israel

Every fish looks strong when it’s swimming with the current, on the Israel lobby

Philip Weiss asked in September on Mondoweiss, “How powerful is the Israel lobby?” It’s a good question but he didn’t get the answer right. His take, like most such analyses, doesn’t look at power at all, but rather just assumes it. I’m not primarily concerned with the specifics of Weiss’ claims, even though some are wrong — for example it was an economic recession combined with Ross Perot’s candidacy that sank Bush I’s reelection, not the Israel lobby. I’m concerned instead with the thesis that gives those claims meaning.

The Israel lobby thesis claims that the lobby is a force that distorts US policy away from supporting Palestinian liberation, institutes reactionary US policies throughtout North Africa and Southwest Asia, and for both these reasons is against the US national interest. The overwhelming majority of Israel lobby theses on the US-Israeli relationship do not examine how the US government operates, how policies are made, and whose interests they serve. This is surprisingly true even of many who acknowledge Israel’s role in US imperialism. For this reason they ignore the obvious question, “What would US policy be like if there were no lobby?” But to ignore systemic analysis is to ensure movement failure. So what do we know about power in the US and the US’s power?

John Dewey wrote in 1931 that “politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.” This does not mean that guys in smoky back rooms make decisions that US legislators then take up, although that is sometimes the case. Instead, as Dewey wrote, “politics in general is an echo, except when it is an accomplice, of the interests of big business.” So when the Democratic Party advocates for increased migration to the US — usually with quite limited protections and rights for migrants, and the Republican Party advocates for restricting reproductive rights, these both are campaigns for the demographic growth necessary for capitalist economic expansion. Increased migration seems the more progressive option but supporting policies that force emigration from peripheralized states robs origin countries and communities of populations they paid to birth, raise, educate, and train. This is sometimes referred to as “brain drain” and is tremendously harmful. This is to say that moral expressions for how capital shapes society takes forms that are not always immediately obvious. In this example, one takes the form of authoritarian patriarchy and the other imperialist population plundering.* Both are Dewey’s “echoes” of big business and its demands for permanent growth.

So when Weiss (and Mearsheimer & Walt and others ad infinitum) argue that the Israel’s lobby’s “policies are against the American people’s interest,” how is he defining interest? Is US policy against Palestinians against the interests of big business? If so, how? Is it against the interests of the US war industries that benefit from billions in guaranteed annual subsidized sales and a combat proving ground for its technologies? Is it against the interests of those labor unions that enjoy high wages and benefits manufacturing and transporting weapons that kill Palestinian workers, peasants and refugees? Is it against the interests of oil companies that get huge windfalls everytime Israel escalates the ongoing nakba, Palestinians escalate armed anti-colonial resistance, or Israel attacks Lebanon or Syria? Is it against the general foreign policy interests of the US when Israel uses US weapons against Palestinians that other prospective or existing client states and allies can then anticipate receiving or procuring with the knowledge that they are battle tested?

In just those four examples we have: the military-industrial complex, labor unions, the oil industry and US policy towards all other client and allied states. Two of those are two of the most important economic interests in the US, up there with banking and real estate. A third is a major power broker inside the Democratic Party. And the last facilitates US efforts everywhere else.This is before we even get to how the US, being a settler colony itself, also expresses settler-colonialism through foreign policy. Or how US foreign policy has always been reactionary. Or any Israel lobby.

We don’t need the existence of a lobby to arrive at the general orientation of the US’s policies against Palestinians. We come to the Israel lobby being the answer when we avoid a class analysis. Or a gendered analysis. Or a black liberation analysis. Or an anticolonial analysis. Or any kind of systemic engagement at all. In the example of the military industrial-complex we can examine US support for other client states like Colombia and look for a Colombia lobby. Or how the US never intervenes for the rights of natives in Canada and look for the Canada lobby. We don’t really find these lobbies but we find harmful US policies anyways.

So what do we make of the Israel lobby? Clearly various groups arguing against Palestinian freedom are at work in US politics. These include groups who oppose Palestinian liberation because they are ideologically Zionist and groups who oppose Palestinian liberation because they are messianic antisemitic death cults that fantasize about a genocidal end of days. These groups celebrate their own perceived efficacy and can plausibly claim many results. They certainly appear powerful. But every fish looks strong when it’s swimming with the current. The power these groups wield is mostly not their own, they operate inside the “shadow cast on society by big business”. It would be a challenge to not appear powerful when everything is already going your way. We can see the hard limits on their capacity when they run up against US interests as defined by one of the forces mentioned above: the military-industrial complex.

In 1981 the Reagan administration proposed an arms sale to Saudi Arabia that Israel vigorously opposed, especially because it included fighter jets as advanced as those sold to Israel and several planes fitted with early warning radar systems. Israel saw those radar systems as potentially restricting its capacity to carry out regional airstrikes with impunity as it had done over the previous year in Lebanon and Iraq. The Israel lobby went all out to oppose the arms sale which would have been, adjusted for inflation, $25 billion dollars today, the largest foreign arms sales in US history to that point. The Israel lobby lost. It could not beat McDonnell-Douglas and Boeing and the arms industry unions. Nor could it sway the Reagan administration from firming up the Saudi monarchy as another anchor of US power in Southwest Asia.

In 2004 the same “neoconservative Zionists” Weiss incorrectly says were behind the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, specifically Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz, cost Israel hundreds of millions of dollars by forcing it to not return drones it had previously sold to China that were sent back to Israel for upgrading, just as the previous US administration did in 2000 when it spiked a prior military sale to China after the contracts were already signed. The US, led by Feith and Wolfowitz, so forcefully pressured Israel about the drones that at least one Israeli official ended up resigning over the affair. When Israel is in opposition to big business the Israel lobby does not succeed. Because that fish is not strong enough to swim against a strong current.

But because the various Israel lobby groups are well organized and are well funded and are swimming with the current most of the time they can have real effects. The various anti-BDS bills in state legislatures almost certainly are because of the lobby alone. Perhaps the larger quantity of military aid the US gives to Israel over Colombia is as well although the primacy of Southwest Asia in US foreign policy is at least part of the reason. And some individual election results, usually in primaries, can also be in part attributed to the lobby as Weiss points out. None of that affects the general orientation of US policy towards Palestine, only some of the details of how it happens. Those details sometimes matter a lot and this can absolutely be a terrain of struggle but only in the context of fighting the US’s general orientation. Otherwise it’s an empty gesture at best, and a quest for a mythological progressive empire at worst. A great example for this being done well by US movements is the fight against Caterpillar. It’s a fight over US policy based against big business and not its shadow.

