How German top research institute benefits Israeli AI tech used against Palestinians

[This piece is part of an investigative section called “For the Record”. The New Arab believes that public interest comes first and that publishing research findings, even if not conclusive, can inform future investigative efforts].

The Max Planck Society (MPS) is Germany’s “most successful research organisation, with 31 Nobel Laureates among the ranks of its scientists”, according to their website. With an annual budget of nearly two billion euros ($2.16 bn), the society funds research across the sciences and humanities, “in the service of the general public”. 

Despite the MPS’ prestige, a group of anonymous researchers called Max Planck Anti-War Machine came forward in protest of the institute’s collaboration with Israeli universities. They shared with The New Arab (TNA) Investigative Unit a report that draws a connection between the Society and Israeli facial recognition technology. The researchers looked into publicly available links between the MPS’ partner universities in Israel and patented technology used by the Israeli army in Palestine. In particular, they focussed on AI software developed by Israeli firm Corsight.

In its response to The New Arab, the MPS denied any involvement in research and funding that contributed to the development of Corsight’s technology.

TNA was unable to establish whether the MPS had directly funded the research behind Corsight’s facial recognition tech. But it was possible to determine that the Society has, at multiple times, subsidised related research by the same academics who founded the Israeli startup in question. The director of Corsight’s parent company is also the head of an MPS-linked research centre that is jointly funded by the German government and Israeli universities.

On 26 January 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that South African accusations that Israel was committing a genocide in Gaza were “plausible”. Given the ruling, human rights organisations are questioning the role played by German political and academic institutions in potentially enabling a genocide through high-tech. To date, the German government continues to fund MPS-linked research collaboration in Israel.

Israeli-German scientific cooperation 

It is common knowledge that the ties between MPS and Israeli academia run deep. The Society currently supports 24 German-Israeli research institutes (Minerva Centers) through a subsidiary called the Minerva Foundation. The German Federal Ministry for Education and Research has been its main funder with more than 350 million euro (around $380 mn) since 1964. Each Minerva Center receives up to 150,000 euro (around $163,000) a year, evenly split between Germany and Israel.

The centres are hosted in six universities and academic institutes in Israel – The Technion (Israel Institute of Technology), the Weizmann Institute of Science, Tel Aviv University, Bar-Ilan University, University of Haifa and Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The Technion, in particular, collaborates closely with weapon manufacturers such as Elbit Systems and Rafael.

TNA contacted the Technion seeking comment on the content of this article, but no response was received in time for publication.

Corsight: “We were built to find a single terrorist within a crowd”

Prof. Yehoshua Zeevi has been the director of The Franz Ollendorff Minerva Center for Information Processing and Automation (also known as the Center for Vision and Image Sciences) at the Technion since he founded it in 1985. The Franz Ollendorff Center was one of the first Minerva Centers established in Israel by the German Ministry of Science.

Prof. Zeevi is also director and chief scientist of Cortica Ltd., an AI start-up he co-founded in 2007 with Igal Raichelgauz and Karina Odinaev. According to a 2012 press release from the company, the founders developed Cortica’s core technology while at Technion. As of 2015, the Technion owned 3% of Cortica’s shares through its Technion Research and Development Foundation Ltd. At the time, the startup was valued at $200 million, according to Israeli business newspaper The Marker. Such a relationship between Cortica and the Technion is telling of the close ties between Israel’s academia and its security-oriented tech market.

The New Arab contacted all of Prof. Zeevi, Odinaev and Raichelgauz with regards to the content of this article, but no response was received in time for publication. 

The technology of Corsight AI Ltd., a fully-owned subsidiary of Cortica, was developed to assist intelligence and law enforcement agencies. In a 2020 interview with US news agency The Media Line, Corsight’s Vice-President of Business Development Ofer Ronen confirmed that the Israeli police was among their clients.

Corsight’s system processes information taken from surveillance cameras, photographs, and other visual sources to create a model of an individual’s face – even going so far as to claim that it will soon construct these models using only genetic material. Corsight’s Ofer Ronen told The Media Line: “We were built to find a single terrorist within a crowd when he’s trying to disguise himself… we don’t need a full face.” 

Several of Corsight’s researchers - including its founders Raichelgauz and Odinaev - have, by their own account, served in the Israeli army’s 8200 elite intelligence unit. The unit has been accused by many, including by its former members, of “infiltrating and controlling all aspects of Palestinian life.” 

According to Israeli military and intelligence sources quoted in a March 2024 New York Times report, the Israeli army is using an expansive facial recognition system in Gaza “to conduct mass surveillance there, collecting and cataloging the faces of Palestinians without their knowledge or consent”. The report specifically mentioned Corsight technology that would enable Israeli soldiers to pick out faces from crowds, and even from grainy drone footage, as potential targets. 

However, the same military sources said Corsight was not always reliable and that they had to combine it with Google Photos - a photo storage service from US company Google - for profiling purposes. The officers apparently continued to use the Israeli software in Gaza because, unlike Google Photos, it was customisable. 

TNA contacted the Israeli army to provide comments about these reports, and about Raichelgauz and Odinaev’s work within the army. They declined to comment. 

