Opinion: Tech Bros Stink (of blood)

Cybersecurity Company With Deep Links to Israel Visit the Hub

Mantis Toboggan, M.D.

It’s week two of the mid trimester break at Kelburn campus. The library is sparsely populated, but the hub is a hive of smart-casual clothes, caterers running around with canapés and coffees, and the grating chatter of tech bros. The Tertiary ICT Conference 2026 is being hosted in The Hub at Kelburn Campus, with the theme of “Imagine | Empower | Belong.” Major brands like PB Tech, Microsoft, and HP are plying their wares to the university. 

There are robots that move uncannily and an alarming number of cybersecurity firms looking for contracts that will offer attendees protection from the impending AI apocalypse. Around the necks of these shmoozing nerds are lanyards bearing the name of the event’s “GOLD + NAMEBADGES & LANYARDS” sponsor, Palo Alto Networks (PANW).

Their stall is modest and their name raises eyebrows, sounding startlingly like everyone’s favourite company, run by New Zealand’s favourite son, Palantir and Peter Thiel. A quick google search reveals Palo Alto is an American cybersecurity company that offers cloud space, firewalls and…cyber warfare systems for the IDF.

Its founder Nir Zuk was a software developer for Unit 8200, one of Israel’s premier military intelligence, cyberwarfare, counterintelligence arms. Unit 8200 conducts Orwellian surveillance on Palestinians and uses the AI missile system “lavender” to immolate Gazans.  PANW is worth $133 billion (with a b) on the Israeli stock-exchange and has signed a $250 million dollar contract with the Netanyahu genocide-ocracy. 

On 23 September 2025, the Te Herenga Waka academic board passed a resounding motion for Boycott, Divestment, and sanctions against Israel for their brutal ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people.

I smell an inconsistency here; I smell the blood of an entire nation, in fact. So, I put it to you, Te Herenga Waka: why are you opening your doors to a killing machine when your academic board openly rejected this sort of carry-on? 

Otago University has already seen controversy after a PANW came knocking earlier this year, where a partnership between the two was proposed for setting up a new Master’s program at their Queenstown campus. 

Critic reported in May of this year that the partnership was “under review” by Vice-Chancellor Grant Robertson’s team, with all the platitudes you’d expect about their “concern” with “the situation in Gaza.” Critic then wrote in July that the review found “no substantive evidence” that would lead Otago to cancel the contract. Ending the partnership would mean Otago would be “ending its commitment to academic neutrality.” Who could’ve seen that coming? Long live academic freedom and long live the Israeli war machine, awesome!

Could Te Herenga Waka possibly think of having a similar relationship with PANW? The point of this expo, from what I can tell, is for the companies in the hub to sell their nerdy shit to one another and VUW (this is pure speculation, I’m not an AI nerd, nor a banal administrator—I like to drink beer and enjoy my life). But there’s another funky smell wafting from this cesspit. 

The expo is going on during the mid-tri break, where there is less likely to be a stir or attention raised by VUW’s humane student body, who, funnily enough, don’t support the sniping of children, the murder of journalists, and the erasure of an ancient indigenous culture. 

The reason is likely due to the need for space—there would be a crowding issue and lots of missing canapés, I imagine, if there were more students in the hub. But the timing is very convenient, nevertheless. It would be an awful look for our principled students and academic staff to openly object to PANW’s presence and sponsorship of the event. 

What is most scary is the banality of it all: the lovely catering, the polite conversation, the smiles and suits that are window-dressing for these purveyors of mass murder. VUW, there are other cybersecurity firms out there, do not make a deal with this speccy devil.