The European Commission gave unconditional approval in February 2026 to Alphabet’s acquisition of Wiz, the Israeli cybersecurity company, in a $32 billion deal that had already cleared US antitrust review. Regulators determined the transaction would not significantly reduce competition in the European cloud computing market and dismissed concerns about data access advantages. The deal is done.
What the EU’s competition analysis did not address — and was not designed to address — is the provenance of the technology and the economy it comes from. Wiz is one of the most prominent recent success stories from Israel’s military-linked cyber sector, a cluster of companies many of whose founders, technologies, and methodologies trace directly to Unit 8200, Israel’s elite military intelligence unit, and to the broader surveillance and control infrastructure developed through decades of occupation of Palestinian territory.
That infrastructure is not incidental to the product. The Palestinian population has served, without consent, as the testing ground for surveillance technologies later commercialized and sold globally. Facial recognition systems, predictive policing algorithms, biometric databases, drone surveillance architectures — technologies developed to monitor, control, and suppress an occupied population have become export products normalized through EU regulatory frameworks that evaluate market competition while ignoring how the market was built.
NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, developed by Unit 8200 alumni, was used against journalists, activists, and heads of state across Europe. Candiru’s tools were documented targeting civil society organizations. Israeli surveillance companies have sold to authoritarian governments across the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia. The EU has responded with modest criticism and ongoing trade.
The Google-Wiz deal deepens global dependence on a military-linked security economy that has explicitly served the occupation of Palestinian land. Every organization that stores data in Google Cloud after this acquisition integrates, however indirectly, into a chain of value that runs through that economy.
Regulators found no competition problem. The competition problem was never the one that mattered.
The EU Just Approved Google’s $32 Billion Purchase of an Israeli Cybersecurity Firm Built on Surveilling Palestinians
The European Commission gave unconditional approval in February 2026 to Alphabet’s acquisition of Wiz, the Israeli cybersecurity company, in a $32 billion deal that had already cleared US antitrust review. Regulators determined the transaction would not significantly reduce competition in the European cloud computing market and dismissed concerns about data access advantages. The deal is done.
What the EU’s competition analysis did not address — and was not designed to address — is the provenance of the technology and the economy it comes from. Wiz is one of the most prominent recent success stories from Israel’s military-linked cyber sector, a cluster of companies many of whose founders, technologies, and methodologies trace directly to Unit 8200, Israel’s elite military intelligence unit, and to the broader surveillance and control infrastructure developed through decades of occupation of Palestinian territory.
That infrastructure is not incidental to the product. The Palestinian population has served, without consent, as the testing ground for surveillance technologies later commercialized and sold globally. Facial recognition systems, predictive policing algorithms, biometric databases, drone surveillance architectures — technologies developed to monitor, control, and suppress an occupied population have become export products normalized through EU regulatory frameworks that evaluate market competition while ignoring how the market was built.
NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, developed by Unit 8200 alumni, was used against journalists, activists, and heads of state across Europe. Candiru’s tools were documented targeting civil society organizations. Israeli surveillance companies have sold to authoritarian governments across the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia. The EU has responded with modest criticism and ongoing trade.
The Google-Wiz deal deepens global dependence on a military-linked security economy that has explicitly served the occupation of Palestinian land. Every organization that stores data in Google Cloud after this acquisition integrates, however indirectly, into a chain of value that runs through that economy.
Regulators found no competition problem. The competition problem was never the one that mattered.