. The 30 minutes of patronizing jargon did not provide any indications on how the upcoming staff cuts and restructuring will save the university any money.

The all staff meeting comes after the university proposed a ludicrous policy, banning graffiti, posters and stickers from campus, rendering our campus sanitized and looking more and more like a neoliberal business precinct rather than a public university. We would like to see how many $$$ will the ANU management spend on implementing this ridiculous policy in order to stifle political expression on campus! These attacks on the university as a public education institution are in the context of a genocide currently taking place and a heavy handed approach universities in so called “Australia” have had towards pro-Palestinian student activists. In addition to the incompetence of ANU’s VC, her high (over $1Million) salary, and the exuberant combined salary of her senior ‘leadership’ team, we would like to flesh out in this article the history and background of ANU’s current VC and her connection to Israeli Apartheid, and we provide at the end of this article a suggestion on how we can restructure the ANU.

According to a recent Lancet report, the number of Palestinians genocided by Israel since October 2023 could exceed 186,000, whilst mass famine is on the horizon as the Zionist entity relentlessly wages its genocidal, settler-colonial campaign (OCHA oPt 2024). Yet, Vice-Chancellor Genevieve Bell has chosen still to continue ANU’s investments in a range of weapons manufacturing companies that play very direct roles in the ongoing genocide of Gaza. On the 27th of May, she called the Australian Federal Police on the ANU Gaza Solidarity Encampment, threatening to remove by force a group of staff and students calling for divestment from these companies. To make some sense of these egregious actions, we shine a light on Genevieve Bell’s personal ties to Israeli apartheid. 

A significant portion of Bell’s career has been in US-based Big Tech companies, which have supported the Israeli apartheid regime for decades. Big Tech corporations today parallel East India companies: they are an extension of Western imperial power. These companies supply a large portion of the core infrastructure required to construct Israeli artificial intelligence (AI) programs, which are designed to produce targets, such as people, and buildings, to destroy (Abraham 2024). Big Tech also shares a close relationship with the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) through the provision of technology parts, research, software, etc., which directly serves the geopolitical agenda of the American Empire, and also sees financial benefit from investing in Israeli apartheid—a consequence of US-led digital colonialism (Kwet 2024). Bell has, for decades, been a part of the structure that perpetuates the colonial practices that are enabling the genocide of Palestinians to continue.   

Intel

Bell started off in the cultural anthropology field and was later recruited to Intel Corporation, where she spent more than two decades in Silicon Valley in the research and development field (Australian National University 2024). Intel is an American multinational company that specialises in the design and manufacture of computer components and is one of the world’s largest semiconductor chip producers by revenue (Zafar 2024). Intel is also one of Israel’s largest employers, with a workforce of around 11,000 employees (Intel 2024). In 2022, Intel Israel brought in $8.7 billion in exports, comprising roughly 1.5% of the country’s GDP (Intel 2024). 

In December 2023, among Israel’s unrelenting slaughter of Palestinians, Intel announced a grant of $3.2 billion USD for Israel, for the construction of a new $25 billion chip plant in the so-called country’s south—the largest investment by a company ever in Israel (Scheer 2023). When Intel halted this investment approximately three months ago, BDS described it as a major victory for the cause. But Intel told Reuters at the time that Israel continues to be one of the company’s key global manufacturing and research and development sites and it remains “fully committed” to Israel (Roya News 2024). More recently, Intel granted $15 million to an Israeli AI technology firm (Reuters 2024). Currently, Bell is a Vice President and Senior Fellow of Intel (Australian National University 2024).

 

SRI International

Bell is also an SRI International Engelbart Distinguished Fellow. SRI International is an American nonprofit scientific research institute. Ten people sit on the board of directors, and scrolling through the webpage, one name stands out—Steven Walker. Underneath his photo is his current role: Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Lockheed Martin (SRI 2024). The same company that supplies Israel with the F-16 and F-35 fighter jets that are being used to bomb Gaza every day, and that ANU currently holds 381 shares in. 

Furthermore, the CEO of the company is William Jeffrey. Jeffrey was the chief scientist of the Tactical Technology Office with the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is a research and development agency of the United States’ Department of Defence. There needs no explanation as to how the US Department of Defence is complicit in the genocide of Palestinians, but just to name a couple of examples—DARPA has funded AI projects in Israel designed to determine “social norm violations”, and it has played a pivotal role in the development of Israeli military capabilities, including the funding of, and providing the base for which Israeli drones were modelled off of (Siegel-Itzkovich 2023) (Atta, et al. 2003). 

 

3Ai & Microsoft

In 2017, Bell established the 3A Institute (3Ai), an “innovation institute” designed to guide engineering centered around cyber-physical systems and artificial intelligence (Australian National University n.d.). Since 2018, 3Ai have partnered with Microsoft to deliver a range of masterclasses. 

Microsoft has a long-standing complicity in the genocide of Palestinians. During the Second Intifada, the devastation caused in Jenin was followed by billboards being placed throughout a highway in Tel-Aviv, with the Microsoft logo under the words "From the depth of our heart – thanks to the Israeli Defence Forces” (Shalom 2002). Microsoft has further provided services to the Israeli Ministry of Defense, cloud services to the Israeli military, and also provides the platform for which the app ‘The Coordinator’ (Al-Munaseq)  runs on, which is an application that the Israeli Civil Administration forces Palestinians to use to apply for permits in the West Bank and Gaza (Who Profits 2024). In late October 2023, Microsoft quietly launched a new Azure cloud region in Israel (Swinhoe 2023). The company has been committed to Israeli industries since the 90’s, so much so that former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called Microsoft “as much of an Israeli company as an American company” (Katz 2021).

Decolonising AI?

Genevieve Bell delivered a presentation at an Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce (AICC) boardroom lunch in 2018, where she talked about the emerging constellation of AI, big data, and the role of technology in future building (Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce 2018). Ironically, in September 2023, she appeared on a podcast and spoke about the importance of decolonising AI, and of thinking about whether there are ways of computation developing that “aren’t just about war and aiming machinery” (Amplifying Cognition 2023).

 

Conclusion

Genevieve Bell has built her career by actively contributing to the occupation of Palestine, and is now overseeing major staff cuts and course restructuring from her ivory tower with no clear plan to pull the university out of deficit. We, students and staff, have no confidence in her leadership and demand her immediate resignation. Over the last nine months, Bell has only addressed staff through Frequently Asked Questions pages and cryptic ANU On Campus newsletters cramped with new, ridiculous policies. 

The ongoing genocide in Palestine is actively being funded by our university under Bell’s ‘leadership’, and the organisations she is loyal to. ANU must divest from the companies that are supplying the military technologies and AI to commit genocide and perpetuate the Zionist colonial empire. Universities are places for education and should not be sustaining the colonial war machine. 

Finally, we say to VC Bell, maybe one way Australia’s national university can save money is by getting rid of your salary and the combined salaries of all your senior ‘leadership’ team.This will ensure that valuable staff who actually do the teaching, research and day to day running of our university can do their jobs, and we can let students be students. This might give you and your team a chance to read a book or two about Critical Management Studies, politics, and Palestine!

 

Bibliography

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Amplifying Cognition. 2023. Genevieve Bell on the history and relevance of Cybernetics, frameworks for the past, present and future, and decolonizing AI (AC Ep10). 13 September. Accessed August 1, 2024. https://amplifyingcognition.com/genevieve-bell-history-relevance-cybernetics-frameworks-past-present-future-decolonizing-ai-ac-ep10/.

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