Israeli surveillance industries are well integrated in the global surveillance market. This incorporation is achieved through marketisation, labour processes and the circulation of capital. Even Israel has been considered by many as a successful securitising model. In this article, it is argued that this success is the outcome of several factors, including the shared premises of Israel’s settler-colonial regime and neoliberal data-based globalised capitalism, which has become a leading sector in the current economic formation. Furthermore, it reflects the advent of the securitising states and concurrently the rise of the security-industrial complex in the US and, to a lesser degree, in Europe. Yet, the acceptance of Israeli-settler colonial surveillance methods and Weltanschauung as a model points to the erosion of hitherto cherished values such as privacy, trust, autonomy, care and solidarity.
M. E. Young, ‘Indian removal and land allotment: the civilized tribes and Jacksonian justice’, The American Historical Review 64, no.1 (1958), pp. 31–45.
2.
Considerable material has been published on this topic. See, for example, E. Zureik, Israel’s Colonial Project in Palestine: brutal pursuit (London: Routledge, 2015); A. H. Sa’di, Thorough Surveillance: the genesis of Israeli policies of population management, surveillance and political control towards the Palestinian minority (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016).
3.
D. Kammerer, ‘Why should we talk about culture, when we want to understand “surveillance”?’, On Culture: the Open Journal for the Study of Culture 6 (2018), p. 3, https://mediarep.org/handle/doc/4839.
4.
E. Zureik, ‘Settler colonialism, neoliberalism and cyber surveillance: the case of Israel’, Middle East Critique (2020), pp. 1–17; Who Profits, ‘“Big Brother” in Jerusalem’s old city: Israel’s militarized visual surveillance system in occupied East Jerusalem’, Flash report, November 2018; N. Gordon, ‘Israel’s emergence as a homeland security capital’, in E. Zureik, D. Lyon and Y. Abu-Laban, eds, Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 153–70; S. Graham, ‘Laboratories of war: surveillance and US-Israeli collaboration in war and security’, in Zureik, Lyon and Abu-Laban, eds, Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine, pp. 133–52.
K. Gates, ‘The globalization of homeland security’, in K. Ball, K. Haggerty and D. Lyon, eds, Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 292–99.
7.
Gates, ‘The globalization of homeland security’; B. Hayes, ‘The surveillance-industrial complex’, in Ball, Haggerty and Lyon, eds, Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, pp. 167−75.
8.
Shezaf and Jacobson, ‘Revealed: Israel’s cyber-spy industry helps world dictators hunt dissidents and gays’.
A. Lubin, ‘“We are all Israelis”: the politics of colonial comparisons’, South Atlantic Quarterly 107, no. 4 (2008), pp. 671−73.
11.
Quoted in Parrish, ‘The U.S. border patrol and an Israeli military contractor are putting a native American reservation under “Persistent Surveillance”’.
12.
Quoted in Parrish, ‘The U.S. border patrol and an Israeli military contractor are putting a native American reservation under “Persistent Surveillance”’.
13.
They often use such marketing labels such as ‘combat-proven’, ‘tested in Gaza’, etc.
14.
Gordon, ‘Israel’s emergence as a homeland security capital’; Graham, ‘Laboratories of war’; Who Profits, ‘“Big Brother” in Jerusalem’s old city’; N. Denes, ‘From tanks to wheelchairs: unmanned aerial vehicles, Zionist battlefield experiments, and the transparency of the civilian’, in Zureik, Lyon and Abu-Laban, eds, Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine, pp. 171−95.
B. Marczak, J. Scott-Railton, S. McKune, B. Abdul Razzak and R. Deibert, ‘HIDE AND SEEK Tracking NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware to operations in 45 countries’, The Citizen Lab website, https://citizenlab.ca/2018/09/hide-and-seek-tracking-nso-groups-pegasus-spyware-to-operations-in-45-countries/ (accessed 13 September 2020). These include Bahrain, Indonesia, Angola, Mozambique, the Dominican Republic, Azerbaijan, Swaziland, Botswana, Bangladesh, El Salvador, Panama, Nicaragua, Malaysia, Vietnam, Mexico, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Honduras, Trinidad, Tobago, Peru, Colombia, Uganda, Nigeria, Ecuador, United Arab Emirates.
19.
Shezaf, and Jacobson, ‘Revealed: Israel’s cyber-spy industry helps world dictators hunt dissidents and gays’.
20.
