Known as the “Pentagon on the Charles,” the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a poster child for the military-industrial-academic complex that was a well-known hub for student anti-war activism in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Campus protests against the Vietnam War at that time got MIT to disassociate itself from the Draper Laboratory, which manufactured guidance technology used in the Poseidon missile system.
Today, a new generation of student activists has lambasted MIT for its complicity in the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
In December, the MIT Coalition for Palestine published a report, “MIT Science For Genocide,” detailing how MIT labs had conducted $3.7 million worth of weapon and surveillance research that was directly sponsored by Israel’s Defense Ministry.
The latter’s wartime head, Yoav Gallant, famously called Palestinians “human animals” and is under indictment by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The MIT research projects include development of algorithms that help drone swarms to better pursue escape targets, improve underwater surveillance technology, and help military aircraft to more effectively evade missiles.
According to the report, two of the sponsorships were renewed after October 7, 2023.
Israel is the only foreign country to enter direct partnership with MIT, doing so under the oversight of the Pentagon, which accounts for 14.7% of all MIT research grants.
The authors of the report specified that MIT’s ties to the genocide of the Palestinians was “immoral, illegal and unpopular among the MIT community” and “broke MIT’s own rules on foreign engagements.”
In the past, MIT has cut ties to laboratories and companies that were involved with Russia’s war in Ukraine and Chinese surveillance of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang province because of concerns about the potential link to human rights abuses.
In a referendum conducted last year, 63.7% of MIT’s undergraduates and 70% of its graduate students voted to cut ties between MIT and the Israeli military.
Applying Their Genius for Dubious Purposes
Scientists have long faced ethical dilemmas about the kinds of research that they undertake and whether to apply their genius to further the war-making capability of oppressive governments.
An MIT professor who chose the latter is Daniela Rus, a Romanian-American computer scientist who is Erna Viterbi Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and directs MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
Recipient of a Ph.D. from Cornell University, Rus is a pioneer in the development of self-driving vehicles, drones and machine learning and was named to the White House’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology during Donald J. Trump’s first term.[1]
Included in the 2017 Forbes “Incredible Women Advancing A.I. Research” list, Rus is author or co-author of the books Computing the Future, The Heart and the Chip: Our Bright Future with Robots, and The Mind’s Mirror: Risk and Reward in the Age of AI.
The research Rus conducted that has put her on the MIT Coalition for Palestine’s rogues list was for a project entitled “Coreset Compression Algorithms.” It focused on the development of algorithms that were designed to help program drone swarms to follow and target people.
An article that was retracted, i.e., censored, from a campus newspaper, The Tech, specified that the IDF uses drone swarms to follow and then fire upon Palestinians. In some cases, quadcopter drones tested in Rus’s project have been used to lure Palestinians out of their homes accompanied by the playing of sounds of women and children under distress. The censored article quoted from a Palestinian poet, Mosab Abu Toha, who showed videos of quadcopter drones doing the latter followed by Toha’s home being destroyed by a bomb.
MIT PHD student Prahlad Iyengar told journalist Chris Hedges that “by introducing these [drone] technologies and by enabling these technologies, what is really being enabled by MIT’s research for the Israeli military is the ability for drones to engage in tracking, in facial recognition, in targeting of Palestinians. MIT’s research can enable a genocide and in fact is enabling the ongoing genocide against Palestinians.”[2]
Besides Rus, the other faculty listed on the “MIT Science For Genocide” rogues gallery include:
1. Eytan Modiano, the Richard C. Maclaurin Professor in Aeronautics and Astronautics, who received $137,147 from the Israeli Defense Ministry for a project involving the testing of robotic drone swarms and mobilizing them to track moving targets, including protesters at demonstrations or people in vehicles.
2. Sertac Karaman, Director of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), a drone development specialist who has previously received grants from the U.S. Office of Naval Research. He received close to $1 million in grants from the Israeli Defense Ministry, including for a project on underwater drone surveillance and on the development of next-generation ground-based sensors reminiscent of Robert S. McNamara’s Electronic Battlefield in Vietnam that could be used to trigger drone strikes.
3. Christopher A. Voigt, a faculty member in the Department of Biological Engineering who received a $786,998 grant from the Israeli Defense Ministry.
