Note: This was originally a chapter written for an edited collection several years ago. That project appears to be dead in the water. So here it is. It’s over 7,000 words long. Might be easier as a PDF and the pdf is consistently formatted. Also this chapter appeared online a few years ago under another author’s name and has even been cited as by that author. Oh well.
Dedicated to the memory of the late riot grrrl, patchouli enthusiast, and drinking buddy Sarah Van Goey. May those privileged to know her remember and carry her love. Thanks to Helga Tawil-Souri for feedback on this chapter, without which it would have been completely incoherent, instead of just mostly so, and to Uri Gordon without whose encouragement this would not have been written at all.
Introduction
Terrorism is a fearsome symbol, connoting irrational violence and conjuring up images of sinister, bearded aliens throwing bombs and seizing innocent (white and Western) hostages. – Edward Herman & Gerry O’Sullivan (1989)
John Collins writes that in its processes, “settler colonialism did much to bring about a globalised world of permanent war in which there is no longer an ‘outside’ (if there ever was),” (Collins, 2011; 173). “Not accidentally,” he writes, “settler states (primarily the United States, Israel and apartheid South Africa) were leaders in the thirty-year development of an entire industry devoted to the study, prevention, and combating of ‘terrorism’. Today’s US-led Global War on Terrorism, which shares with neoliberal globalization ‘the unbounded surface of the earth as [its] territorial frame of reference’ would have been impossible without the discursive and ideological space constructed through the ‘terrorism’ industry,” (ibid). I here explore this ‘terrorism industry’ in one such settler colonial context, Israel/Zionism, and its relevance in two highly securitised locations where there are no clear boundaries of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’—mega-events and airports—even as each also acts as a gated community (The seeming contradiction being indicative of the continual negotiations of and between geo-, bio-, and necropolitics, an examination of which is beyond the scope of this chapter).
Both mega-events and airports are prefigurative spaces in that they are prophetic of control regimes that expand beyond the physical boundaries of the airports and the temporal boundaries of the mega-event. This becomes especially important when ‘innocent’, ‘suspect’ and ‘guilty’ have no fixed definition at the securitised airport or mega-event, though local conditions may impart more innocence, suspicion or guilt on particular status groups or individuals. Israel’s experience suppressing Palestinian and Lebanese resistance is a key source of techniques and technologies used to negotiate innocence, suspicion and guilt at these sites. The Israeli surveillance and control techniques and technologies deployed at mega-events and airports translate settler colonialism to other political geographies or, as Collins (2012) argues, assists in their colonization.
Airports and mega-events are analytically useful in that they are cites of intense oppression without regular insurgency. While insurgencies erupt at both airports and mega-events on occasion—political violence, hijackings, fan celebrations and riots, etc., they are best understood as cites of coordinated mobility and consumption. It is this purportedly apolitical status that opens up the question of criminalisation and prosecution of everyday behaviour explored below. I suggest that the universal gaze of suspicion and guilt in comprehensive surveillance regimes is an organization of power that can be framed, with a nod to Pierre Clastres, as The State Against Society.
The chapter is organised in two main parts. First is an overview of Zionist securitism and settler colonialism’s attempts to eliminate Palestine’s indigenous populace. I look at this through the lens of a ‘pacification industry’, the trade in the theories and technologies of inequality management that assist in the repression of resistance and criminalised populations around the world (Johnson, 2012; Halper, pending). Second is the practice of criminalising suspect, disruptive, or unwanted persons under the risk analysis and comprehensive surveillance regimes found at airports and mega-events and these institutions acting as roll-outs for systems later deployed more broadly. I examine Israel’s export of pacification industry technologies to China for it preparations for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, a brief sampling of other examples, and the export of comprehensive surveillance systems to airports worldwide to connect the political geography between parts one and two.
