Israel’s settler-colonialism as a global security paradigm

Background

Settler societies never normalise themselves. The frontier’s imagery clings to them through over-lived norms, values and, above all, the language. Outmanoeuvring the natives, studying their ‘mentality’, learning their language, hidden transcripts and way of life in order not only to prevent them from obstructing the settlers’ project but also to impair their ability to function by undermining their society, weakening their solidarity and, if possible, turning them against each other, are foundational to settler-colonialism. ¹ To the Israeli establishment, these processes have been condensed into one – surveillance; an assortment of methods which focus on the identification and often the manipulation of individuals’ identity, social groups, networks and social communication. This heritage of surveillance has been kept, continually upgraded and technologised, given that the frontier has never ended for Israelis. ²

Surveillance, Kammerer argues, should not be viewed as a tool to deal with perceived problems or needs, but rather as constitutive of knowledge, experience and relationships. ³ This article aims to explore how Israeli-settler colonialism has created a surveillance Weltanschauung, which is not only constitutive of knowledge and relationships but also of consciousness and material aspects of lives. In other words, it has become a key organising principle of the polity and the society. This Weltanschauung, I argue, has been globalised under neoliberalism. Indeed, the relationship between Israel as a settler-colonial regime and its emergence as a surveillance industry hub has been pointed out by scholars, activists and practitioners. ⁴ Explaining these relations, an ex-employee of an Israeli surveillance company pointed out:

The army supplies very young but experienced talents, with specific knowledge. Why don’t we [Israelis] develop social networks like Snapchat . . .? Because we don’t have a relative advantage [in that] . . . espionage is our relative advantage. There are other industries like this – the drones . . . The reason that the [surveillance] industry in Israel is flourishing so well is the ecosystem that was created here. ⁵

The success of the Israeli surveillance industry and the vindication of its surveillance Weltanschauung resulted from the advent of the securitising state in the US and Europe, which coincided with the rise of neoliberal globalisation; although it had been legitimised and championed following 9/11. ⁶ This securitisation has taken two interrelated forms: the globalisation of American homeland security’s premises and practices and the rise of the surveillance-industrial complex in the US and Europe. ⁷ In this global securitisation milieu, Israeli surveillance practices and know-how have been esteemed, because of Israel’s success in containing a large native population since its establishment, and particularly since the 1967 war when it became in control of a large Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza. Yet, the Israeli model cannot be isolated from its settler-colonial backdrop, where key human values – such as privacy, trust, freedom, liberation, justice, solidarity and even the value of the human being – are violated.

Nevertheless, worldwide securitising processes have given Israeli surveillance companies a head start. In 2018, their share in the global surveillance market reached 15 per cent, placing Israel in the lead in the ratio of surveillance companies per capita. Foreign capital flew in to take a share in this thriving industry, turning Israel into a ‘start-up nation’. Indeed, in 2016 about 20 per cent of the global investments in start-ups went to Israeli companies. ⁸

The first section sketches Israeli sales of surveillance technologies and their perceptions and effects on a variety of populations. Meanwhile, the second discusses the genesis of Israeli surveillance under British rule over Palestine. It is followed by the third, which succinctly describes the development of Israeli surveillance of the Palestinians since 1948. The fourth section deals with the causes which have led to the marketisation of Israeli state surveillance technologies and the endeavour to produce ‘total surveillance’. The fifth describes the mechanisms that enable the diffusion of Israeli surveillance technology internationally. Meanwhile, the final section explores the shared organising principle of both the Israeli surveillance Weltanschauung and neoliberal globalised and data-based capitalism.

Sales of Israeli surveillance technology: perceptions of effects

Israeli surveillance products are particularly sought after by security agencies and private companies, to help in tightening their grip on disempowered populations and dissidents. For example, Elbit, a major Israeli security systems company, won a contract in 2014 worth $145 million to build a ‘virtual wall’ on Arizona’s border with the Mexican state of Sonora. This wall cuts across the Tohono O’odham reservation, rendering the lives of its inhabitants, particularly those residing within several miles of the border, unbearable. Real-time data and images stream from the installed cameras and sensors to the central operating station. Consequently, young Tohono O’odham men who work in cities began to avoid returning to the reservation to keep away from the constant surveillance and police harassment. ⁹