The forces lobbying for right-wing US policies in Colombia are historically based in the same right-wing groups that advocate for the Cuba embargo and other regressive policies. Which brings us back to John Dewey again and the “shadow cast on society by big business.” When the US took over patronage of Israel from France in 1967, it did so under the banner of a colonial anti-communism that sought to fight Third Worldist, nationalist and Soviet-aligned movements and states in North Africa and Southwest Asia. 

The US had already gotten behind the Gulf monarchies and the Shah in Iran. Becoming more active supporting settler rule in Palestine was an extension of already existing US reactionary policies, not a deviation from them. When the US created a tripartite alliance with Israel and South Africa starting in the late 1960s — from whence the War On Terror discourse eventually comes, this was done specifically to fight decolonization and communism, politics the US already had in places no Israel lobbyist has ever cared about. This is where US hostility to Palestinian liberation comes from.

The Israel lobby thesis to explain US hostility to Palestinian liberation is popular for several reasons. It appeals to a vision of a United States that would do the right thing if only it had a free choice even though the United States very nearly never does the right thing. It provides an answer that doesn’t require systemic analysis nor systemic change. Defeating one lobby is a lot easier than defeating the fundamentals of empire. And yes, it also appeals to antisemitic ideas of behind the scenes Jewish control. Perhaps the best evidence of the lobby thesis’ limitations is that it cannot even explain the existence of the lobby itself. But critiques of colonialism and capitalism can both explain the lobby’s existence as well as the goals of US policy. The original critiques of major US support for Israel were based in anti-colonialism and revolutionary anti-imperialism and their analyses reflected a systemic analysis that contextualized US foreign policy in US empire. The anti-Vietnam War movement, the early PLO and varieties of Third Worldism and Black Internationalism, provided systemic critiques of US imperialism and Zionism that ‘the lobby’ proponents seem to have forgotten. But the further we get from systemic critiques the less able we are to effect change and the hollower our cries for Palestinian freedom sound.

Coming back to the brief point about the US never intervening for the rights of natives living under Canadian rule (or Australian or New Zealander, etc.). What Weiss and others see as proof of the lobby’s strength looks to me more like a sign of weakness and political precarity. If a US politician stood in Congress and railed against settler rule in Canada or against its colonial violences they would be met with bewilderment. The end of settler rule in Canada, or the US or Argentina, or any of the big settler states, is so unthinkable in US national politics that it’s hard to imagine it having any discursive effect at all at the moment. So it doesn’t appear as threatening (except to the FBI!). 

But ending settler rule in Palestine is thinkable. Which is perhaps why the lobby has to stay so busy and why it has to work so hard. Even though Israel fits coherently and consistently inside US empire without any lobby, Israel might not be, or might no longer be, necessary for US empire. The US eventually and reluctantly supported the end of direct settler rule in South Africa. It could well do the same in Palestine. It would still support right wing policies that oppose Palestinian freedom — it already backs neoliberal capitalist Palestinian politicians in the PA — but it might not need Israeli rule to push these policies. It is precisely because the end of settler rule seems like a possibility that the Israel lobby has not only to exist, but to do all that work. Empire explains the lobby. The lobby does not explain empire.

* There is not time to go into it here but I am NOT saying patriarchy comes from capitalism, only that capitalism can articulate through patriarchy.

France->Detroit->Algeria->Palestine: A spectre of settler colonialism

Detroit organizer, scholar and beloved comrade Kristian Davis Bailey is en route to France to discuss/further Black-Palestinian joint struggle and solidarity. French settler colonialism runs deep through both Turtle Island and Palestine and this little essay is inspired by his trip and efforts.

 

Settler colonialism and imperialism have linkages and traces across the globe. What follows shows linkages between Black people in the U.S. and Palestinians (and others) through the the spectre of French settler colonialism and imperialism, with various sites in France being host to discussions of Black-Palestinian solidarity during Israeli Apartheid Week this year.

 

Starting in Detroit where I’m writing, French colonization of Turtle Island was no less catastrophic than the British or Spanish, even if circumscribed by other imperial powers over time. Locally in what the settler society calls Detroit, the French under the leadership of Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, started the destruction of Ojibwe society through the commodification of furs, introductions of European diseases, frontier homicides (though less common than the British later), and introduction of alcohol (a colonial history of alcohol is yet to be written though is direly needed).

 

Early French settlers brought African slavery with them during conquest. Alternately put, French settler colonialism built an anti-Black world as it destroyed a native world. As Bill McGraw writes for Deadline Detroit, “In 1750, for example, toward the end of the French regime, more than 25 percent of Detroit residents kept slaves.” He continues, “Many roads, schools and communities across southeast Michigan carry the names of old, prominent families that owned slaves: Macomb, Campau; Beaubien; McDougall; Abbott; Brush; Cass; Hamtramck; Gouin; Meldrum; Dequindre; Beaufait; Groesbeck; Livernois and Rivard, among many others.”

 

The wealth from French colonialism on Turtle Island did not match the profits of French slave colonies in the Caribbean, especially Haiti. Yet the French fur and slave empire in Detroit is part of the colonial and imperial power that, over a century after France left North America after being expelled from Haiti in modernity’s most important revolution, brought France together with the U.K. to create the Sykes-Picot Agreement carving up Southwest Asia between the U.K., France and Russia. Sykes-Picot created the basis for British colonialism in Palestine, a regime that facilitated Zionist settler colonialism. Without the wealth from selling African people as property and colonizing Turtle Island, France would have never had the power to participate in and shape Sykes-Picot.

 

Another key French settler colony, Algeria, began again to face decolonial opposition and organizing shortly after Sykes-Picot (though not because of it).  Over the ensuing four decades the French regimes brutally, but unsuccessfully, suppressed Algerian decolonial agitation and revolt culminating in the Front de Libération Nationale-led rebellion that ended French rule in 1962.