Through these two themes I explore both settler colonialism’s elimination of indigenous populaces and the overlap between erasing political resistance and socio-cultural nonconformity in ‘clean’ spaces. One quick word on terminology. Many of the materials surveyed use ‘terror’, ‘terrorism’, and ‘terrorist’ in ways similar to how most governments use the terms. This refers primarily to armed actions by “selected, relatively small-scale terrorists and rebels, including some genuine national liberation movements” and leaves out analogous state actions altogether (Herman & O’Sullivan, 1989; xii). I do not subscribe to this understanding. Terrorism is a tactic, not ethic, whether deployed by states, groups, or individuals from the political economic Right, Centre or Left. Like the terms ‘militant’, ‘armed’ and ‘nonviolent’ it describes a little about the tactic in question, but nothing about towards what end or goal it is deployed nor the ethical base for its deployment, by far the more important questions.
A Settler Colonial Security Industry
Israel targets Palestinians for surveillance and control no matter whether they are conscious antisystemic actors as, in Patrick Wolfe’s paraphrasing of Deborah Bird Rose, “to get in the way of settler colonisation, all the native has to do is stay at home,” (Wolfe, 2006; 388). Wolfe (2006; 387) writes that settler colonialism is guided by a “logic of elimination,” that it “destroys to replace,” (388). Elimination need not be physical destruction. Since 1948 Israel has tried to create “Israeli Arabs” as a status group within its borders. This attempts to displace the native population’s indigeneity and articulate Palestinians instead through the settler society. Australia’s “Stolen Generations”—the abduction of indigenous children for rearing in the White settler society—are another example of elimination without physical destruction.
Wolfe continues, “In short, elimination refers to more than the summary liquidation of Indigenous people, though it includes that. In its positive aspect, the logic of elimination marks a return whereby the native repressed continues to structure settler-colonial society,” (Wolfe, 2006; 390). Ahmad Sa’di (2011; 83) elaborates on this writing that the “The size, natural growth, structure, migration, and spatial distribution of the indigenous population and the settlers are of fundamental importance to the functioning – and even the very survival” of settler colonial regimes. Indeed the indigenous population is the single most important element shaping settler societies. The indigenous—in this case Palestinian—structuring of settler society is clearly seen in the development of Israeli security apparatuses.
Zionist colonisation’s first decades saw largely unorganised or small-scale organised resistance from indigenous Palestinians. Early Zionist settlements “had not provoked the enmity of the [peasantry] who were less concerned with the identity of the landowners than with the availability of employment opportunities,” (Shafir, 1996; 86). The Second Aliya (wave of Jewish immigration) between 1904 and 1914 brought ‘Hebrew labour’ programs and significant displacement of Palestinians from jobs and lands, leading to more organised resistance. The first settler security forces—Bar Giora which quickly morphed into Hashomer—turned to guarding in response “to the escalation of Palestinian hostilities after the Young Turks’ Revolt in July, 1908 and, specifically, to the subsequent attempt of villagers and Bedouins in a number of locations in the Lower Galilee to reverse Jewish land purchases,” (Shafir, 1996; 138). As the resistance to, subversion of, and attacks on the colonists became more organised, the colonisers in turn began to further organise security forces. The colonisers formed the Haganah—Hashomer‘s successor and the Israel Defence Force‘s precursor (IDF)—during British colonial rule in response to the 1920 uprising, along with Ta’as its military production branch. It developed into a more formal paramilitary organization after the next Palestinian uprising in 1929, its forms again shaped by the relationship with Palestinians, and first developed counterinsurgency teams and built frontier surveillance systems—the Special Night Squads and homa umigdal (‘wall and tower’) settlements respectively—during the 1936-39 Arab Revolt (Johnson, 2012; 6). Indigenous resistance has guided the structuring of the Israeli military and security apparatuses and industries continues ever since. Neve Gordon notes that in Israel,
after telecommunications, [homeland security (HS)] is the second-largest high-tech subsector in terms of numbers of companies. Interestingly, in terms of the number of HS/surveillance companies and the revenues these companies accrue, there is no comparison between Israel and countries like Ireland, Taiwan and India, all of which have enjoyed a similar high-tech boom but have not developed an HS within their high-tech industries. Only two other countries appear to have such robust HS and surveillance high-tech sectors: the United States and the United Kingdom. The difference between Israel and the other newly established high-tech capitals reflects the impact of the internal forces and processes that led to the creation of Israel’s HS industry (Gordon, 2011; 158).