This wall not only illustrates the export of technology developed to monitor the Palestinians, but also affirms the collaboration of two white-settler societies in surveilling native populations. ¹⁰ It also points to the advantage that Israeli companies have achieved, given that they have never stopped developing ever more sophisticated equipment to monitor and contain the Palestinians. Tohono O’odham activists and Elbit’s representatives seem to be in agreement regarding these suppositions. Ofelia Rivas, a tribe member, stated, ‘Now we won’t be able to go anywhere near without the big US-Israeli eyes monitoring us, watching our every move.’ ¹¹

Another tribe member, Nellie Jo David, who visited the West Bank, noted: ‘I don’t feel safe with them taking over my community, especially if you look at what’s going on in Palestine – they are bringing the same thing over here to this land.’ ¹²

Such statements regarding the duplication of Israeli surveillance methods developed to monitor the Palestinians in other places are not taken by Elbit’s and other Israeli security companies’ representatives as excruciating, but rather as a point of strength. They often highlight their advantage in selling ‘field-proven’ technology; systems whose effectiveness has been proven on the Palestinians. ¹³ Social scientists have called this phenomenon the ‘laboratory thesis’. According to it, the Palestinian Occupied Territories have become a testing ground for control, surveillance and crowd suppression technologies. ¹⁴

Similarly to the Tohono O’odham, the Mapuche – the indigenous population of the Araucania region in Chile − have taken the brunt of Israeli surveillance technology. Israel’s security sales, which aided the Pinochet dictatorship (1973−1990) in its massive suppression, continued after the regime change. In 2018, an agreement was signed between the two countries, which ensures the continuity of this export that is used to suppress the Mapuche. ¹⁵

Besides these native communities, the refugees attempting to reach Europe constitute another ‘homo sacer’ group which Israeli surveillance companies help to hold back and monitor. In 2018, Elbit won a two-year renewable contract worth $68 million to monitor Europe’s coastline. The mission has been carried out by drones developed for use in combat missions in the besieged Palestinian territory of Gaza. The use of drones instead of vessels to monitor maritime traffic in the Mediterranean was triggered by the migration panic that engulfed Europe’s political class to avoid embarrassing political rows over what to do with rescued migrants. ¹⁶

Besides the large established companies, some smaller ones have also made headway in the global surveillance market. These companies mainly develop systems, programmes, viruses and malware to hack communication systems. Of these, the NSO Group, the developer of Pegasus malware, is probably the most (in)famous. This programme, made to be stealthily installed in any mobile and hoover up all the owner’s communications, photographs, video clips, passwords and movements, has received considerable publicity ¹⁷ and been exported to over forty-five countries. ¹⁸

For obvious reasons, Israeli officials and representatives of security companies are reticent about these sales. However, when questioned about their implications, they often revert to variations of Herzl’s characterisation of the Jewish state as a bulwark of western civilisation against barbarism, arguing that these products help to prevent [Islamic] terrorist attacks and protect western citizens’ lives. ¹⁹

However, the identity of the bulk of the customers and high-profile cases of victims suggest otherwise. The victims are mostly human rights activists, journalists, political dissidents, members of civil society organisations and the LGBTQ+ community. For example, according to a Citizen Lab report, between January 2015 and August 2016, fifteen mobiles of Mexican activists were hacked. These included three activists in the field of public health, five human rights activists and seven journalists. ²⁰ The targets were involved in investigating or working on reports of high-level official corruption, or human rights abuses. ²¹ Furthermore, such systems have been supplied to regimes known for ‘problematic’ human right records − including Peru, Mexico, Colombia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Swaziland, South Sudan, Nigeria and Ethiopia – where they are used to spy on political opponents and dissidents.

The secrecy which shrouds these sales makes it difficult to identify the victims. Describing this atmosphere, an Israeli trainer of foreign customers stated: ‘Most people who worked with me . . . did not talk about it. It feels like guys who come back from a war.’ These employees might not talk much about their work, but they are likely to be aware of its implications. For example, one instructor who was sent to Azerbaijan recalled that his customers were particularly interested to know how to identify sexual inclinations via Facebook. Afterwards, he discovered that they are known for persecuting the gay community. More generally he stated: ‘Whoever takes part in this industry knows what he is doing.’ ²² This world of secrecy, divisiveness and disregard for others’ privacy and fate is not devoid of a legacy of its own.

