When an autonomous loitering munition selects and engages a target without human intervention, we assume we know what it is not: it is not aware. It does not experience the moment of impact. It does not, in any meaningful sense, choose. But the confidence behind that assumption rests on a question that neither Israeli defence procurement nor anyone else has rigorously answered: what is consciousness, and at what point, if any, does a sufficiently complex artificial system acquire it?

Israel’s economic model and security architecture depend more heavily on artificial intelligence than those of almost any other democracy. Rafael’s AI-driven weapons platforms, Mobileye’s perceptual networks, the intelligence systems fed by the Unit 8200 pipeline, and the proliferating ecosystem of Israeli AI ventures are growing in complexity at a pace that outstrips the frameworks meant to govern them. The consciousness question is not, for Israel, a seminar topic. It is a planning contingency.

Three competing models define the debate. The first treats consciousness as binary: you have it or you do not. This underwrites most legal codes, where personhood is conferred categorically, never by degree. The second treats it as occupying qualitatively distinct states separated by sharp transitions, much as water becomes ice at a critical temperature. Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory, which quantifies consciousness through a metric........

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