TNA also emailed Corsight’s Vice-President of Business Development Ofer Ronen. We did not receive a reply. 

“Administrative responsibility” only?

When TNA confronted the Max Planck Society (MPS) with evidence of its connections with Israeli facial recognition tech, the German research institute declined any responsibility. 

Dr. Christina Beck, MPS head of communication, stated in an email exchange that “the Minerva Foundation is not involved in and not responsible for the scientific research at the Technion.”

Beck added that “the [Cortica] company and the research results on which this spin-off is based have absolutely nothing to do with Minerva.” 

However, publicly available research output suggests that Israeli-German scientific cooperation benefited, at the very least, the development of Cortica’s facial recognition technology.

The Max Planck Anti-War Machine collective, drew our attention towards two academic articles published in 2006 by Zeevi, Raichelgauz and Odinaev (‘Cliques in Neural Ensembles as Perception Carriers’ and ‘Natural Signal Classification by Neural Cliques and Phase-Locked Attractors’), which were reportedly fundamental for the Cortica patents. In 2006 Raichelgauz and Odinaev were supervising undergraduate students at the Technion-based Ollendorff Minerva Center, of which Zeevi was the director.

The two articles have been cited at least 32 and seven times respectively in patents assigned to Cortica for which Zeevi, Raichelgauz and Odinaev are listed as the inventors. 

According to a 2012 Cortica press release, research conducted by Zeevi, Odinaev and Raichelgauz into the neural networks of the brain cortex (the same topic of the 2006 academic articles) was crucial in the development of the company’s facial recognition technology. 

TNA was able to establish that, prior to their collaboration with Zeevi, Raichelgauz and Odinaev completed their final undergraduate project in 2003 at the Vision and Image Sciences Lab, part of the Ollendorff Minerva Center. 

This project, for which they received two awards from the Technion, looked to apply “a novel theoretical framework” called “Liquid State Machines” to information processing.

The two academic papers, which are cited by the Israeli researchers in Cortica’s patents, looked at expanding this framework to simulate the brain cortex for the purpose of voice and word recognition.

We were not able to determine whether the application of this same framework to image recognition is the basis of Corsight’s current facial recognition technology.

In their response to TNA, the Max Planck Society also argued that, because of the source of the funding and the way funds are channelled to Israeli research institutes, they would only bear “administrative responsibility”. The Society sought to distance itself from any financial responsibility, although they are the sole shareholder of the Minerva Foundation.

“The MPG [i.e. German for MPS] manages Minerva GmbH [i.e. the Foundation], but does not finance it. The funds come exclusively from the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research [BMBF]”, said Beck, the MPS’ spokesperson. 

She explained that the Minerva Centers, which are co-financed by the Minerva Foundation with funds from the BMBF, are “neither institutions of the [...] MPG nor institutions of Minerva”.

TNA contacted the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research, asking whether they were aware that taxpayers’ money was being allocated for research that led to the development of Corsight’s facial recognition tech. The ministry declined to comment and redirected us to the MPS' press office. 

With regards to Prof. Zeevi, the MPS spokesperson clarified that “each Minerva Center is headed by a director who is employed at an Israeli university [...]. This director is responsible for the organizational management of the center, but is not an employee of Minerva GmbH.”

Dr. Beck also said that the Ollendorff Minerva Center run by Zeevi had been closed in August 2023, and sent parts of a contract valid from September 2011, supposedly related to the centre in question. The lifetime of a Minerva Centre is indeed always limited to an initial period of six years, which can be extended for a second final six-year term. 

While the contract sent by Beck does state 31 August 2023 as its end date, it also gives the MPS the ability to unilaterally close the centre and sever ties with the Israeli host institution, if the outcome of the sixth-year evaluation is not “positive”. 

It is not clear what ethical considerations were taken into account when assessing the impact of the Ollendorff Center’s research on Palestinians. 

The MPS’ claim that the centre is now closed is also disputed. On 10 June 2024, the German co-chair of the Ollendorff Center’s advisory committee, Prof. Ulrich Rueckert, confirmed to TNA via email that the centre was still active.

For AI, civilians and military often look the same

Experts have warned about the use of artificial intelligence and facial recognition technology, especially in Israel. Investigations have uncovered Israel’s AI “targeted” systems that are automating mass killings and destruction in its war on Gaza.

Matt Mahmoudi, Amnesty International’s Advisor on Artificial Intelligence, told TNA that “there is nothing in an AI system that would enable anyone to draw a distinction between a military and [a] civilian target.” Mahmoudi explained that Israeli AI systems like Lavender are “incredibly biased towards the identification of particular people to then generate a list of targets that are not really based on an actual read of whether someone is engaged in military combat, but simply [on] a probabilistic calculation of whether someone was in a particular location [...] that might be considered ‘Hamas-affiliated’”.

According to Marwa Fatafta, MENA policy and advocacy director at Access Now, a digital civil rights non-profit group, “facial recognition technologies are an extremely invasive form of identity verification, and our position is that this is a type of biometric surveillance that needs to be banned.” 