Zionist settler-colonialism and surveillance

To understand the Israeli surveillance Weltanschauung, one should go back to its foundational moment – to the beginning of the systematic Zionist colonisation of Palestine. Following the Balfour Declaration and the institutionalisation of British rule over Palestine in 1920, the president of the Zionist Organization and later the first president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, came to visit the country which was promised as a ‘homeland for the Jewish people’. At that point the Jews comprised some 11 per cent of the population. Weizmann was supplied with a plan contrived by the Intelligence Office of the Zionist Executive’s political department on activities that were to be taken to further the achievement of the Zionist goal. Among the plan’s tactics were: 1) bribing local leaders to organise pro-Zionist petitions and to distance them from the national leadership; 2) purchasing newspapers hostile to Zionism to ensure a pro-Zionist editorial policy; 3) stirring up conflicts between Muslims and Christians. ²³

As the Zionist settler-colonial project gained momentum, new surveillance tools and technologies were added to the time-honoured ones of mobilising local informers and bribery. Chiefly, the use of surveys and aerial photography. As early as the 1930s, the Yishuv’s (the organised Zionist community in Palestine) security organisation began a comprehensive survey of Palestinian villages. These surveys, which matured into and were assembled as the ‘village archive’, included variables relating to the topographic location of each village, its access roads, quality of land, water springs, main sources of income, its sociopolitical composition, religious affiliations, names of local leaders, its relationship with other villages, the number of men of military age (16–50) and an index of ‘hostility’ towards Zionism. An aerial photograph was attached to each file. These files – of about 1,000 villages − were updated several times and made a major contribution to the Zionist effort in the 1948 war. Furthermore, a cadre of spies was trained to spread rumours and develop intrigues in Palestinian villages.

Besides these techniques, most Jewish settlers were enlisted to spy and pass on information on Palestinians with whom they worked or came into contact, particularly women who worked with Palestinians in governmental offices, hospitals, health clinics, etc. ²⁴ Ezra Danin who headed the Security Organization of the Yishuv in the 1940s stated: ‘I presume that such activity should be similar to the way the Nazis worked in Denmark, Norway and Holland – touching on every aspect of life’ (emphasis added). ²⁵

This statement reflected the settlers’ mindset and world view. Jewish settlers – like other colonists − were aware of their foreignness: they neither related to nor were they willing to assimilate into their surroundings. Rather, they conceived themselves as part of the West and held orientalist views of Palestinians. Furthermore, they perceived their existence as precarious; as surrounded by a sea of hostile or potentially hostile uncivilised and deceitful natives. Therefore, they had and have to be vigilant and learn the natives’ intentions and ‘hidden transcripts’.

Meanwhile, the Palestinians – like other natives – were not only dehumanised but were also considered by Zionism an object of elimination. ²⁶ Indeed, as in other settler-colonial settings, unexploitable natives were deemed ‘surplus bodies’. This legacy explains Israel’s use of the Palestinian territories as a testing ground for surveillance and crowd control systems. This eliminatory drive also found expression in the popular imagination. For example, the American proverb ‘The only good Indian is a dead Indian’ has been modified with the substitution of the Arab for the Indian. ²⁷

Technology has not only been perceived as a way to subdue the Palestinians but has also been fetishised. It is presented as proof of Israelis’ superiority vis-à-vis the Palestinians and as a signifier for Israel’s affinity to the West. ²⁸

Surveilling the Palestinians by the Israeli state

During and in the aftermath of the 1948 war, Israel expelled the bulk of the Palestinians who lived in the territory upon which it was established. Those who remained were subjected to a draconian military rule and Israeli leaders hoped to drive them out in the immediate future. Only in 1958 did the Israeli officials in charge of Palestinian affairs contrive the first plan as to how to deal with these Palestinians. It was premised on the expulsion of the Palestinian minority in case of war − not to integrate them into Israeli society as equal citizens, but to relegate them to the margins of society and the labour market, and to give primacy to security considerations when dealing with their affairs. This plan laid out the foundations for surveillance, population engineering and control of the Palestinian minority for three decades. Surveillance was the first article in the plan. According to it, native informers were to be mobilised to spy and pass on information on their communities and also to be presented as a moderate force. Palestinians’ opposition to Israeli policies was to be presented as contention between radicals and moderates. ²⁹ The role of technology in making Palestinians visible to the Israeli official gaze was also highlighted. Speaking in almost Foucauldian terms, Reuven Barkatt, the head of the committee which drafted the plan, stated:

