Israeli settler violence escalates in the West Bank as Americans confront AI data centers consuming enormous amounts of electricity and water.
The embedded video contains solely the questions that WBAI’s We Decide’s Jenna Flanagan asked me. The entire panel discussion can be viewed here (Episode: 2026-08-24). We Decide is a joint Pacifica Affiliate, WBAI production, and the We Decide: America at the Crossroads with Jenna Flanagan.
Summary
The WBAI We Decide political panel connected two seemingly different stories—escalating Israeli settler violence in the occupied West Bank and America’s rapidly expanding AI data-center buildout—through one common question: Who pays when concentrated power pursues territorial, political, or economic objectives without meaningful democratic accountability? The discussion argued that Palestinian families face growing coercion and displacement while many American communities increasingly confront energy-intensive data centers whose private benefits can impose public costs.
- Settler violence has become a systemic humanitarian crisis. The panel discussed Palestinian families trapped in their homes as masked Israeli settlers attacked residents and property. The latest UN reporting says more than 1,040 Palestinians have been injured in settler attacks during 2026, with attacks increasingly affecting homes, roads, farmland, water, and electrical infrastructure.
- The violence cannot be dismissed as a few isolated extremists. Reuters reported another late-August attack in Qusra involving masked settlers, a besieged Palestinian home, and allegations that Israeli forces detained Palestinians while making no settler arrests.
- American policymakers are facing growing pressure to respond. Forty-five members of the Senate Democratic caucus recently urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to curb settler violence and investigate killings of American citizens.
-
AI itself is not the enemy; privatized implementation is the problem. The panel argued that AI could represent society’s accumulated knowledge and benefit everyone, but its gains are instead being concentrated among a relatively small number of corporations and investors.
-
Data centers increasingly externalize costs onto communities. The discussion highlighted electricity and water consumption and argued that facilities can be engineered more responsibly when corporations are forced to absorb those costs rather than passing them to the public. Berkeley Lab now estimates that data centers could consume 11.8% of all U.S. electricity by 2030, with plausible scenarios ranging from 9.5% to 15.3%.
Whether the battlefield is Palestinian land or an American community fighting an enormous industrial load on its electrical and water systems, democracy fails when government protects powerful interests before ordinary people. Progressives should insist on enforceable human rights abroad and enforceable public-interest standards at home.
PLEASE BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBER TODAY
Countering billionaires—and soon trillionaires—is hard, probing work. They flood the zone with propaganda, policy distortions, and economic fallacies rooted in the Powell Memo and financed by concentrated wealth. We work every day to answer that machinery with truth, context, and critical thinking. But independent media cannot survive on conviction alone. It needs support from people who understand the stakes. Please become a paid subscriber today. Your support keeps this work alive, expands its reach, and helps build a media ecosystem that serves people, not plutocrats. This is not charity. It is an investment in truth, democracy, and the public good.
Premium Content (Complimentary)
From the West Bank to America’s Data Centers, Concentrated Power Sends Everyone Else the Bill
Two subjects that initially appear unrelated—Israeli settler violence in the occupied West Bank and America’s explosive growth of AI data centers—actually expose the same underlying political disease: concentrated power operating without sufficient democratic constraint.
The WBAI We Decide panel began with reports of Palestinian families effectively trapped in their homes as settlers intensified attacks in the occupied West Bank. The discussion correctly framed the violence not simply as random misconduct by disconnected individuals but as part of a broader struggle over land, movement, and territorial control.
Current evidence makes that argument increasingly difficult to dismiss.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that more than 1,040 Palestinians had been injured in settler attacks during 2026 by late August. It documented 80 settler attacks resulting in casualties or property damage during just two weeks in August. The frequency of Palestinian injuries directly caused by settlers has risen from roughly one every three days in 2020 to more than three per day in 2026.
Reuters also documented a late-August attack in Qusra in which dozens of masked settlers allegedly threw stones at a Palestinian home while residents remained trapped inside. Witnesses said Israeli soldiers were present, yet no settlers were arrested.
Those facts demand more than ritual diplomatic concern from Washington. Forty-five Senate Democrats recently called on Netanyahu to rein in settler violence and investigate the deaths of American citizens allegedly killed by settlers or Israeli forces. When the United States supplies enormous political and military support to Israel, it cannot credibly pretend it bears no responsibility for demanding adherence to international law and basic human rights.
Then the panel pivoted to AI and data centers.
That transition was more logical than it may have seemed.
AI can become an extraordinary social resource. Humanity has poured generations of knowledge, creativity, publicly funded research, journalism, art, engineering, and human experience into the information ecosystem that modern AI derives tremendous value from. The fundamental question is whether that accumulated social inheritance will enrich society broadly or serve as another mechanism by which concentrated capital privatizes collective knowledge.
The panel made the distinction clear: AI as a tool can be tremendously useful; AI implemented to maximize private extraction can become socially destructive.
Data centers make that conflict physical.
These facilities require massive quantities of electricity and substantial cooling resources. Berkeley Lab’s June 2026 update projects that data centers could consume approximately 11.8% of total U.S. electricity by 2030, with scenarios ranging from 9.5% to 15.3%. Berkeley researchers have also estimated substantial water consumption associated with U.S. data-center operations.
That does not mean America should reject data centers. It means America must reject the idea that communities should subsidize corporate expansion through higher utility costs, strained infrastructure, depleted water resources, noise, pollution, or publicly financed grid upgrades.
The technology exists to build more efficient facilities, improve cooling, recover waste heat, deploy storage, produce power onsite, and integrate clean energy. The obstacle is frequently not engineering. It is political economy.
Corporations minimize private costs when government permits them to socialize environmental and infrastructure costs.
That is the connective tissue between these stories.
Whether dealing with territorial domination in the West Bank or corporate domination of American infrastructure planning, powerful actors flourish when ordinary people lack meaningful leverage.
A progressive politics must reverse that relationship. Human rights must outrank territorial ambition. Communities must outrank corporate convenience. And technological progress must produce broadly shared prosperity rather than another upward transfer of wealth.
Democracy means the people set the terms—not settlers, not monopolists, not billionaires, and not corporations.