 

Israel has always needed a powerful sponsor and France played that role beginning in 1954. According to Michael Laskier, the Mossad created underground paramilitary units in Algeria that were active in fighting decolonial FLN actions against Algerian Jews (whom anti-semitic French colonialism had positioned as a privileged native caste, one ‘closer’ to European-ness than Algerian Muslims). Israel also supported French rule at the United Nations, repeatedly siding with France during votes on Algerian independence and nuclear weapons tests in the Sahara.

 

For its part, France provided Israel with advanced arms and helped it build an aircraft industry and nuclear weapons. France supplied the aircraft Israel used to invade Sinai during the Suez Crisis, the October 1956 joint British-French-Israeli attack on Egypt. In 1959 France permitted Israel to build the Fouga Magister jet under license while over the decade, selling Israel even more advanced fighters like the Mystère. It was with French arms that Israel attacked Egypt and Syria in June 1967. Jordan joined Egypt and Syria and in the end Israel conquered the Sinai Peninsula and Occupied Gaza Strip from Egypt, the Occupied West Bank from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria.

 

Israel quickly built settlements in the Sinai hoping to prejudice any future talks by creating facts on the ground that would bind parts or all of the peninsula plus Gaza Strip to Israel. Israeli colonization led to inevitable Egyptian resistance. Surface-to-air missile systems took a heavy toll on Israeli aircraft during the War of Attrition. To confuse the anti-aircraft radars, Israel bought its first drones from the U.S. These were both decoy and spy drones. Drones at the time had still photography so returning drones had to be unloaded, the film developed and analyzed, before any intelligence was gained. Egyptian resistance combined with advances in data processing led Israel to modify the drones to deploy real time surveillance. The new drones provided real-time video thereby collapsing the time between reconnaissance and attack, allowing for on-the-spot battlfield adjustments. These new drones didn’t see much use in Sinai which was returned to Egypt in 1981 under Egyptian and international pressure. But all modern drones everywhere in the world can be traced to the Israeli colonization of the Sinai. It is there that drones became real-time surveillance platforms. It is the drones Israel developed there that led to the U.S. reinvesting in a technology it had largely abandoned.

 

France instituted an arms embargo on Israel after the 1967 war. Yet France today uses weapons Israel developed during the Sinai occupation (and deployed in Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza). France uses a modified Israel Aerospace Industries Heron drone under the name ‘Harfang’ in the imperial ‘Global War on Terror’ and in unilateral and multilateral French invasions and occupations of Afghanistan, Mali and Libya.

 

In the latter two cases the technology Israel – a settler colony whose existance is partially dependent on the Sykes-Picot Agreement France helped create and implement – developed as a result of its French-armed attack on African soil reverses course and flows from former client to patron for its own invasions of African countries. In this way France profits immensely from actions it supposedly embargoes.

 

These are some of the entanglements of settler colonialism and empire that flow through France, Palestine, Detroit and Algeria.

The Kibush HaShmira and The Violence of Settler Sovereignty in Palestine

This essay derives in part from, though cannot be blamed on, Gershon Shafir’s Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict though it is not directly cited. Thanks to Tom Pessah for helping to make this legible. Shortly after I emailed this article to him to let him know I was citing him yet again, I learned that Patrick Wolfe had made the transition. This article is dedicated to his memory. May those that knew him carry his light onward.

Israel is a settler colony. It is premised on the dislocation of Palestine. Israeli geographic existence and expansion is contingent upon Palestinian geographic contraction. Every five dunams of Israel is five less dunams of Palestine, what Patrick Wolfe calls a relationship of “negative articulation.” This dynamic illuminates the tremendous hostility to Palestinian land transfers – whether coerced, fraudulent or voluntary – to Zionists. When someone from Senegal buys a house in India the space does not become part of Senegal’s sovereignty, it remains India. When settlers obtain Palestinian land they remove it from Palestine and transfer it to Israel. The entire history of Zionism and Israel is this history of anti-Palestine-ing (along with some colonizing of adjacent nations). This is no less, and quite possibly most, true of the arms industry and Israeli military-industrial complex.

Max Weber described states as any “human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” The common shorthand version describes states‘ defining premise as holding a monopoly of legitimate violence. As the early Zionist settler society aspired to statehood in Palestine one of its key tasks was achieving monopolies on legitimate violence wherever it could.

Some of the first Zionist settlements in the 1880s had settler guards but virtually all were supplanted in the coming decade. By 1905 it was primarily Bedouin and Circassian Palestinians under contract guarding the settlements. Alternately put, local relations of force – Palestinian guards subordinate to Ottoman rule – prevailed during the early period. Beginning with the Second Aliya (a wave of Zionist settlement between 1904-1914) the nascent elements that would come to be called Labour Zionism (the forerunners of the Mapai, Mapam, Achdut Ha’Avodah, Avodah, Meretz & related parties) began a three-pronged ideological program of conquest. Three Kibushim (conquests) – Kibush Ha’Avodah (Conquest of Labour), Kibush Ha’Adama (Conquest of Land) and Kibush HaShmira (Conquest of Guarding) – created the base for a separate settler sovereignty.

The Kibush Ha’Avodah created labor fields where Jewish settlers would not be in competition with Palestinian natives. The Kibush Ha’Adama created geographic spaces exclusive to Zionist settlement. The Kibush HaShmira put settlement guarding solely in the hands of settlers. The latter combined parts of the former two while bridging them, providing a labor field exclusive to settler workers while establishing settler relations of force in limited geographies. The Kibush HaShmira conquered the act of guarding that guarded the act of conquest. The Kibush HaShmira built the proto-state organs dependent upon a monopoly on violence and separated, partially, Zionist settlement from local relations of force (even while still subordinate to Ottoman and later British imperialism). The Kibush HaShmira created proto-state spaces through which intrasettler land and labor relations separate from settler-native relations could operate. The Kibush HaShmira imagined and created the first Israeli geography.

The Kibush HaShmira ideologues created in 1907 the Bar Giora in and then Hashomer militias to take over guarding at some of the first kibbutzim. The leadership disbanded Hashomer in 1920 when the Yishuv organized the Haganah. They founded the Haganah in response to early 1920 Bedouin raid on the Tel Hai settlement and the Nebi Musa riots in Jerusalem in which several Jews (primarily natives in the latter instance, often forgotten is that Zionism destroyed Palestinian Jewry too as part of dispossession all Palestinians) and Palestinian Muslims were killed. The Yishuv felt the British colonial regime had not done enough to put down Palestinian activists in either instance and set about improving their own military capabilities. The Haganah in 1920 also created the first underground arms workshops and weapons procurement program from which all Israeli weapons production descend.