4. Yoel Fink, Professor of Material Sciences and Engineering and a graduate of the Israeli Institute of Technology, who received a grant of $430,355 from the Israeli Defense Ministry for research designed to assist in IDF radio monitoring, surveillance and electronic warfare capabilities.
5. Emilio Frazzoli, another robotic and drone specialist, who is an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics;
6. Qing Hu, a professor of electric engineering at MIT, who received a $430,000 grant from the Israeli Defense Ministry for research into lasers with military application.
7. William D. Oliver, an electrical engineering and computer science professor involved in a quantum computing project with military applications.
Last semester, Daniela Rus told the MIT administration that she felt unsafe because of student anti-war/anti-genocide demonstrations—which never actually physically threatened her.
In response, the MIT Coalition for Palestine raised the pertinent question: “What about the women in Gaza who fear being killed by the very technology Daniela Rus’s work contributes to?”
Association with Merchants of Death
According to the “MIT Science For Genocide” report, MIT’s bloody hands extend to its collaborative relationships with military contractors—notably Elbit Systems, Maersk, Lockheed Martin and Caterpillar—that sell vast amounts of weaponry to Israel, or aid in weapons shipments.
Elbit Systems supplies 85% of Israel’s killer drone arsenal and is the primary provider to the IDF of mortars, signals intelligence technology, white phosphorus, cluster bombs and flechette projectiles. The company also does brisk business along the U.S.-Mexican border and sells spyware and weapons to repressive regimes like Azerbaijan, Ethiopia and India.
This has not dissuaded MIT’s administration from inviting Elbit to become a member of MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program (ILP), which connects it to MIT alumni and start-up technology companies that they set up.
Maersk, the largest shipping company in the world, shipped thousands of tons of weapons to Israel through the Port of Ashdod. According to “MIT Science For Genocide,” the company has a partnership with the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics and has gained privileged access to MIT researchers. It has sponsored multiple research papers by MIT scientists focused on automating the shipping industry.
In 2019, MIT’s International Science and Technology Initiatives Israel (MISTI-Israel) established a seed fund to connect student researchers at MIT to Lockheed Martin projects in Israel.
Lockheed Martin is among the biggest weapons contractors in the world, including AGM-114R9X Hellfire missiles that were used to pulverize Gaza, along with F-16 and F-25 jets that carried out horrific bombing operations.
This past fall, when Lockheed Martin recruiters came to MIT’s campuses, they faced a barrage of angry students with signs like “Lockheed Kills Children in Gaza.” Prahlad Iyengar was among those charged with harassment and intimidation of the recruiters.
Another company targeted by protesters was Caterpillar Inc., which is notorious for building the bulldozers that Israel has used to impose collective punishment on rebellious Palestinian towns like Jenin in the West Bank.
Caterpillar Inc. has been involved since 2009 with the MIT Leaders for Global Operations (LGO) partnership, which sponsors research projects and internships for students.
Other companies complicit in Israel’s genocide, like Raytheon (now RTX), which builds guided missiles and drones among other weapons, have also had long partnerships with MIT and been targets of past student protests.
Raytheon’s founder, Vannevar Bush, was MIT’s Vice President and Dean of MIT’s Engineering Department who was a primary organizer of the Manhattan Project (which developed the atomic bomb).[3]
Aurora Flight Sciences, a subsidiary of Boeing, which makes the GBU-28 guided bombs that were used widely in Gaza, leases workspace from MIT at 314 Main Street in Cambridge, MA.
Additionally, Google and Amazon, which provide the IDF with cloud computing and AI services under Project Nimbus have mutually beneficial relations with MIT.
Falling Beneath the Activists’ Radar—MIT-Ukraine Initiative
The “MIT Science For Genocide” report is oddly silent about MIT’s complicity in the U.S. imperial intervention in Ukraine and war crimes there.
The report mentions how MIT cut off relations with the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in Moscow, with which MIT had 45 grants, the day after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
At the time, MIT issued a statement condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which completely ignored the eight previous years of U.S. meddling in Ukraine and U.S.-Ukrainian provocations directed against Russia.[4]
Besides canceling the Skolkovo contract after the Russian invasion, MIT established an MIT-Ukraine Program, whose aim was to “mobilize MIT’s scientific and technical expertise in support of Ukraine,” according to the program’s website.
