For years, Palantir CEO Alex Karp has been an outspoken supporter of Israel and that country’s ongoing war in Gaza, which, according to a recent tally, has resulted in the deaths of over 73,000 Palestinians, many of them women and children. A United Nations investigation published last September found that Israel’s actions in Palestine constituted genocide.
But a photo of a young Karp included in Valley of Death, a forthcoming book from journalist Sharon Weinberger about the relationship between Silicon Valley and the U.S. military, suggests his political views have changed over time.
The photo is taken from a yearbook of Haverford College in Pennsylvania, where Karp attended as an undergraduate. He’s shown reclining on a stone ledge and wearing a keffiyeh, a traditional Arab garment that has long been a symbol of support for the Palestinian people. The keffiyeh as an emblem of solidarity and political resistance was popularized in the 1970s by Yasser Arafat, the former leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), who often wore the garment, including during a 1974 address to the United Nations. Keffiyehs are often worn as headdresses, but Karp is shown donning it like a scarf. Just a couple of months after the October 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas militants and the ensuing war in Gaza, three college-aged men of Palestinian descent were shot in Vermont while walking down the street—two of them had been wearing keffiyehs over their shoulders. (All three survived the attempted murder.) According to Weinberger, Karp “was an active participant” during his years at Haverford College “in student activities to protest racism.”
In the aftermath of the October 2023 Hamas attack, Palantir immediately rallied to Israel’s side, calling for swift justice. “Certain kinds of evil can only be fought with force,” the company wrote on its official X account days after the attack. “Palantir stands with Israel.” In January 2024, Palantir signed a deal to provide the Israeli government with “advanced technology in support of war-related missions,” the company’s executive vice president Josh Harris told Bloomberg.
Karp has often spoken about his Jewish identity shaping his worldview, according to Weinberger, and framed Israel’s war with Palestine as a struggle of good versus evil. “From my perspective, it’s not just about Israel,” he said in a 2024 interview with CNBC. “It’s like, ‘Do you believe in the West? Do you believe the West has a superior way of living?’” The young radical who once stood up against racism, it seems, now has a cultural superiority complex.
Palantir did not immediately reply to Gizmodo’s request for comment. Weinberger’s Valley of Death will be available in bookstores later this month.
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