The electrification of the Arab village has an immense value not only in economic-cultural terms; it has also a significant security value. When you pass by Wadi ‘Ara street [which crosses the Triangle area, inhabited by Palestinians] at night you see hostile darkness . . . if we illuminate this darkness, we take them out of the darkness and place them under our supervision. The same is true with regard to streets and transportation. ³⁰

Israeli state surveillance through spying and bureaucratic means – including the recreation of village files − was exceptionally intrusive. Its extent came to light when Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel and one of its founders, read out, in the course of a debate in the Knesset on 20 February 1963, fragments from Palestinian pupils’ essays in which they expressed dissent. ³¹

Following the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, the Israeli state’s need for surveillance increased significantly, putting an excessive burden on its security establishment, particularly in periods of unrest. This came to the fore, for example, during the Palestinian Intifada in 1987. Technology was considered the appropriate means to keep Palestinians at bay. The developments in digital technology and biometric surveillance – such as facial, voice, iris recognition and thumb printing – have been adopted to monitor Palestinians. These technologies were developed by commercial companies and security organisations in the US and Europe and were transferred to Israel, given their close intelligence collaboration. Likewise, the technologies that use algorithms and data mining and which allow the surveying of big-data and the explication of sequences and correlations within seconds have also been deployed. Like the old technologies, these new ones have been employed to deepen Israeli state surveillance of the Palestinians. This use of mass surveillance came to light in a letter sent in September 2014 to the prime minister and chief of general staff by thirty-four reserve soldiers of the cyber unit 8200:

There’s no distinction between Palestinians who are, and are not, involved in violence. Information that is collected and stored harms innocent people. It is used for political persecution and to create divisions within Palestinian society by recruiting collaborators and driving parts of Palestinian society against itself. In many cases, intelligence prevents defendants from receiving a fair trial in military courts . . . Intelligence allows for the continued control over millions of people through thorough and intrusive supervision and invasion of most areas of life. ³²

Indeed, the new technologies, like the old ones, have been used to monitor Palestinians, identify social networks and rip the social fabric of the society. They were adopted, tested on Palestinians, produced, assimilated and marketed internationally. But why should other societies, particularly the advanced ones, purchase them? Before answering this question, I shall explore the mechanisms which made the globalisation of these technologies possible.

Growth and globalisation of Israeli surveillance technology

The marketisation of Israeli digital surveillance technologies internationally was the result of various factors. First, the ascendance of rightwing governments in Israel since the beginning of the twenty-first century, particularly those headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, which stalled the ‘peace process’ and hinted that the real goal is to annex the West Bank. The absence of a political solution increased the urgency for monitoring the Palestinians. The second factor was the privatisation of large segments of the security sector, including the field of surveillance. This turned the military service in surveillance and espionage units, particularly cyber unit 8200, into a springboard for many officers to establish start-ups and rapidly accumulate considerable wealth. These companies produce new systems and programmes which are used to tighten the Israeli grip on Palestinians, are exhibited to potential buyers and sold to foreign customers.

This circle came to the fore, for example, in the surveillance project ‘Mabat 2000’ – an acronym in Hebrew which stands for technology and surveillance system (also as a word, it means gaze). It was introduced in the Old City of Jerusalem in 2000 (before 9/11). This scheme is part of an ongoing endeavour by the state and settlers to create visual surveillance of Jerusalem. The plan includes the installation of 400 CCTV cameras in the square mile on which the Old City is built, making 95 per cent of its public spaces visible. The images stream from these CCTV cameras to the observation and command centre which is staffed 24/7 by twelve policemen, who have direct communication with the 800 security personnel patrolling the City. This system was set up and maintained by a private company called C. Mer Group, founded by Chaim Mer − a former officer in the intelligence unit 8200 – and is traded on the Israeli stock exchange. The software for this system was provided by a subsidiary company called Athena, established by Shabtai Shavit, former head of the Israeli National Intelligence Agency (Mossad). ³³ This software is supposed to provide predictive policing by identifying the ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’, through engaging

in constant collection of data and analytical cross-matching of information and metadata from – multilingual texts, images and videos, websites, social media, dark-net, and more – creating profiles of individuals and ‘identifying persons of interest’. The company’s technology includes facial recognition, ongoing surveillance of individuals, and the ability to deploy analysis algorithms to ‘identify and evaluate relationships between entities’. ³⁴

