Peter Thiel, René Girard, and the Algorithmic Scapegoating of Palestine

There has been a flurry of commentary about Peter Thiel. But what’s missing in all of it – from the wonkish pieces that pick apart his writings on economics to the political philosophy think pieces on whether he properly interprets the works of Strauss – is an assessment of Thiel’s intimate relationship with the great Catholic philosopher René Girard.

Thiel wasn’t just a casual reader of Girard—he was his student, his benefactor, and one of his most public evangelists. In interviews and essays, Thiel often invokes Girard’s mimetic theory of desire and scapegoating. He even claims it explains “almost everything.”

So what do we make of the fact that, in Thiel’s response to the fire and blood of Gaza, in the sterile decision trees of his predictive surveillance systems, in the binary logic of his company Palantir, and in his “deference” to Israel’s use of Lavender AI to target innocent Palestinians, we see a perfect mirror image of a Girardian approach to today’s injustices – not aligned point for point, but reversed?

The explanation can only be that Thiel heralds not a Girardian awakening but a Girardian betrayal – a Satanic parody of Girard’s prophetically true presentation of the Gospel.

Thiel appears to have absorbed the diagnostic clarity of Girard—rivalry, crisis, the sacrificial mechanism—but not the ethical demand that flows from it. Girard called us to unmask the victim. Thiel, it seems, has chosen to re-mask the victim with code, with data, and with a sinister geopolitical myth.

And in this betrayal, the Palestinian people are the scapegoat to be sacrificed.

Girard and the Gospel

I’ll explain, starting with what Thiel knows more thoroughly than almost anyone: the thinking of Girard.

Girard’s central insight is that human beings imitate one another’s desires. This leads to rivalry, which leads to crisis, which is resolved through a scapegoat – an arbitrarily chosen victim upon whom all blame is placed. The scapegoat is sacrificed, peace is restored, and the horrible, fallen human cycle begins anew.

Crucially, Girard believed that Jesus Christ revealed and condemned this mechanism, while also redeeming the nature of the humans who seem, almost compulsively, to engage in it. The Passion narrative unmasks the lie: the victim is innocent. The crowd is guilty. The violence is not sacred—it is murder.

To understand Girard is to understand the Gospel he believed in and brilliantly interpreted – and so to understand Girard is to approach Christ and to learn to participate in His mission of breaking the cycle.

But Thiel? Thiel has taken the blueprint of the machine Christ came to overcome and rebuilt it – with software.

Palantir, Lavender, and the Technology of Sacrifice

Palantir, Thiel’s brainchild, is a surveillance and data fusion platform marketed to governments. It has been used to predict crimes, profile migrants, and assist in military operations. Palantir claims to aim at total factual accuracy, eliminating all uncertainty and mapping human complexity into systems of control.

As worrisome as that rigid systematization of human society may be, it becomes more so in light of Thiel’s now-infamous refusal to speak against the use of another AI – Lavender. The Israeli AI tool is reportedly used to generate airstrike targets in Gaza. Lavender automates suspicion. It takes metadata, phone calls, movement patterns, and outputs lists of presumed militants – not based on certainty, but on correlation.

According to investigative reports, during the most recent war in Gaza, Lavender tagged over 30,000 people. Some targets were killed with less than a minute’s human review. Entire families were erased because someone had the wrong phone, or knew the wrong person, or happened to be standing in the wrong place.

Asked about this moral scandal, Thiel balked. “I defer to Israel,” he simply said.

That’s not justice. That’s not war. That’s sacrificial math.

And most importantly – that’s the world Peter Thiel has helped build.

Using Girard without Honor

Here’s what’s coming into focus: Thiel’s political agenda uses Girardian insight rather than honoring it, creating a strange sort of counter-Girardian way that is utterly post-Christian in spirit.

Thiel believes that society needs a unifying myth and a ruling elite to guard it. That myth, today, is techno-civilizational Zionism: Israel as the front line of Western reason and security, and Palestinians as the “chaos” that must be contained.

But to fortify the myth Thiel puts Girard’s psychological toolset to use: the need for sacrifice in times of rivalry, the logic of scapegoating in crisis. And rather than resisting that mechanism – as Girard insisted – Thiel would have us strategically serve it.

Palestinians are not targeted because they are powerful. They are targeted because their survival breaks the myth. Their stubborn humanity disrupts the story that Silicon Valley, Tel Aviv, and Washington want to tell: that progress is smooth, that technology is neutral, that war is clean.

To live as a Palestinian is to become a glitch in the matrix. To mourn publicly, to bury children, to insist on land, memory, and dignity is to defy the technocratic script. It is to say: humanity is still here.

And that is intolerable.

Because if Palestinians are not a terroristic threat to the world, then perhaps our bombs are not defensive. If Gaza is not a barbarism at the gate of civilization, then maybe the new, cobbled-together “civilization” we are creating is the real global threat.

In other words: If the scapegoat is innocent, then the whole system is guilty.

The Student Betrays the Teacher

Peter Thiel knew Girard. He sat with him. He funded his work. And yet, in Thiel’s politics, his investments, and his strategic silence, he has betrayed the very heart of Girard’s message.

It’s not enough to know how scapegoating works. You must resist it. You must name it. You must refuse to benefit from it.

Thiel, instead, has turned Girard into a strategy manual a new Sanhedrin. He uses Girard not to stop sacrifice, but to optimize it. To repair the temple veil and make it seamless. To remove the mess of myth and ritual and replace it with clean interfaces and plausible deniability.

And in doing so, he ensures that the crucifixion of Christ’s image in the Palestinian victim remains unseen, ungrievable, and – most dangerously – justified.

The revolutionary, system-breaking mission of the Gospel, its whole revelation and salvific power, is in God becoming man, intimately identifying Himself in all His public words with the rejected and maligned scapegoats among us, then dying as one of them and rising again – enjoining all His followers with the duty to love one another, especially the suffering and unjustly persecuted, as He loved.

We are living through a deliberate attempt by the world’s most powerful actors to eclipse that Gospel. Our age is characterized by a crisis of empathy engineered by systems of power that prefer abstraction to blood and data to dignity.

Girard taught us that when we see the scapegoat for who they are, the myth collapses. The lie is exposed. The sacrifice stops.

This is why we must keep saying the names. Showing the faces. Refusing the categories. Defying the scripts.

We must look at the sinister projects of Lavender and Palantir not as lapses in the judgment of global leaders, but as deliberate enactments of a sacrificial logic that Thiel has helped globalize. And we must say: No more.

Not in our name. Not with our money. Not with our silence.

Because if Girard taught us anything, it’s that the Cross reveals every bomb, every algorithm, every noble lie for what it is: a betrayal.

And if you still follow the Christ whom Girard loved, then you must follow the Saving Victim all the way to the Cross – not to crown Him as executioner, but simply to stand beside Him at the crucifixion.

I’ll end here with the opening words, surely very familiar to a devout man like Girard, of a prophetic prayer authored by the great theologian St. Thomas Aquinas:

O saving Victim, op'ning wide
The gate of heav'n to us below
Our foes press on from every side
Thine aid supply, thy strength bestow