Each of the Haganah’s subsequent military reorganizations and tactical and technological developments was a direct result of settler colonialism. Alternately put, they were shaped by the Zionists’ relationship of dispossession with Palestinians. Most prominent amongst these are Palestinian military and diplomatic resistance to Zionist and British colonialism, British support for the Zionist settler society during World War II, Palestinian and Lebanese resistance to Israeli occupation and the colonization of the Sinai Peninsula. What follows are two examples, Zionist counterinsurgency kibbutz construction during the 1936-39 Arab Revolt and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) development 1967-81 settlement of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

Homa Umigdal‘s architecture of removal

The architectural style of homa umigdal (‘wall and tower’, alternately translated as ‘tower and stockade’) shows the Palestinians’ fundamental importance to the Yishuv’s political, ideological and military infrastructural development. Homa umigdal settlements, in James Gelvin’s words, “were built between 1936 and 1939, the period of the ‘Great Palestinian Revolt’ in those ‘frontier’ areas of Palestine where the Yishuv sought to establish and maintain a presence in the face of Arab Palestinian resistance.” Its fundamental principle were an enclosed perimeter and a watchtower.

John Patrick Montaño writes, referring to British settler colonialism in Ireland, “if we follow the cultural geographers in seeing landscape as rife with meaning, then we can read the built environment as a document of ideological text created to convey a particular message or view of the world.” What then, is homa umigdal‘s message?

Sharon Rothbard notes that the homa umigdal “is more an instrument than a place.” “The primary tactical requirement for the Homa Umigdal settlement,” she writes, “was that it had to meet several conditions: it had to be planned in such a way that it could be constructed in one day, and later even in one night; it had to be able to protect itself for as long as it would take for backup to arrive; and it had to be situated within sight of other settlements and be accessible to motor vehicles.” Rothbard observes that homa umigdal was a tool of conquest and control as much as an architectural form. Its design makes it “first and foremost an observation point.” As a mechanism of control its “constant panoptic observation policed by the vantage point of the ‘tower’ determined the overpowering relations” between the colonists and their surroundings.

Homa umigdal is a paradigmatic settler colonial form, a space that excludes (homa) the indigenous populace while simultaneously observing and controlling it (migdal). Homa umigdal is a further integration of the kibush ha’adama and kibush hashmira. Here the conquest of guarding is the conquest of land. They’re indistinguishable and the violence of settler sovereignty and its concomitant geographic ethnic cleansing is made pure. From a labor perspective the workers from an exclusive labor caste created an exclusive settler space. In a friendly amendment to Rothbard’s analysis I offer that homa umgidal is not “more an instrument than a place,” but, like all settler geographies, is an instrumental place, a geography exemplifying Zionism’s “negative articulation” to the native Palestinian population.

Israeli Colonization of the Sinai Peninsula and the development of modern drones

UAVs are a key export of Israel’s arms industry. A number of Israeli firms export drones, most prominently Aeronautics Defense Systems, Elbit Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries. UAVs are commonly used for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions. More recently some models have begun to carry armed payloads. All of them stem from Israeli colonization of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

Israel conquered the Sinai during the June War in 1967. In short order Israel built settlements in the Sinai, primarily south of the Gaza Strip to create facts on the ground that would separate Egyptians and Palestinians in and around Gaza from the rest of Sinai and articulate the geography to Israel instead. Israel had to deal with substantial Egyptian resistance during the Sinai occupation and developed technologies to do so.

During the first years of the Israeli occupation of Sinai, according to the Israeli Air Force (IAF), “Egypt began to deploy the SA-2 and SA-3 antiaircraft systems. The appearance of the batteries led to a number of IAF losses, and harmed the Air Force’s ability to gather intelligence from the frontlines. During the search for a method of intelligence gathering that would not put the lives of air crew at risk, the possibility of acquiring UAVs was explored.”

Alternately put, the cost of Egyptian resistance to Israeli colonization required mechanisms of pacification. In September 1971 the first squadron of U.S.-made Firebee UAVs was deployed to the Refidim Airbase in Occupied Sinai and the “squadron’s first operational flight was carried out almost immediately”. In the October (Yom Kippur) War, according to Kenneth Munson, the IAF “was able to reduce its manned aircraft losses by using inexpensive Chukar decoys to deceive and saturate Egyptian [surface-to-air missile] battles along the Suez Canal.”

They were deployed similarly to support the colonization of Syria’s Golan Heights where they “fooled the Syrians into thinking that a massive combat plane strike had begun against their [anti-aircraft] positions.” The key Israeli innovation was not use as decoys, but in modifying the surveillance payload from film to video. The “operational need for real time intelligence on the front lines led to the idea of a UAV carrying a stabilized camera that could broadcast pictures.”

Munson notes that shortly after the war the Israeli government “charged the IAI and Tadiran companies with developing small, versatile, low-signature [UAVs], able to send back real-time intelligence by direct video link, and capable of being operation in the field by ordinary soldiers after only three to six months training.”

Both IAI and Tadiran responded successfully. Tadiran produced the Mastiff UAV and IAI the Scout with the first units entering into service in 1977 though were sparsely used in Sinai as Israel began drawing down its in preparation for the withdrawal from Sinai after Camp David. Instead, Stephen Zaloga writes that the concept was first tested in battle “in 1981 when the South African Army used the IAI Scout during Operation Protea in Angola.” Operation Protea was an attempt to destroy the South-West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO). The South African military’s use of drones in a colonial war of military occupation forecast Israel’s first UAV surveillance combat deployment in Lebanon in 1982. The IDF invaded and attacked Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) bases analogous to the South African attack on SWAPO, also engaging in combat with the Syrian military and Lebanese irregulars. The Israeli attack on Lebanon and the PLO turned out to be a turning point in the deployment and popularization of UAVs and the driving motivation for U.S. investment in UAVs, a technology it had largely abandoned at that point. All modern surveillance and attack drones descend from this.

