By Jonathan Diebold
“Sanctions must be imposed immediately” were the words of Eoin Hayes, recently suspended TD for the Social Democrats, in November 2023, seven weeks after the beginning of the genocide in Gaza – in one of his few comments on the issue. By that point, some 15,000 had been murdered. In the same time period, stocks in Palantir, a company which supplies militaries with targeting software, essentially a high-tech arms dealer, rose 22%. By its CEO’s own admission, “after October 7th, within weeks, we are on the ground and we are involved in operationally crucial operations in Israel.”
When Hayes made his call for sanctions, on 29 November, the value of Hayes’ own stocks in the company had risen to €128,950. By this point, an estimated 40,000 tons of explosives had been dropped on Gaza – on schools, hospitals, and apartment complexes. This was only the start. Hayes would hold on to his shares for a further seven months, campaigning for electoral positions for the Social Democrats, as the death toll, and the value of his shares, continued to rise.
Murderous systems
Palantir’s algorithms are used in Palestine to target individuals for aerial strikes. One IDF source told +972 Magazine that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the decisions of the army’s military AI systems, adding that usually they only dedicated about “20 seconds” to each target before authorising a bombing, in spite of that system’s 10% error rate. The publication further revealed that they “systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes – usually at night while their whole families were present”.
An intelligence officer said “the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.” Systems like the ones Palantir provides are directly responsible for the deaths of innocent women, men and children in Gaza.
Palantir’s sordid history
Hayes’s shares in Palantir date back to a two-year period he spent working for the company, ending in 2017 when he was gifted 7,000 shares in the company. He has been vague about the precise nature of the work he carried out for the copmpany, saying he worked in areas “like HR and IT,” but in a 2021 interview he stated that the exact nature of his work was confidential, and involved “travelling around the world.” Palantir, founded with seed-capital from the CIA, was supplying technology to organisations like the US military and the controversial US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Its billionaire CEO was an early supporter and funder of Donald Trump.
In a statement, Hayes said Palantir “only had contracts with the Israeli military this year.” Indeed, on 11 January Palantir signed a “strategic partnership” with Israel to supply it with military technology. Meanwhile protests erupted in the UK over Palantir’s provision of predictive policing technology to Israel, and its assistance in and support for the genocide. By this point, the death toll had increased to nearly 25,000. 70-80% of all buildings in Northern Gaza were damaged or destroyed, and 50% across the whole strip. Over 50 were killed in a single airstrike in Khan Younis that week. Hayes’s stocks in Palantir would jump to €157,971 shortly after the deal.
Hands-on in support for atrocities
However, this was far from the beginning of Palantir’s active support for the oppression of the Palestinian people. In 2014, The New York Times reported on employees’ dissatisfaction with the company’s work with Israel. In 2015, while Hayes was visiting the company’s offices around the world, Palantir opened a 15,000 square foot office in Tel Aviv. In 2017, Israeli newspaper Haaretz stated that Palantir was one of “only two technology companies that provide predictive systems used for intelligence at Israeli security organizations”. In a 2019 panel discussion in Haifa university titled ‘Meet the Israeli AI Industry’, a senior Palantir representative, when asked how the company stops its technology from being used by “evil regimes”, said that “we’re not in the position of the standar commercial software provider,” such as Microsoft Office, “where they pass the software on and wipe their hands clean… We have to make choices about what sorts of countries we serve,” going on to outline the hands-on role the company plays in administering their software for countries like Israel.
The role of AI in IDF operations was sharply revealed in April by an exposé in +972 Magazine, while Hayes was preparing for the local elections where he would be elected as a councillor. According to one source, “thousands of Palestinians – most of them women and children or people who were not involved in the fighting – were wiped out by Israeli airstrikes, especially during the first weeks of the war, because of the AI program’s decisions.” The article was released not long after the Kuwait Roundabout massacre, in which a convoy of Palestinians in northern Gaza were fired on by Israeli soldiers. By this point in the genocide, the toll was well over 30,000 at minimum, although every indication that official counts of confirmed dead are well below the actual figure. Within a month, the value of Haye’s shares increased by another €8,000.
Profiting from genocide
In June, Hayes was elected to Dublin City Council. As he celebrated, the 8 June ‘Nuseirat refugee camp massacre’ took place – 276 were killed. It was now eight months since October. Official figures had the death count at 36,000. Palantir’s share values continued to rise. Hayes signed a legally binding statement on entering office saying he had divested of his shares “within the past 12 months”. He told journalists up until now that he had sold them before he “entered politics” and maintained this position at his first press conference as a TD, where the question was reportedly put to him 23 times. Within hours, he revealed via press statement that this was a lie.
In reality, it was another month post-election before he sold his shares, for a final value of €199,000, as bombs were falling on a school, which was being used as a field hospital – the ‘Khadija School massacre’. The death toll by that point was over 40,000. The value of Hayes’s shares had nearly doubled since October 2023. There are few things more heinous a person can do than profit – and profit considerably – from a genocide, and all the barbarity that entails.
Serious questions for the Social Democrats
Many young people looked to the Social Democrats this election. Many were attracted by their strong words on Palestine. Had they known about the large sums of money Hayes made by keeping stocks in a company assisting in the attacks on Palestine, many in his constituency would not have voted for him. Had people across the country known the Social Democrats were running someone like him, many would have turned elsewhere this election. Leading members like Gary Gannon defended him right up until the moment he revealed the truth about the dates his misled people with. Hayes has now been suspended from the party, but will they wait a few months in the hopes that this blows over and they can invite him back into the fold? The fact that he has merely been suspended, and not expelled, perhaps points to this.
The Social Democrats have serious questions to answer. When did they discover his links to Palantir, which was freely available on his LinkedIn page and which he had discussed openly in the past? Why was proper vetting not done? Why did they rally to his defence without fully investigating the matter themselves?
This Eoin Hayes scandal shows more than ever that, while the government and parties like the Social Democrats can use strong language on this issue, it is action, not words, that are the real measure of their actual support for Palestine.