The insinuation was that Ukraine was a model democracy that had been attacked by a more powerful neighbor.
In reality, however, as CovertAction Magazine has covered for a long time, Ukraine is not a model democracy by any stretch—its U.S.-imposed leader has canceled elections, banned opposition parties, and hunted down opposition figures. He has also adopted regressive labor laws and sold off Ukrainian resources to foreign corporate interests and Wall Street.
Furthermore, since the U.S.-backed Maidan coup, Ukrainian politics has been dominated by far-right-wing elements whose forefathers collaborated with the Nazis in World War II and who invoked Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera as a national hero.
When eastern Ukraine pushed for autonomy, Ukraine began waging a decade-long war that was fought primarily by the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, whose purpose was in part to draw the Russians into the conflict.
With U.S. weapons, including many manufactured with support from MIT and other university scientists, the Ukrainian military bombed and shelled eastern Ukraine for years, forcing people to live in underground bunkers and killing countless civilians.[5]
Quadcopter drones of the kind experimented on and developed at MIT have been particularly widely adapted by Ukraine, whose drone industry the Biden administration secretly helped subsidize, for similar purposes as in Gaza.
The victims of Ukrainian government terrorism include Katya Kutubaeva, a beautiful twelve-year-old ballerina, and her beloved teacher, Galina Vasilyevna Volodina, who were walking together on August 4, 2022, on Pushkin Boulevard in Donetsk when they were torn to pieces by Ukrainian army rockets.
In May 2023, Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett reported on a Ukrainian army attack on Donetsk city center using U.S. produced HIMARS rockets that resulted in the destruction of a city bus and murder of nine civilians—including an eight year old girl and her grandmother in another sadly typical incident.[6]
For some reason, with only scattered exceptions, the suffering of the people of eastern Ukraine and increasingly Russians has never registered among American leftists and was never covered even in alternative media outlets watched by activists like Democracy Now.
No groups ever sprang up on campuses to offer solidarity for the people there or to investigate and protest their universities’ ties to the production of weapons that were used—like in Gaza—to kill and maim civilians.[7]
From the information that is accessible on MIT’s website, the MIT-Ukraine Program has provided financing to bring Ukrainian scientists to study at MIT and sponsored internships for Ukrainian students and lectures and public talks supportive of the Ukrainian cause. Additionally, there have been efforts to help Ukrainian scientists whose labs have been shut down because of the war and to develop programs to aid in Ukraine’s reconstruction.
Three MIT students, including seasoned U.S. army veterans and reservists, furthermore, worked with the Kyiv Engineering Corps in Warsaw, Poland, on optimizing aid distribution logistics to the Ukrainian front-line zones. They were directly involved in the distribution of weapons, which are often delivered under the cover of humanitarian aid.
An April 2023 MIT News article profiled an MIT alumnus (2019) associated with the program, Ian Miller, who was then working remotely with the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI). According to author Deborah Halber, Miller’s “skills in transportation and power system modeling, developed at MITEI under Principal Research Scientist Emre Gençer, helped the team transport more than 150 used vehicles—Nissan Pathfinders and vans for moving civilians away from the front, Ford pickups for transporting anti-missile defense systems—and hundreds of batteries, generators, drones, bulletproof vests, and helmets to the front through nightmarish logistical bottlenecks.”
Miller teamed up with another MIT alumnus, Evan Platt (class of 2020) and U.S. Air Force veteran Mark Lindquist to set up a non-profit that provided cost-benefit analysis of weapons systems to the Ukrainian government that were being shipped to the Ukrainian front line for use against the Russians. The MIT team, additionally, was involved in the creation of digital maps and in helping to modernize Ukraine’s intelligence infrastructure to facilitate “better military operations,” in Miller’s words.
The founding director of the MIT-Ukraine program, history professor Elizabeth Wood, authored a scholarly article on how Vladimir Putin cultivated a certain vision of masculinity that lent support to his authoritarian rule and allegedly for brutal practices among Russian soldiers in Ukraine.