Kibush hashmira in the Present

Settler violence – apart from the horrifying but peripheral violence carried out by fundamentalist ideologues, the West Bank “hilltop youth” for example – is settler sovereignty and there is no Israeli rule in Palestine without it. Anarchist and Weberian analyses of the state are never more prescient than when locating sovereign state violence in describing settler state dispossession of native nations. Or rather, they would never be more prescient if they were used to analyze settler states or colonial encounters which they are not.

Proportionately small numbers of Druze and Bedouin Palestinians are in the Israeli army, intelligence apparatuses and Border Police and proportionately smaller yet number work in the arms industry. The idea of kibush hashmira as a segregated labor caste, the conquest of the act of guarding, continues. So too does the Israeli military industrial complex continue to guard the act of conquest. The conquest of the act of guarding that guards the act of conquest is not a phenomenon from the Second Aliya, it is phenomenon of the present. Wolfe wrote that settler colonialism “is a structure, not an event.” The kibush hashmira is one such example of Zionism’s structural presence. The conquest of guarding created both a phenomenon of sovereign violence and a segregated labor caste based upon sovereign violence that underlays the ongoing Zionist colonization of Palestine.

Though the term kibush hashmira is not in use and has not been for around a century its meaning has not lessoned. It is the guiding logic of the Israeli arms industry and military and all Israeli military industrial production is part of this colonial production of violent settler sovereignty.

Settler Colonial Securitism: Israeli Surveillance and Control Regimes at Airports and Mega-events

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).

Risk management and risk analysis have been around—outside the insurance industry—for some time and are partially attributable to rise of terror/counterterror in Western political discourse. Herman and O’Sullivan note that “One segment of the security industry that grew rapidly in the wake of the new terrorist threat of the 1970s and 1980s was political risk analysis. This proved to be such a growth industry that in 1980 a trade group was formed in the United States called the Association of Political Risk Analysts,” (Herman & O’Sullivan, 1989; 122). Yet it was only in “the aftermath of 9/11, [when] the [U.S.] federal government’s chief fiscal and program watchdog, the U.S. Government Accountability Office, recommended the country allocate its security resources on the basis of a risk-management approach,” (Lahav, 2008; 82). A broader look at risk analysis and management vis-a-vis counterterrorism discourse is beyond the scope of this chapter. I here focus on risk analysis at the individual level at airports, or passenger profiling. The conclusions cannot be extended to all discussions of risk analysis and risk management. As Salter notes,

Security risks are both unpredictable and adaptive. Both criminal and terrorist groups are able to change tactics and strategies based upon the preventative approaches taken by the airport. […] With environmental hazards, facility design, apron accidents, of aviation safety, there is a relatively robust scientific consensus on the probability and impact of events. However, there is no such database for criminal and terrorist activities that can act as a reliable predictor for the future. In short, the risk-management system attempts to quantify and ranks dangers that are unquantifiable and cannot be ranked. Not only are terrorists and criminals adaptive in a way that the physical environment or aircraft part is not but also the political risk of terror attacks is openly and actively contested, (2008b; 21)

Whitaker writes that in behavioural profiling of risk, “high accuracy in prediction is not the required standard from a security and policing perspective. What is being measured is risk, itself more a matter of statistical probability than of certainty,” (2011; 374, emphasis in original). Behind the compiling and analysis of data to determine risk “is a further assumption: the selection of what data to compile, and the analysis of this data, presupposes prior guidelines, or pre-existing models – what to look for and why it matters,” (ibid., 2011; 373 emphasis in original). In addition to Salter’s reservations about the predictive ability of behavioural profiling noted above, the “prior model contains the expectations that the analyst brings to the collected data,” (ibid.; 375) and “reproduces in its own workings the same ideological colour of the larger society that gave rise to it,” (ibid.; 383). In many states, especially but not exclusively in the Global North, the “ideological colour” includes systemic White supremacy and the “Clash of Civilisations” political doctrine of ‘The West’ vs. ‘The Islamic World.’ The “expectations the analyst brings” include racism, anti-Blackness and xenphobia. Whitaker warns of “the impact on individuals falsely identified as high risk, or the impact on entire communities that are, in effect, singled out as suspect on the basis of the correlation of high risk with a minority of individuals from that community,” (2011; 374). The risk analysis through behavioural profiling regime implies a certain universal (potential) guilt, though not all are equally (potentially) guilty. In risk analysis through behavioural profiling, the question is not whether you will perpetrate risky or dangerous behaviour, it is assumed that you will. The answer it seeks is the likelihood that you will perpetrate such behaviour this time.

Israeli airport security features passenger profiling as an important part of a multilayered security system. This has tremendous implications in a settler state. As a 2007 op-ed in the daily Haaretz observed, “Every traveler passing through Ben-Gurion International Airport recognises the scene: Arab passengers, citizens of Israel, are automatically pulled aside for security checks, some of them degrading, which sometimes last for hours,” (Haaretz, 2007). This is what Adey (2008; 146) sees as how the “contemporary surveillance and security machine acts as a mesh or sieve that sorts wanted from unwanted and trusted from distrusted identities.” Further, “airports actually work to make the differences by sorting passengers into different modalities,” (ibid.). The Israeli airport not only adheres to the systemic alterity of Palestinians, it helps to shape it.

Israeli expertise in passenger profiling is actively exported and informs many of the broader trends of political risk analysis at airports. For example, ICTS International, a private security firm established in 1982 by former members of El-Al security and Israel’s General Security Service, handles security at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport and developed “the Advanced Passenger Screening system used by most North American Airlines,” (Whitaker, 2011; 379). Its screening concepts are “widely in place in many European airports,” (ibid.). Boston’s Logan Airport uses—and the U.S. Transportation Security Administration now promotes—a passenger profiling system “directly inspired by Israeli advisors,” (ibid.). In 2005 Israel agreed to Help Russia “set up an aviation security system similar to the one that it has,” (Melman, 2005). The export destinations continue ad infinitum.

Another key part of airport security systems is the ‘comprehensive surveillance regime’. These regimes are not literally comprehensive. The budget needed for truly panoptic surveillance equipment and analysis would quickly put airports out of business. As Klauser, November and Ruegg note—referring specifically to Geneva International Airport but broadly applicable, “the airport is not homogeneously under surveillance but rather selectively monitored, dividing its surface into hierarchically-organised areas of control,” (2008; 115). This surveillance creates specific categories of both persons and space (ibid.; 107). Klauser, November and Ruegg’s case study is especially valuable for how it looks at the application of a surveillance regime, closed circuit television (CCTV), beyond the counterterrorism paradigm. At “Geneva International Airport,” they write, “cameras are used to monitor the microscale behaviour of previously identified, arriving ‘passengers of risk’ within publicly accessible arrival zone of the airport. In [their] interviews, examples of closely monitored ‘individuals of risk’ ranged from members of the Hell’s Angels and religious sects to supposed members of human trafficking rings, criminals and terrorists,” (ibid.; 111).

Looking at surveillance beyond passengers and luggage is vital due to the shifting nature of airports. Salter notes that the “profits derived from retail space are increasingly important to private or public-private airports. In one example, the private British Airport Authorities ‘has raised the amount of revenue derived from unregulated commercial sources from 49.5 % in 1984/85 to 71.5% in 1998/99. Airports are thus pressured to generate profit from nonaviation sectors,’” (Salter, 2008b; 7). In addition to retail revenue, airports are increasingly being made destinations themselves. Jarach explains that in addition to hotels and conference and meeting facilities,

the airport has to become an “event organiser” with an autonomous image able to stimulate complementary demand in off-peak periods during the day or the year. Frankfurt airport in Germany opened a disco inside the Terminal building, while Amsterdam Schiphol launched a casino in the transit area. [..] Malpensa airport, more sporadically, has been organising music concerts inside new Terminal 1’s walls. The relevance of this service diversification in terms of direct and related additional influxes of income is fairly evident: for instance, enthusiasts, disco-lovers and gamblers have the potential to generate demand for retailing and food services, (Jarach, 2001; 124).

Illustrating “more generally the joint production of airport security between public and private actors,” airport surveillance regimes seek to both identify “dangerous” and “risky” individuals “and exclude commercially unattractive people from the airport area,” (Klauser, November and Ruegg, 2008; 114). Klauser, November and Ruegg’s survey of Geneva International Airport is worth quoting at length.

As a result, CCTV operations are not only aiming at the reduction of criminal behaviour in order to create a safe airport but also at the exclusion of individuals whose behaviour is considered to be inappropriate in the finely polished marble landscape of the airport. The repressive functionality of CCTV (i.e., to neutralise, control, and avoid specific individuals and behaviours) and the creative functionality of CCTV (i.e., to produce a commercially appealing environment) are thus intrinsically related. […]

Despite the airport’s function to receive and accommodate the general public, its publicly accessible parts cannot be understood as “public” in the sense of open, democratically shared, public space. On the contrary, within the picture of a safe, trouble-free, and presentable airport, not every social group has its place. Publicly accessible airport sections are thus restricted to clearly designed social groups, which are only accommodated as long as they are not classified to be “undesirable.”

To provide a symptomatic sample of this ambivalence, it is worth looking at two examples, including skateboarding youth, one one hand, and homeless people, on the other hand. In fact, camera operators did not describe these social groups to be of risk, in that they would need to be especially monitored to prevent luggage theft, for example. They were on the contrary exclusively seen as disturbing elements to the airport’s reputation as both a prestigious national port of entry and as a nice place to go shopping, (Klauser, November and Ruegg, 2008; 117, emphases in original).

They note this points to an overlapping and sometimes contradictory surveillance regime whereby unlike the security forces, “the busy shops, cafés, and restaurants do not consider arriving or departing passengers as border-crossing individuals but rather as potential customers. They even seek to attract additional clients to the airport who do not have any intentions of leaving by plane,” (ibid, 118). Thus do ‘the dangerous’ and ‘the undesirable’ come together as disruptive of the airport’s status as a node of mobility, a national entry gate, and a site of capitalist accumulation. Like risk analysis through behavioural profiling, comprehensive surveillance regimes assert a universal application of scrutiny. All are deserving of scrutiny, the only question is what level of scrutiny is appropriate for each category of surveilled person. On the whole, these categories will reflect racist and gendered group status in broader society. And as David Lyon notes, the “common promotional refrain, ‘if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear,’ is […] vacuous. Categorical suspicion has consequences for anyone, ‘innocent’ or ‘guilty’ caught in its gaze,” (cited in Adey, 2008; 146).

CCTV and other systems used to realise these surveillance regimes are a field of Israeli prominence. NICE Systems, for example, won surveillance contracts for airports in, amongst others: Bangkok, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Ottawa, Shanghai, Sydney, Toronto, and Washington, D.C. NICE’s technological base stems directly from settler colonial security experience. It was founded in 1986 by “former IDF personnel putting their intelligence knowhow to civilian use and converting military technologies into communications infrastructures,” engineers who had worked as a team under David Arzi, later to become NICE’s CEO (Globes, 1999). They “sought to commercialise the logging and recording software they had developed as part of the international operations” of the IDF in Lebanon and elsewhere (ibid). NICE’s early sales were mostly in the military sector. A large ‘civilian’ business developed from it which now dominates its activities. Due to its success in the ‘civilian’ sector, NICE spun off its entire communications intelligence division in 2003 and now focuses on a mix of customer service and surveillance systems.

Verint Systems too relies heavily on the IDF’s surveillance and intelligence engineering branches for its technological development. Verint—a subsidiary of the Israeli firm Comverse with headquarters in the U.S. and its main research and development centre in Israel—has won airport surveillance contracts in Kansas City, Kuala Lumpur (despite no diplomatic relations between Israel and Malaysia), Orlando, Paris, Vancouver, and Washington, D.C. and elsewhere. Numerous other Israeli firms such as Vigilant, Elbit Systems, and Magal Security Systems too provide surveillance systems for airports. All of these firms, as noted in Gordon’s interview with Yossi Pinkas, use Israeli “experience in the West Bank and Gaza as well as Lebanon” to develop the surveillance and control technologies then exported to other authoritarian systems. The next section details repression involved with international mega-events and looks at how some of these same surveillance and control regimes are deployed to ‘clean’ mega-event spaces from “commercially unattractive” and “risky” persons.