More sophisticated software was installed in 2017. The centre was showcased and the technology has been exported. It has been visited by law enforcement chiefs and politicians from many countries, including New York’s governor Andrew Cuomo who announced that the Israeli police’s use of technology is ‘something that we can learn from’. ³⁵ It seems that the project’s success led other companies to offer their schemes, such as the giant multinational technological company, Cisco Systems, which offered to establish and run a free-of-charge pilot surveillance network for three years. Dubbed as ‘Smart City’, ³⁶ this programme includes the installation of CCTV cameras, a command-and-control centre and video software analysis that is capable of detecting voices and spotting and alerting about lingering groups. The command-and-control centre will be able to analyse images streamed from up to 10,000 CCTV cameras.

Such an application of surveillance technology in the West Bank and Jerusalem and its marketing internationally has become quite common. Anyvision, for example, a start-up that produces facial recognition technology, is used in twenty-seven biometric checkpoints in the West Bank. It enables a guard to identify whether an approaching Palestinian is allowed to pass through or not, making Israeli army surveillance easier, more efficient and faster. This technology is also installed deep in the West Bank, allowing Israel to gather biometric data from Palestinians and monitor them. Besides that, Anyvision has developed a profiling technology, called ‘Better Tomorrow’, which purportedly identifies ‘suspicious behaviour’. This company’s products have been sold to forty-three countries and are used in public places such as airports and stadiums. Several large international companies have invested in Anyvision, including Microsoft, the German company Bosch, Qualcomm and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

The advances in facial recognition technologies, machine learning and algorithms apparently make it possible for computers to automatically make a judgement based on a person’s actions, bodily expressions, skin colour, voice and so on, that cameras stream. This spectacle has led human rights organisations in the US to campaign against the deployment of facial recognition technologies in public spaces. In San Francisco, the use of facial recognition technology in public spaces has been barred. To counter the backlash, Anyvision began lobbying the US Senate against restrictions that might be imposed on the use of this technology. ³⁷

These examples point to the evolvement of a cycle of surveillance: the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) train soldiers in cyber units to surveil the Palestinians. After the end of their service, they either join surveillance-related companies or establish their own start-ups. Given the current worldwide securitisation Weltanschauung, they produce new systems that supposedly reduce the uncertainties and opposition that elites face and the insecurity of increasingly alarmed populations. International companies invest in this industry, thus fuelling further research and development. The new equipment is used by a new generation of Israeli soldiers to surveil the Palestinians more tightly, and these soldiers in due course become developers and experts in surveillance. Indeed, this lucrative industry is dominated by a largely homogenous group of elite Ashkenazi-Jews who served in cyber unit 8200. They account for 80 per cent of the cyber companies’ founders. ³⁸

Many of these surveillance technologies are the product of the ‘digital revolution’. Given the extended time people spend and the multiplicity of activities they conduct online, digital surveillance is presumed to be total. It could supposedly detect and monitor not only behaviours, but also mobility, preferences, intentions, thoughts, emotions and relationships, thus rendering the individual traceable, transparent and manipulable. At first, social media was conceived as a public sphere in the classical sense – the new town square wherein citizens could freely and equally express their opinions – but it quickly turned to be a major site of surveillance. Given the political and military restrictions imposed on Palestinians, they tried to use the full potential freedom that social media offers. This was countered by three Israeli measures. First, Israel created in 2015 a ‘Cyber Unit’ in the Attorney General’s office. It puts pressure on Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets to purge their platforms of content critical of Israel, especially that posted by Palestinians. Israeli authorities very often smear credible criticism and activism as incitement. According to this ‘Cyber Unit’s’ report in 2016, out of its requests to remove 2,241 posts, 69 per cent were accepted. ³⁹ In fact, Facebook accepts Israeli and American requests to delete content or deactivate accounts of those considered as agitators and those added to the US’s sanctions list. Yet, the use of social media by Israelis, including those in leadership positions, to incite against Palestinians, has never been sanctioned by social platforms, including Facebook. ⁴⁰

