ALEX KARP, the CEO of Palantir, the US military spyware company used by Israel in its targeted bombings of Gaza and which has been awarded a contract with the NHS, wants to see campus opposition to Israel’s brutal and relentless attack on Palestinians snuffed out. 

Karp has described the college encampments in support of the bombed and beleaguered Palestinians murdered by Israeli forces as “a pagan religion infecting our universities.”

With Karp now fully in league with Trump insiders, it is no surprise, therefore, to see a flurry of recent arrests — and, in at least one case so far, deportation — of pro-Palestine students and faculty at leading US universities.

However, the protests are not so much a “pagan” problem as a potential threat to Karp’s profits. Palantir is a merchant of death by AI, and Palestine protesters are in the way.

“We tend to think these things happening across college campuses are a sideshow. No, they are the show,” Karp said during an interview last year. “Because if we lose the intellectual debate you will not be able to deploy any army in the West ever.”

These are ominous warnings for the British public. Accordingly, voices of protest are being raised ever louder by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and a host of other civil liberties groups, who are calling once again on Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Wes Streeting to cancel Palantir’s seven-year, £330 million contract that would allow the company to control and manage NHS patient data.

“From racist policing and immigration detention in the US, to Israel’s apartheid regime, Palantir technology is enabling state violence,” said PSC in a recent statement.

But violence is precisely what Karp depends on for his corporation’s survival. In a letter to shareholders, he claimed that the dominance of Western powers depends not on “the superiority of its ideas or values or religion… but rather by its superiority in applying organised violence.”

Palantir’s technology, as PSC pointed out, “has been used to accelerate Israel’s genocide in Gaza, by using AI technology for its bombing campaigns. This has allowed the Israeli military to develop, in the words of one former military officer, a ‘mass assassination factory’.”

Palantir, wrote William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the US Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, is “a company in the business of enabling devastating conflicts.”

In the past few weeks, overseas students and faculty at Ivy League universities known to have objected to Israel’s relentless attack on Palestine, have been abruptly detained and threatened with deportation, and, in one case so far, actually deported.

The attack on Ivy League universities such as Columbia, Yale, Georgetown and Brown, which Ben Zinevich of the anti-war and civil rights umbrella group Answer Coalition describes as “ruling-class reproduction centres,” is a deliberate strategy, he says. 

“It’s clear they really have their eyes on more war and if they can’t wage it without a mass resistance from upper-middle-class children or children who are going to become part of leading ruling-class institutions, then that’s a great danger to their existence,” Zinevich said. 

“They are dedicated to snuffing out this movement, any movement that really calls to question a greater system that depends on forever war, that depends on using AI to control people’s lives, and which is dedicated to the overpolicing of everyday people and workers.”

In recent days, Palestinian Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University student, was seized and effectively renditioned to a Louisiana immigration detention centre. Badar Khan Suri, an Indian postdoctoral fellow from Georgetown University, ironically researching conflict resolution, was detained purely because his wife’s family has links to a Hamas member. He too was flown to a Louisiana detention facility. Neither have been charged with crimes. 

Helyeh Doutaghi of Yale Law School was stripped of her position by the university as more institutions of higher learning are threatened with massive withdrawals of government funds by the Trump regime. 

Grant Miner, a union organiser and activist at Columbia, has been expelled. Dr Rasha Alawieh, a Brown University assistant professor and doctor, was deported to Lebanon after she returned to the US after attending the funeral of slain former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

All of them were in the country with legal rights to live and work or study in the US.

“From racist policing and immigration detention in the US, to Israel’s apartheid regime, Palantir technology is enabling state violence,” said PSC, recalling how Karp “boasted last month on an investor call that Palantir is here ‘to scare our enemies and, on occasion, kill them’.”

Even before its contract with Israel, Palantir already had what Dr Rhiannon Mihranian Osborne described in a British Medical Journal article last August as “a long and controversial history of supporting predictive policing, deportations, state surveillance, and drone strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Americans are watching with growing dread while Elon Musk and his DOGE enforcers raid private data at the Social Security Administration — the country’s social insurance programme providing retirement, disability and survivor benefits. 

Karp, meanwhile, is relishing the chaos unleashed by Musk on working Americans. “We love disruption, and whatever is good for America will be good for Americans — and very good for Palantir,” he said, alarming words given what would be Palantir’s unfettered access to NHS patient information.

“Palantir is not a suitable partner for our NHS,” said PSC. “Health worker and patient groups have repeatedly spoken out against the decision to award it the contract. If the rollout goes ahead, it risks damaging vital public trust in the health service.”

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland.