Part 3: Who TF Am I Working For?? | The Netanyahu Connection

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Part 3: Who TF Am I Working For?? | The Netanyahu Connection

Sep 18, 2025

What happens when the world’s most powerful surveillance architect builds his deepest alliances in one of the world’s most permanent war zones?

We’ve been tracing Larry Ellison’s blueprint piece by piece. In Part I, we saw how his worldview was forged at the CIA. In Part II, we followed Oracle into China as the government rebuilt its legitimacy after Tiananmen, embedding ancient symbolism into modern surveillance.

Now we turn to Israel. And here the stakes come into sharpest focus: Gaza as laboratory, bunkers as infrastructure, and media megaphones waiting to sell the story abroad.

Lavender and “Where’s Daddy?”

In the first weeks of the Gaza war, Israeli intelligence officers began using an AI system codenamed Lavender. According to reporting from +972 Magazine and Local Call, its purpose was chillingly simple: generate kill lists.

Lavender ingested everything: phone intercepts, cell-tower pings, drone footage, satellite imagery, facial-recognition matches at checkpoints, even social media traces. Out of that torrent of data, it marked tens of thousands of Palestinians as suspected militants.

Officers were then given the list. Their job was not to investigate, not to analyze—only to perform a 20-second check. The only real question: is this person male? If yes, they clicked “approve,” and a bomb was assigned to the target’s home.

A second system, grimly nicknamed “Where’s Daddy?”, tracked those flagged men until they went home at night. Then it sent an alert so the Air Force could strike while their families were inside.

This was not intelligence in the traditional sense. It was automation. Mechanized killing. And with an error rate estimated around 10 percent, that meant thousands of people wrongly marked for death.

The casual cruelty of a name like “Where’s Daddy?” tells you everything about how far the line has already been crossed.

The Bunkers Beneath Jerusalem

Now, step back to 2021. That May, during Operation Guardian of the Walls, Gaza was under bombardment for eleven days. More than 250 Palestinians were killed, along with over a dozen Israelis. Towers crumbled. Infrastructure buckled.

That same year, Israel awarded a $1.2 billion government cloud contract known as Project Nimbus. The winners: Google and Amazon. Oracle lost.

Ellison’s response was extraordinary. Rather than walk away, he announced Oracle would build its own cloud region in Israel anyway; buried nine levels underground in Jerusalem. A facility hardened against missile strikes, designed to keep running in the middle of war.

Three years later, in March 2024, as the war escalated after Hamas’s October 7 attacks and Israel’s invasion of Gaza, Oracle pledged to build a second underground region. CEO Safra Catz said explicitly that it was meant to remain operational during wartime.

This was more than infrastructure. It was a proof of concept. Israel’s wars weren’t a only a backdrop to Oracle’s strategy; they were the conditions that made the strategy viable.

Project MENTA

Buried in Israeli defense budgets and Oracle contracts, one name keeps surfacing: Project MENTA.

It began in 2021, the same year Oracle broke ground on its Jerusalem bunker. It was set up as a four-year collaboration with the Israeli Air Force. As of fall 2025, it is now concluding.

Almost nothing has been said publicly. Internally, Oracle employees brushed off questions with lines like, “a bunch of important military stuff we can’t share,” punctuated with a sword emoji. No self-promotion, huh? That silence is telling in a company that usually thrives on it.

Speculation swirls: telemetry, pilot biometrics, secure chip design. But the most convincing interpretation is simpler. If Lavender was the app putting names on kill lists, MENTA was the plumbing—the hidden process that carried those names seamlessly into the kill chain.

By structuring it as a four-year cycle, the Air Force gave itself time not just to adopt software, but to absorb a new doctrine. A culture shift from command-and-control to machine-speed targeting.

And now, as Gaza enters its second year of war, Project MENTA is ending. Was the deliverable a platform? A hardened system? Or something more intangible; the normalization of AI as decision-maker in Israel’s air war?

What we know is this: Gaza has been the live demo.

The Fusion of Body and Battlefield

While MENTA tied Oracle into the Air Force, Ellison was also pouring money into Israel’s health sector. In 2022, he invested in Imagene AI, a startup training algorithms to detect cancer from digitized biopsy slides. Around the same time, Sheba Medical Center, the country’s largest hospital, began moving some of its AI projects onto Oracle’s cloud.

On the surface, this looks like philanthropy. But Ellison’s interest in cancer was never charity. There’s no profit in cures. The value lies in the pipeline—millions of biopsy slides, genetic sequences, treatment outcomes across entire populations.

And pipelines need infrastructure. Imagene and Sheba provided the data. Oracle provided the sovereign cloud.

The overlap is striking: the same infrastructure processing battlefield data is also ingesting medical data. Tumors and targets, bodies and battlefields all flowing through the same machine.

In China, Oracle was a contractor, embedding into someone else’s system. In Israel, the roles are reversed. Ellison isn’t selling tools this time; he is using the state itself as the proving ground.

Words of Iron

When Hamas launched its October 7 attacks in 2023, Israel’s response was named Swords of Iron. But there was a parallel campaign almost as aggressive: the digital offensive analysts called “Words of Iron.”

Pro-Israel hashtags trended globally. Videos were clipped, subtitled, and pushed into feeds within hours. Infographics spread faster than news reports. It was information war at machine speed.

At the same time, Oracle’s leaders made their loyalties unmistakable. Safra Catz described Israel as Oracle’s “most important customer.” Ellison’s personal friendship with Netanyahu was already well known—the prime minister has even vacationed on Ellison’s Hawaiian island of Lanai.

This blurs the line between infrastructure and narrative. Oracle doesn’t just build the bunkers; its leadership aligns personally with the politicians deciding how the technology is used and explained.

If Lavender and MENTA are the reality on the ground, then “Words of Iron” is the story that shields it from scrutiny.

The Closed Loop

By fall 2025, the outline of Ellison’s system is visible:

The Laboratory: Israel, where Oracle’s cloud has been embedded into both the military and health sectors. Four years of Project MENTA have wired the Air Force into Oracle’s infrastructure. Imagene and Sheba have added health data to the mix.
The Showroom: Gaza, where algorithms like Lavender and “Where’s Daddy?” were not prototypes but live deployments, generating battlefield data in real war.
The Megaphones: The Ellison media orbit. Paramount and CBS now under family control. Warner Bros. Discovery in his sights. TikTok already flowing through Oracle’s servers via Project Texas, shaping the news diet of a generation.

Piece by piece, infrastructure, doctrine, and narrative are being fused into one loop.

This isn’t Ellison as a tech billionaire who happens to like Israel. It’s Ellison as architect of an operating system for governance — tested in live conflict, and now preparing for export.

The question isn’t whether it works. Gaza has already answered that.

The question is: who’s next?