Settler Colonial Surveillance Takes the Field

Like airports, mega-events are are moments of heightened international attention to host countries and cities and sites of universal suspicion and contestation. The civic and nationalist pride involved involved in mega-event pageantry allow for the suspension of rights under the rubric of a collective sacrifice to put the community’s best face forward. The heightened attention is also recognised as a moment of opportunity to bring focus to grievances by dissidents and antisystemic agents, some of whom are created through forced displacement by the mega-event itself. They are places where new surveillance and control technologies are first introduced. The massive mobilizations involved in ‘securing’ mega-events, like more formally declared wars, “cease to be constrained by time and space and instead become both boundless and more or less permanent,” (Graham, 2010; xv). Alternately put, these regimes of surveillance and control are put in place for a passing event, but establish a new norm that persists afterwards.

‘Security’ has been a public aspect of Olympic Games preparations for decades. The 1972 attacks at the Munich Games by the Palestinian Munazzamat Aylūl al-aswad organization and the 1996 bombing at the Atlanta Games by Right-wing United States militant Eric Rudolph—along with the petty crime concerns when millions of wealthy international tourists converge—provide much of the context for the historical securitisation of the Olympics. Adjustments were made to this framework after the September 11, 2001 attacks. Security preparations in Athens (2004), Beijing (2008), and London (2012) were heavily ‘War on Terror-ised’ though only Beijing is explored here.

The Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) in 2007 detailed severe levels of oppression accompanying international mega-events like the FIFA men’s World Cup and Summer Olympic Games. “The desire to show off a city and make it an attractive tourist destination is often accompanied by […] clean-ups of public areas facilitated by criminalisation of homelessness and increases in police powers,” (COHRE, 2007; 200). Common results are “displacements and forced evictions prompted by gentrification” that are “accelerated by the Olympic Games.”

Some 720,000 people were forcibly evicted in Seoul and Inchon prior to the 1988 Olympic Games, while conservative estimates show at least 1.25 million people have already been evicted in Beijing in the lead up to the 2008 Summer Olympic Games […] Furthermore, thousands of people were evicted or relocated in Barcelona (1992), Atlanta (1996) and Sydney (2000) and Roma were evicted from their settlements [in] Athens in relation to the 2004 Olympic Games. […] In Atlanta, it is estimated that 30,000 people were affected by displacement due to Olympics-related gentrification and the associated escalation in housing costs, with specific examples of over 4,000 people being displaced from just one housing community,” (COHRE; 197).

The Chinese government framed preparations for the August 2008 Summer Olympic Games in the starkest language possible to justify the dramatic escalation of securitisation of the built environment and crackdowns on dissent. Prior to the Olympics The People’s Daily—an official voice of the Central Committee of the ruling Communist Party of China—stated that, “As far as China is concerned, the international situation and the political environment is becoming increasingly complicated by the day, and the dark clouds of terrorism on our borders are a fact that cannot be ignored.” (Asia Pacific News, 2008) The “dark clouds of terrorism on our borders” referred to uprisings that preceded the Olympics in Tibet and Qurighar (East Turkestan). The uprisings demonstrated “that the Beijing Olympics is facing a terrorist threat unsurpassed in Olympic history.” To address this, China constructed “the most strict prevention and control system in Olympic history, adopting a series of security measures rarely seen,” (ibid.).

The act of ‘securing’ Beijing prior to and during the Olympics involved a mobilization of forces on par with a major international war. These included 100,000 commandos, 100,000 police officers, 200,000 security guards and 600,000 volunteers to patrol the streets (Chan, 2008). Thousands of video cameras and others surveillance systems were installed throughout Beijing and others host cities and throughout the national railway infrastructure. Hebei province, which surrounds Beijing, set up checkpoints “on all roads leading into the capital” almost three weeks before the Olympics began. The Hebei provincial government stated that “our police must firmly attack and wipe out those who seek to dominate and endanger others” and that “We must prevent any person with ulterior motives from entering Beijing and we must prevent any dangerous or illegal materials from entering Beijing,” (Watts, 2008).

While security firms from all over the world competed and won Olympic security contracts, a number of them went to Israeli firms, this despite the U.S. State Department intervening with the Israeli Foreign Ministry to restrict ‘homeland security’ and military exports to China (and greatly enriching U.S. homeland security firms participating in Olympic bids), (Melman, 2008a). NICE Systems’s first Olympics-related contract was awarded in April 2006. Its press release announcing the contract uses the depoliticised language of a shadowy, unnamed enemy to bridge between the GWOT and the Beijing Games. The video surveillance contract was awarded “following mounting security concerns worldwide and in preparation for the 2008 Olympics,” (NICE, 2006). The system is designed to “spot suspicious packages,” and “detect unauthorised entry” while automatically alerting authorities. Two weeks prior, Verint Systems announced it has won a “several million dollar” contract for a networked video system “designed to enable security personnel to proactively detect threats before they escalate,” (Verint, 2006). Both NICE and Verint won further contracts throughout 2007 and 2008 for integrated surveillance and security systems in preparation for the Olympics. NICE won a video surveillance contract for the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, the main infrastructural artery connecting Beijing to what was at the time a very restive Tibet and Lhasa. Jerusalem based DDS-Security joined NICE and Verint in landing important surveillance and control contracts. In December 2007 it won a contract to provide access control technology to some 2,000 doors throughout Beijing’s various Olympic buildings and complexes.

City and national security officials—in order to more concretely confront the “dark clouds of terrorism”—turned to International Security and Defence Systems (ISDS), a “multinational consultancy and system integration group in the security and defence fields” based in Nir Tzi (ISDS website). ISDS were counterinsurgency consultants for the governments of South Africa, El Salvador and Guatemala during the 1980s, Chile under Pinochet, Zaire under Mobutu, and Paraguay under Stroessner (Schmid & Jongman, 2005; 585, Herman & O’Sullivan 1989; 135-6). More important than counterinsurgency experience throughout the Global South are the histories of ISDS personnel in the suppression of Palestinian and Lebanese resistance to Israeli military occupation. Promotional materials declare that “ISDS brings over 20 years of real world experience” to “counter-terrorism.” The firm’s head Leo Gleser “served for over 30 years in the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) as a member of the Special Elite Counter-Terrorism Units of the IDF, an operative in the Israeli Security Agency (ISA) and a Sky Marshall with EL AL Airline” and all “ISDS personnel are former members and instructors in select counter-terrorism units, ISA, Mossad or other intelligence and special security units,” (Smith & Wesson, 2003).