J. Scott-Railton, B. Marczak, B. Abdul Razzak, M. Crete-Nishihata, and R. Deibert ‘Reckless exploit Mexican journalists, lawyers, and a child targeted with NSO spyware’, The Citizen Lab, https://citizenlab.ca/2017/06/reckless-exploit-mexico-nso/ (accessed 19 June 2017).
21.
Other high-profile cases include the bugging of the mobiles of Saudi dissentients Omar Abdulaziz, who lives in Canada and was in close contact with slain Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashogghi, Ghanem al-Masarir, the London-based Saudi satirical commentator, and the internationally acclaimed human rights activist Ahmed Mansoor from the United Arab Emirates, who was sentenced to ten years imprisonment. Furthermore, the Saudi authorities have allegedly used this spyware to bug the mobile phone of Ben Hubbard, the New York Times journalist; B. Marczak, S. Anstis, M. Crete-Nishihata, J. Scott-Railton and R. Deibert. ‘Stopping the press: New York Times journalist targeted by Saudi-linked Pegasus spyware operator’, The Citizen Lab, https://citizenlab.ca/2020/01/stopping-the-press-new-york-times-journalist-targeted-by-saudi-linked-pegasus-spyware-operator/ (accessed 13 September 2020).
22.
Quoted in Shezaf and Jacobson, ‘Revealed: Israel’s cyber-spy industry helps world dictators hunt dissidents and gays’.
23.
H. Cohen, Army of Shadows: Palestinian collaboration with Zionism, 1917–1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), p. 17.
24.
Cohen, Army of Shadows, pp. 178−79.
25.
Sa’di, Thorough Surveillance, pp. 93−95.
26.
P. Wolfe, ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006), pp. 387−409.
27.
See, for example, N. Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 35; G. Levy, ‘Good Arab, Dead Arab: in Israel, police killing a demonstrator is a marginal story, only because the victim is an Arab’, Haaretz, 7 June 2017, https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-good-arab-dead-arab-1.5481672 (accessed 14 November 2020). For the original proverb, see, for example, Wolfe, ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the Native’; W. Miede, ‘“The only good Indian is a dead Indian”: history and meaning of a proverbial stereotype’, The Journal of American Folklore 106, no. 419 (1993), pp. 38−60; N. Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: the concept of “Transfer” in Zionist political thought, 1882–1948 (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992).
28.
A. H. Sa’di, ‘Modernization as an explanatory discourse of Zionist-Palestinian relations’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 24, no. 1 (1997), pp. 25−48.
29.
Sa’di, Thorough Surveillance, pp. 35−40.
30.
Sa’di, Thorough Surveillance, p. 38.
31.
Y. Bauml, A Bue and White Shadow: the Israeli establishment’s policy and action among its Arab citizens – the formative years 1958−1968 (Haifa: Pardes, 2007), p. 248.
7amleh the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, ‘Will a new wave of Israeli legislation diminish internet freedoms?’, 14 August 2018, https://7amleh.org/2018/08/14/will-a-new-wave-of-israeli-legislation-diminish-internet-freedoms/ (accessed 15 November 2020). For using practices which fall in the grey zone of legality see Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, ‘Israel State Attorney claims censorship of social media content, following Cyber Unit requests, isn’t an “exercise of gov’t authority”’, 20 November 2019, https://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/9859 (accessed 15 November 2020).
For example, Harvey Weinstein employed the Israeli private investigation firm Black Cube, whose advisory board includes such people as Meir Dagan – former head of Mossad; Efraim Halevy – former head of Mossad, who headed the National Security Council and the Hebrew University Centre for Strategic Studies; Yohanan Danino – former Israeli police commissioner; Major General Giora Eiland – former head of the Israeli National Security Council, who headed the IDF’s Operation Branch and IDF’s Planning Branch; ‘Harvey Weinstein hired Black Cube to block New York Times article, jury hears’, The Guardian, 30 January 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/jan/30/harvey-weinstein-black-cube-new-york-times (accessed 30 September 2020). See also R. Farrow, ‘Harvey Weinstein’s army of spies’, The New Yorker, 6 November 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/harvey-weinsteins-army-of-spies (accessed 14 November 2020).
54.
For example, Knesset Member Glick, who stated that ‘Instead of being a light unto the nations, the Jewish state is circulating weapons that are used in crimes against humanity, and it makes no difference whether it’s a rifle by the force of which a woman was raped by soldiers, or a digital system used for surveillance.’ Cited in Shezaf and Jacobson, ‘Revealed: Israel’s cyber-spy industry helps world dictators hunt dissidents and gays’.