Speaking with TNA, Fatafta explained further the reasons why Access Now is supportive of a total ban, especially in the case of Palestine. “Even the smallest margin of error could mean fatal consequences [...], particularly in a context where the Israeli occupation has been inflicting ruthless and brutal violence on Palestinians from abductions, to torture, to crimes against humanity and ill treatment”, she said.

Abetting genocide?

Germany has always been transparent about its commitment to security-oriented research in its cooperation with Israeli academia. 

In 2008, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research published a document titled ‘Germany-Israel: Science and Technology, Education and Research’, in which it praised Israel’s “extraordinary ability to react to new security challenges and threat scenarios in a quick and flexible manner”. 

The report added that “in view of the increasing risks of terrorism and natural disasters, the German Federal Government has also made civil security research a priority.”

Access Now’s Marwa Fatafta warned about collaboration with Israeli institutions as, in her view, there can be no separation between what goes on inside the university, and the human rights violations that are currently taking place in Gaza. 

“Israeli universities are at the very core of Israel's military tech industrial complex”, she said, “these universities are deeply complicit and the Technion is normalising practices of surveillance and digital oppression under the facade of academic and scientific research.” 

According to Fatafta, German funding of Israeli universities is “indicative of that normalisation, that it is okay to sponsor research that could potentially end up being deployed and utilised for military purposes,” and particularly to commit war crimes in Gaza.

Amnesty’s Mahmoudi told TNA that both research institutions and states need to abide by the provisional measures ordered by the ICJ on January 26. “So while states have a duty, entities engaged in business activities have a responsibility [to not contribute to genocide]”, he said. And this would apply also to “institutions of research, to ensure that they are also not contributing to the development of tools that could further exacerbate the risk of genocide, or the unfolding genocide”. 

TNA contacted the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research, asking what kind of measures were in place when allocating research funds, to minimise the risk of contributing to the unfolding genocide. The ministry declined to comment and redirected us to the Max Planck Society's press office.

On April 30, Nicaragua brought a case against Germany at the ICJ, accusing it of enabling the genocide in Gaza through weapons supplies to Israel, and by means of its suspension of aid destined to UNRWA. Germany was however successful in objecting, among other legal arguments, that it had scaled down military supplies to Israel from the onset of the war. The ICJ ruled that it could not issue provisional measures against the German state.

As for the responsibility of German academia towards shaping research programmes at the Israel-based Ollendorff Center, the MPS spokesperson told TNA that “an advisory board with international, Israeli and German members advises the center on its research program, approves the budget and follows up on scientific performance.”

TNA contacted by email Prof. Juergen Renn, the chair of the Minerva Center Committee, in charge of appointing Minerva Centers, to ask whether the potential impact on the rights of Palestinians was factored in when allocating funds for the centres. Our questions were forwarded instead to Dr. Lou Bohlen, head of office at the Minerva Foundation, but no reply was received.

TNA also emailed current and former members of the advisory committee of the Ollendorff Minerva Center, to ask whether similar considerations were taken into account. No reply was received. 

The MPS’ unwavering support for Israel

The Max Planck Anti-War Machine collective told TNA: “Our primary objective is to raise awareness about the connections between the MPS and the Israeli technology used in the Gaza genocide.”

In fact, since the war in Gaza began, MPS has doubled down on their support for Israel. On 20 December 2023, the Society announced it was allocating 1 mn euro ($1.09 mn), in addition to 500,000 euro ($545,000) from German federal funds, to establish the Max Planck Israel Programme. The most important aim of the programme is to “counteract the drop-out of young talent and facilitate the early return of international researchers to Israel as well as to strengthen the exchange of Israeli scientists with Max Planck Institutes”. The announcement also included the planned opening of a Minerva Foundation office in Israel.

On 12 June 2024, in response to calls for a boycott of Israeli universities, MPS President Patrick Cramer tweeted a statement by the Alliance of Science Organisations in Germany. “We consider it discriminatory and misguided to terminate research collaborations with Israeli scientific institutions, to exclude Israeli scientists from international conferences and awards or to reject funding applications from researchers working at Israeli institutions”, the statement said. 

The group of anonymous researchers counter the MPS’ stance by arguing that their aim is “to ensure that the taxpayers in Germany and the academic community at large are informed about the implications of MPS' current associations”. 

They also call on the Society to “completely divest from Israel and sever all academic ties with Israeli institutions”. This action, they say, is not without precedent; “a similar decisive step was taken when academic relations with Russia were entirely severed following the invasion of Ukraine.”

The researchers’ collective believes that the MPS should learn from its history. In the past, the Society, formerly known as Kaiser Wilhelm Society, officially admitted having “co-masterminded and sometimes even actively participated in the crimes of the Nazi regime”. Given this historical legacy, the researchers argue that “the MPS must take all necessary measures to ensure it does not become complicit in yet another genocide.”

Editing and fact-checking:

Investigative Editor Andrea Glioti and Researcher Anas Ambri.

July 18 correction: a previous version of this article stated that the ICJ had ordered Israel on 26 January to suspend "military operations in and against Gaza". This is not correct, as the ICJ did not issue such an order.