ISDS first won several small contracts from Chinese security firms, “Mainly for holding seminars and study days,” according to Gleser (Melman, 2008a). But a “turning point came in March 2008, following several terror attacks, including a suicide bomber’s attempt to blow up an aircraft and an attack on a bus in Shanghai. Alarmed, the Chinese government realised that it needed help from overseas after all. Gleser was asked to provide know-how and situation reports about international terror, mainly regarding threats of extremist Muslim groups in Asia,” (ibid.).

The threat of insurgency by militant Uighur and Tibetan groups—Islamist and nationalist, armed and unarmed—seeking to use the spotlight of the Olympics to bring an international eye to their plight concerned the Chinese government. The threat of nonviolent spectacle was especially distressing. As Gleser told Haaretz, “The Chinese fear, among other things, that some demonstrators’ group might try to take advantage of the worldwide attention to carry out a non-violent but provocative act to disgrace the Chinese organisers,” (Melman, 2008a). Further efforts equipping security personnel to prevent “especially distressing” spectacles were carried out by the Israel Police (Mishteret Yisrael) and Border Police (Mishmar HaGvul) in May and June of 2008.

The approximately six-week course was held in Israel for about 20 selected officers of the People’s Armed Police Force, to use Israeli experience to train them for possible scenarios involving terror and civil disturbances at the Games. The training involved, among other things, how to neutralise terrorists with their bare hands, how to deal with a crowd that riots on the playing field, and how to protect VIPS and remove demonstrators from main traffic arteries. […]

For purposes of training, the Kiryat Eliezer soccer stadium in Haifa played the part of the Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium in Beijing. The officers learned how to take over a hijacked bus and identify a car rigged with explosives, and trained with M-16 rifles and Jericho pistols. Although the main focus of the training was to give the Chinese police the tools necessary to handle terrorist attacks, they also learned how to handle mass civilian demonstrations (Lis, 2008).

Elsewhere, ISDS assisted the securitising of the 2000 Sydney Olympics and the 2004 Athens Olympics. ODF Optronics sold surveillance systems to South Africa for the 2010 FIFA men’s World Cup. Israel Aerospace Industries sold unmanned aerial vehicles to the Rio De Janeiro police to help pacify the favelas in the run up to the 2014 men’s World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympic Games. Controp provided surveillance systems to Greece for the 2004 Athens games and the Israeli government chipped in by sending Border Police to help train their Greek counterparts. Magal Security Systems provided perimeter detection and other surveillance systems to Equatorial Guinea and Gabon for the 2012 AFCON football championship. Vigilant provided networked surveillance recorders for the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City. Aeronautics Defence Systems’ Skystar 300 aerostat was used to surveil the 2006 G-8 conference in Moscow. An exhaustive list would greatly accelerate deforestation.

In the end, Beijing police set up three protest zones—all miles away from Olympic sites—during the 2008 Olympics but denied all of the 77 applications made for their use. Some would-be protesters were preemptively incarcerated based upon their applications for protest that were eventually denied anyway. These included Zhang Wei, who was “jailed for 30 days after applying to protest about her home being destroyed in the Olympics development,” (Watts, 2008) and Wu Dianyuan and Wang Xiuying, who were sentenced to “reeducation through labor” also for protesting their displacement (Foster and Spencer, 2008).

Settler Colonial Securitism Takes a Hike?

This chapter has laid out the development of Israel’s security apparatuses in the context of settler colonialism, investigated comprehensive surveillance and risk analysis regimes at airports and mega-events, and noted how Israeli settler colonialism is used to securatise airports and mega-events. I’ll end with a few more observations about these surveillance regimes and possibilities for antisystemic movements.

In behavioural profiling as well as video surveillance, faces are “territories to monitor,” (Klauser, November & Ruegg, 2008; 107). And as the “airport is an exception to normal urban spaces and a laboratory for testing wider schemes of social control,” (Salter, 2008b; 23). These surveillance regimes exemplify what Henry Giroux calls the “politics of disposability,” a “new form of biopolitics marked by a cleansed visual and social landscape in which the poor, the elderly, the infirm, and criminalised populations share a common fate of disappearing from public view,” (Giroux, 2006; 23). The disposable and criminalised populations targeted by capitalism and White supremacy share, though differently, their exclusion with Palestinians under settler colonialism. Wolfe writes that “it is difficult to speak of an articulation between colonizer and native since the [settlers’] determinate articulation is not to a society but directly to the land,” (Wolfe, 1999; 2). Indeed, Palestinians are so much ‘surplus humanity’ under Zionism.

This exercise has attempted not only to look at systemic relations and surveillance regimes, but also to elucidate linkages, nodes of connectivity where antisystemic agents can engage. Under Palestinian leadership, hundreds of foreign solidarity activists coordinated their flight arrivals to break the increasingly strict closure regimes Israel deploys against the occupied Palestinian territories. Some two hundred activists were prevented from flying to Israel at all, three hundred and ten—including some non-activists—were questioned upon arrival, one hundred and twenty-four were detained, and dozens more made it through to join allies in Ramallah in the West Bank, (Blumenkrantz, Khoury and Kubovich, 2011). This innovative action challenged both Israel’s apartheid policies and the multilayered airport surveillance regime.

Many pending events offer similar possibilities. Brazil’s progressive Workers’ Party governments are likely to oversee the 2014 FIFA men’s World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympic Games. Antisystemic organisers can challenge the securitisation of mega-events and Israeli apartheid by joining the Palestinian boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and dissuading Brazilian officials from employing Israeli surveillance and security firms. The fight against behavioural profiling comprehensive surveillance regimes can be linked with the struggles against systemic White supremacy and Islamophobia. The list is virtually endless. Just as ‘terror’ and its derivatives are largely vacuous terms with regards to goals and aims, so too are the techniques and technologies described above. How do surveillance regimes and risk analysis resolve purported dangers? They don’t, not even a little. These regimes intend to preserve a deeply unjust and unequal status quo as best they can, to manage and not resolve the purported threat. Doing anything more is beyond their capability. And herein lies the room to posit alternative visions.

Bibliography

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Blumenkrantz, Zohar, Jack Khoury and Yaniv Kubovich (2011) “124 pro-Palestinian activists arrested at Ben-Gurion Airport,” Haaretz, October 7. Accessed 15 January 2012 at http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/124-pro-palestinian-activists-arrested-at-ben-gurion-airport-1.372376

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