Second, the Israeli government has created a legal infrastructure to prosecute those who allegedly published ‘incitement and hostile propaganda’− in practical terms, punishing those who publicised Israeli violations of Palestinian rights. ⁴¹

Third, Israeli former officials were given leading positions inside social media outlets. Facebook, for example, has appointed to its Oversight Board a former Israeli director-general of the Justice ministry who saw the creation of the ‘Cyber Unit’ in the Attorney General’s office. ⁴²

Israeli surveillance of social media aspires to attain global reach. It aims to track and intimidate not only Palestinians residing under its control but also Israel’s critics worldwide, particularly American students and professors. Such an effort found expression, for example, in the ‘Canary’ website which publishes names, photos, social media accounts and out-of-context quotations of such activists branding them as radicals, thus helping to thwart student activism. ⁴³ Inconclusive public debate regarding this practice was spurred on following the rescinding of a job offer to an American professor by a well-regarded American university because of his tweets critical of Israel. ⁴⁴

The use of such technology to surveil social media is problematic; not only ethically. Algorithms and data mining cannot properly comprehend and analyse various sorts of speech and styles of writings such as metaphorical, picturesque or allegorical language. This came to the fore in the trial of a Palestinian poet. The word ‘resist’ which she used in a poem was interpreted as a call for violence. The poet Tatour is one of some 400 Palestinians who have been arrested for posts on social media since October 2015. ⁴⁵

Nevertheless, these methods and surveillance technologies that monitor and supposedly interpret behaviours, thoughts and emotions, are not only used to stifle Palestinians’ opposition but have been exported to many regimes, private companies and powerful elites, rendering the Palestinians the epitome of the disempowered. The following section discusses how these technologies are diffused on a global scale.

International diffusion

Surveillance is a lucrative business. An official report estimated this sector’s exports in 2017 at $5.5–$6 billion. ⁴⁶ However, besides revenues, Israel has always given special importance to its security sales as they help in establishing friendly relations with elites and foreign governments, given successive governments’ questionable policies and the illegitimacy of Israel’s current borders. This ‘weapon diplomacy’ led to the export of security equipment to oppressive regimes and states caught in civil wars, as illustrated before. ⁴⁷ The sector, which grew with neoliberalism, is characterised by its fluidity. Companies often move from one country to another, and, in many cases, they open offices and subsidiaries in more than one country, thus contributing to the internationalisation of this industry. For example, Anyvision, the biometric cyber company mentioned above, has offices in Belfast, Holon (Israel), Mexico, London and Singapore. ⁴⁸ Israeli cyber companies, on the whole, prefer to establish subsidiaries and offices in Cyprus and Bulgaria because these countries are EU members but have underdeveloped regulations. Through these offices, Israeli cyber companies can label their products as EU products and offer them to countries that do not have diplomatic relations with Israel. ⁴⁹

Another form of diffusion of the Israeli cyber industry is through the hiring of employees in its offices and subsidiaries. A division of labour, whereby relatively simple and arduous parts of the production process are relegated to countries with skilled cheap labour, has been established. A veteran of this industry explained: ‘As I understand it, the reason is, above all, cheap labour. To pay a Ukrainian or Moldovan $2,000 a month to investigate weaknesses in security mechanisms nonstop is not a lot of money.’ ⁵⁰ In the opposite direction, some international companies began recruiting alumni of cyber unit 8200. Among these is the UAE’s DarkMatter which supplies surveillance services to the UAE government. These graduates are lured by high salaries and they offer the know-how they acquired during their army service. ⁵¹

Besides the globalisation of the capital, products and the workforce, these companies themselves are part of neoliberal capitalist relations. They change hands and names frequently. For example, NSO was purchased by the American Francisco Partners and rebranded as Q Cyber Technologies, and became a subsidiary of OSY Technologies, which is registered in Luxembourg. However, it was resold and the Israeli founders Lavie and Hulio, partnering with European private equity fund Novalpina Capital, purchased the majority of its shares. ⁵²

Settler-colonialism and neoliberalism: shared values

The successful integration of Israeli surveillance technology in global markets has not resulted from a coincidence of global neoliberal capitalism’s emergent needs, on the one hand, and the existence of mature surveillance systems and methods in Israel, on the other. Furthermore, this integration doesn’t necessarily reflect the sophistication of Israeli technology. Rather, it is above all, the result of the shared presuppositions and requirements of settler-colonialism and neoliberal globalisation. Four such requirements are outlined below.