Palestinian resistance—armed and unarmed, from Marxist to Islamist to nationalist—not only structures the Israeli military and HS industry, it is also its laboratory and proving ground. As Gordon writes, “According to Ran Galli, corporate vice-president of major campaigns for Elbit Systems, ‘No other country has Israel’s extensive hands-on experience in fighting terror, including the development of new systems, testing them in real-time and adapting and fine-tuning following feedback from performance in the field,’” (Gordon, 2011; 162)
Gordon’s interview with Yossi Pinkas, vice-president of Nemeysco, further elaborates on the laboratory. Pinkas notes that Israeli firms can “check the products on the ground to see if they resolve the issue – solutions mean technology, doctrine, and system. After 9/11 everybody began buying technologies … We have already made the mistakes and through our mistakes we learned to produce a general solution, one that unites the different systems … We learn from our own experience in the West Bank and Gaza as well as Lebanon and employ it in order to improve the products and services,” (Gordon, 2011; 162).
Zionism—settler colonialism in Palestine—produced military and security apparatuses that can be best understood as anti-Palestinian technologies. As noted above, the technology’s history as ‘battle proven’ is a selling point. Settler colonialism’s logic of elimination guides these industries as they produce and test tools to suppress Palestinian resistance. The following sections examine two of the many fields in which Israeli arms and security industries are active: risk analysis through profiling and comprehensive surveillance at airports and in preparations for mega-events.
Settler Colonial Securitism Takes Flight
Klauser, November and Ruegg, note that airports serve as “test beds for further societal applications and developments of preprogrammed control technologies,” (2008; 110). Mark Salter concurs, writing that “airports have long been laboratories for new strategies of both technological and social control,” Further, “Public and private authorities have taken advantage of the liminal character of airports to conduct policing and border functions, which take place inside the state but at the margins of the law,” (Salter, 2008a; xi). Indeed airports are increasingly authoritarian spaces. Airports as “test beds” lends gravity to Alistair Gordon’s conclusion that:
Antiterrorist measures turned the airport into an electronically controlled environment rivalled only by the maximum security prison. It was more there mere coincidence that the architects responsible for some of these fortified terminals had also designed penitentiaries. Both the airport concourse and the cell block used similar kinds of logic. Interior and exterior spaces were under twenty-four-hour surveillance from electronic eyes, motion detectors, and video cameras. Both inmates and passengers moved through narrow checkpoints, where personal screenings were administered with metal detectors and body searches. Only the duration of incarceration differed (Gordon, 2004; 238).
The airport as an incarcerating space is relevant throughout this section which focuses on two developing trends in surveillance and control technologies at airports: risk analysis and management and comprehensive surveillance regimes. I look at how these “counterterrorism” security regimes are deployed along the lines of systemic alterity and their logic of universal guilt and suspicion.
Salter notes that “Risk management has become the governance touchstone of the post-9/11 world, arising in the academic fields of sociology and criminology, and the private fields of insurance and policing,” (2008b; 20). Whitaker elaborates that in this “official security discourse” of “risk analysis: resources are limited; 100 per cent security is impossible; the rational response is to analyse the risk levels of potential threats and deploy resources proportionately,” (2011; 372). In risk analysis “businesses, governments, and airport authorities must plan for failure and allocate resources, procedures, and policies according to the probability and impact of certain unavoidable risks. […] Risk is then, mitigated, avoided, transferred, or accepted according the abilities and environment of the authority,” (Salter, 2008b; 20).
CiCo3 