While there is some merit, her analysis obfuscates the origins of the Russo-Ukraine conflict by placing all the focus and blame on Russia and the supposed pathologies of its society, while ignoring the U.S. and Ukrainian roles in triggering the conflict and carrying out brutal violence against the people of eastern Ukraine and Russia itself where U.S. weapons have been targeted.
Wood is co-author of a 2016 political primer on Russia-Ukraine published by the Woodrow Wilson Center that similarly omits the U.S.-CIA role in supporting the February 2014 Maidan insurrection and its domination by far-right groups. In her chapter, Wood discounts the theory that Russian leader Vladimir Putin was reactive in pushing for the Russian seizure of Crimea (which an overwhelming number of Crimeans voted in favor of) following the Maidan coup.[8]
Wood’s co-authors are all connected to the political establishment that has supported a destructive new Cold War with Russia and war in Ukraine that was deliberately provoked by the U.S. as part of a strategy of trying to weaken Russia, a potential geo-political rival to the U.S.[9]
So why aren’t MIT students disrupting Dr. Wood’s classes and accusing her of complicity in war crimes—rooted in Machiavellian geo-political calculation—as they have Dr. Rus?
Both professors are equally culpable in my book.
Wood distorts the nature of the Ukraine-Russia War and presents a one-sided viewpoint to her students under the veneer of a scholarly analysis while using the cover of MIT to actively support what appears to be a military-intelligence operation.
Rus, by contrast, considers herself a robotics innovator working to advance science, regardless of how it is applied.
Rus once stated that she imagined a future where “robots are so integrated in the fabric of human life that they become as common as smart phones are today.” ↑
Iyengar has faced suspension for his outspoken opposition to MIT’s research projects with the Israeli Defense Ministry. ↑
Affirming his belief that “science would protect the nation” in Modern Arms and Men (1949), Bush claimed that the burst of atomic fear following the Hiroshima attack was exaggerated and that prophets of doom had wrongly predicted the “end of the world as we know it.” Bush also said that, if President Franklin Roosevelt had “prioritized weapons development ten years earlier,” World War II “could have been prevented.” ↑
MIT President Rafael Reif blamed Russia for initiating a “violent invasion of a peaceful neighbor.” Ukraine, however, was not peaceful as, for the previous eight years, heavily armed by the U.S., it had violently attacked the people of eastern Ukraine, killing thousands and forcing many others to live in underground bunkers. Reif and his counterparts never offered sympathy to eastern Ukrainian students subjected to U.S.-Ukrainian attack after that region voted for autonomy following the February 2014 Maidan coup that imposed a regime hostile to its people. ↑
Interested readers should consult the video documentaries of Patrick Lancaster, a U.S. Navy veteran who, for years, has been cataloging the horrific atrocities carried out by the Ukrainian military with U.S. weapons. Lancaster has never been given a platform, sadly, in the U.S., including in activist media. ↑
Bartlett reported that the attack also targeted a major hospital, apartment buildings, houses, parks, streets, and sidewalks. All civilian areas—not military targets. ↑
In June 2024, I attended the keynote session of the Left Forum in New York which brought together student leaders of the campus anti-Israel/genocide protests who were defending Hamas’s right to resist Israeli aggression. When I asked them about Ukraine, they admitted to ignorance about the conflict or regurgitated U.S. government propaganda about Russia. One claimed the conflict reflected inter-imperialist rivalry between the U.S. and Russia. None had any interest in broadening campus activism to include Ukraine and other U.S. overseas military operations including in Southeast Asia, a very curious and disturbing attitude. ↑
Elizabeth A. Wood et al., Roots of Russia’s War in Ukraine (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2016). ↑
The co-authors include: William E. Pomeranz, a former director of the George Kennan Center who has called Putin’s Russia the “the sick man of Eurasia”; E. Wayne Merry, a former political affairs officer at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, 1991-1994; and Maxim Trudolyubov, a senior adviser at the Kennan Institute and editor at large of Meduza, an anti-Putin publication financed in the past by anti-Putin oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky who had close ties to Western intelligence agencies. Branded as an undesirable publication within Russia, Meduza is the type of publication typically funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA front organization. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Left on Left.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