First, the survival of both settler-colonialism and neoliberal capitalism depends on continuous mass surveillance. Israeli governments view the long-term survival of the state of Israel as dependent on surveilling the Palestinians and taking the appropriate measures to prevent them from challenging its dominance. Meanwhile, neoliberalism has created conditions for massive movements of populations by turning tourism into a major source of capitalist accumulation. Also, it has degraded the living conditions of a large mass of population so that they are pushed to emigrate. These ‘floating’ populations have to be constantly monitored and regulated to prevent a serious interruption of the existing order.

Second, the endeavour to predict and influence the behaviours of the surveilled. Successive Israeli governments have tried to engineer Palestinian society demographically, socially and politically. This effort was illustrated on many occasions such as the first plan submitted to Weizmann, the village files, and the various predictive policing measures that Israeli companies developed and deployed in the Occupied Territories, etc. Meanwhile, profiling customers by internet companies (the leading sector in the neoliberal economy) constitutes an essential tool to predict and manipulate web surfers’ behaviours and desires and eventually to increase their spending.

Third, weight is attached to atomising the targeted population and manipulating identities. This indicates the wish to undermine a possible collective uprising by self-identifying Palestinians, in the first place, and the urge to increase the circulation of products, lifestyles, capital and ideas, in the second, to stimulate rapid growth and accumulation of capital. Indeed, under neoliberal capitalism, the individual has been turned into an assortment of data, indicating desires, behaviours, patterns and so on.

Fourth, the underscoring of elitism, power and entitlement, and disregard, even contempt for the indigenous, the weak, the poor and the disempowered. This is inherent in settler-colonialism by its very nature. Meanwhile, neoliberalism is hostile to social programmes designed to help underprivileged populations. These shared values come to the fore, for example, in the hiring by powerful organisations and individuals – such as the Hollywood rapist Harvey Weinstein − of an Israeli surveillance company to spy on plaintiffs and reveal intimate events and relationships in their lives. ⁵³

This shared affinity seems to be the reason for the acceptance of the Israeli viewpoint, methods and rationalities by political and economic neoliberal elites; and, as a corollary, the evolution of Israel’s surveillance Weltanschauung as an epitome of neoliberal globalised capitalism.

Conclusion

This article illustrates how Israeli surveillance Weltanschauung and the practices of its occupation have become a mirror image of the world we live in. To some, this might be choking. Even those who look at the globalisation of Israeli surveillance from a provincial viewpoint can be disheartened. To them, the sales of surveillance technology and their implications constitute an affront to Jewish history. ⁵⁴ One such critic stated:

All of these counter-terror technologies were first developed by Israel to permit subjugation of Palestinians. But as they’ve been exported throughout the world, they’ve generated racism, mistrust and violence in most societies which adopted them. Israel has become a model, not just for itself as an individual security state, but for all states which embrace such products and methods. ⁵⁵

It might be presumptuous to argue that the Israeli surveillance Weltanschauung has colonised the current worldview of securitisation. However, it seems more reasonable to contend that it has converged with the organising principles of current data-driven neoliberal capitalism, thus creating a sense of affinity between globalised neoliberal elites and Israel as a surveillance state and its elites. The ascendance of the surveillance-industrial complex in the US and to a lesser extent in Europe, and the leading role that digital technology companies have assumed in the current economic formation, created a reality in which Israeli-settler colonialism has become a model of social relations. This convergence explains the changing ethics under neoliberal capitalism, where lauded values such as privacy, autonomy, trust, solidarity and care have been eroded. Moreover, the marketing success of the Israeli surveillance industry illustrates the multiple forms in which the subjugation of natives could become a source of wealth accumulation and influence.