TURNING `SWORDS INTO SILICON CHIPS` – The Israeli Homeland

TURNING ‘SWORDS INTO
­SILICON CHIPS’
­
– The Israeli Homeland
­Security Industry and ­Making
of Jewish Nationhood
Leila Stockmarr
Thesis for the degree of Ph.D Roskilde University,
September 2015
Supervisor: Dr. Sune Haugbølle
Co-supervisor: Dr. Gorm Rye Olsen
TURNING ‘SWORDS INTO S
­ ILICON CHIPS’
­
– The Israeli Homeland Security Industry
and ­Making of ­Jewish Nationhood
Leila Stockmarr
Thesis for the degree of Ph.D Roskilde University,
September 2015
Supervisor: Dr. Sune Haugbølle
Co-supervisor: Dr. Gorm Rye Olsen
TURNING ‘SWORDS INTO SILICON CHIPS’
– The Israeli Homeland Security Industry
and ­Making of Jewish Nationhood
Copyright © 2015 Leila Stockmarr
Word count 122.801
All rights reserved
Printed in Denmark, Roskilde, 2015
Department of Society and Globalisation
Universitetsvej 1
4000 Roskilde, denmark
Issn 0909-9174
Content
Acknowledgements1
Abstract3
Terms and abbreviations
4
INTRODUCTION AND FOCUS OF ­RESEARCH
9
Preface9
Background12
The project
13
The research questions
15
The argument(s)
16
Contributions17
The case of Israel
19
Sources20
Organisation of material and structure of research
20
CHAPTER ONE
LITERATURE REVIEW, CURRENT RESEARCH TRENDS AND METHODS
25
25
1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 25
26
30
34
36
38
42
45
45
46
49
51
52
53
1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 Introduction
The broader scope of Zionism and colonialism
The political economy of the Israeli security industry
Global Palestine
The Palestinian experience/racialisation
Security studies, policing, and liberal war
Militarism and the military-industrial complex
Methodology and research questions and practices
Background of research Technology, power, and critical realism
Research methods and practice
Studying of extreme cases (extreme case sampling)
Limitations of scope of analysis
Data, fieldwork, and interviews
Ethical concerns: Research in conflict zones and questions of access
and assigning blame
Political emotions
56
59
CHAPTER TWO
FOUNDATIONS, THEORIES, AND CONCEPTUAL ­REFLECTIONS
2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 Technological nationalism, settler colonialism, and security as ­
national innovation
Introduction
Nation-state incongruence and state-sponsored nationalism
Thinking the national
Settler colonialism
Nation, state and ‘race’ Technological nationalism and national systems of innovation The ‘national dream’ is technological
Techno-globalism versus techno-nationalism
Structures of innovation
Security as national innovation, security as a substitute Critique of security
Conclusion
CHAPTER THREE
3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 4.4 63
63
64
65
68
69
71
74
76
79
81
84
89
91
BACKGROUND I: ZIONISM, NATIONALISED SECURITY,
AND ISRAEL’S MOBILISATION FOR NATIONHOOD
91
Introduction
91
Zionism as nationalised settler colonialism
91
Destruction/construction98
Israel as a racial state, ethno-classes, and ethnic capital
101
Frontier violence and settler governmentality 106
Israeli homeland security
108
Conclusion
113
CHAPTER FOUR
4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 63
63
BACKGROUND II: A HISTORY OF THE ISRAELI
SECURITY INDUSTRY
Introduction
The Israeli security industry: A short introduction Background: How it all began The ideology of economic independence and ethnic capital
Pre-state formations and the nascent security economy
Early stages of military production
IMI: From clandestine underground factory to security giant
Pre-state militias and initial production Settling the land and the dynamics of replacement
117
117
117
117
122
122
124
124
127
130
131
4.5 4.6 4.7 The state revolution
State-controlled production
The birth of the giants
Zionist pioneers, elite networks and defence legends: The case of
IAI and Elbit
Expansive military production
Post-1967: a new impetus and restructuring
External reliance: Pax Americana and the role of foreign capital
The ‘economic peace’ of the Oslo Accords From third world villainy to Silicon Wadi Conclusion
134
135
137
138
141
142
145
147
152
155
CHAPTER FIVE
159
5.0 5.1 5.2 159
159
159
162
163
166
167
172
175
177
179
5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 SECURITISED NATIONALISM, TECHNO-SCIENCE, AND WAR
Introduction Science, settler colonialism and Zionism
Ein Breira science and avenues of warfare
Scientific frontier institutions
Policies of science: R&D and security
The commercialisation of science and the Chief Scientist’s Office
The Negev technopolis
Blumberg’s Homeland Security Institute Laboratories of war
The juxtaposition of real and fake war: ‘Seeing is striking’
The entrepreneurs of science and security:
between pragmatism and ideology
The spirit of entrepreneurship
An extraordinary mission
Chik-chak, bitzu’ism, chutzpah, and rosh gadol
Conclusion
CHAPTER SIX
6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 ALGORITHMS OF CONTROL: DIGITAL ENVELOPES AND
THE MANAGING OF THE EMOTIONAL LANDSCAPE
Introduction
Israel’s cyber and digital security economy
Digital enveloping and calculating technologies
Surveillance and the digital enveloping of Palestine
Controlling the emotional landscape
Risk management and digitalised control
Predictive software: the case of Athena
Algorithms of control: from combat to Waze and Any.do
Selling ‘the truth’ and constructing identities
182
182
183
187
190
193
193
193
194
196
196
198
199
199
200
204
6.4 6.5 Coding bodies: Biometrical tracking
Biometrical access
Conclusion 207
207
210
CHAPTER SEVEN
213
7.0‘SMART CITIES’, ISRAELI URBANISATION,
AND URBAN CONTROL
7.1Introduction
7.2 Welcome to the ‘smart city’
7.3 Zionism and urbanisation 7.4 Policing and ‘cities without violence’
7.5 Smart wars and frontier settlements From kibbutzim to outpost to smart city
The Ariel-Qalqilya binary
7.6 Israeli smart city spaces and projects The Digi-Tel-Jaffa binary
Fortress Jerusalem and the case of Mer
Magal: From Ramat Ha’sharon to Mombasa
Elbit’s Public Security Deployment Scope
Compression of time and space
7.7 Conclusion: the smart city revisited
213
213
214
217
220
224
224
225
228
228
230
232
234
238
240
CHAPTER EIGHT
BORDER SECURITY PART I: 243
243
8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 ‘THE HOMELAND BEGINS AT THE BORDER’
243
Introduction 243
Borders of national belonging
244
Israel-Palestine’s ‘human’ borders 246
Access248
Denied access
250
The borders of the Oslo Accords
253
The no-contact rule and managing the threat of violence
254
Conclusion
256
CHAPTER NINE
9.0 9.1 9.2 BORDER SECURITY PART II: SEPARATION, SURVEILLANCE,
AND TRANSIT
Introduction: Walls, barriers, and fences
Gaza’s frictionless borders: transfer and ruling from afar Frictionless patrolling: the robot servant
259
259
259
259
262
9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 Borders of separation: Hafrada logics Hafrada as an operational concept
Imperfect hafrada and indigenous resistance
Borders and surveillance
The case of Controp
Sensors, treasures and pearls
Elbit – from Palestine to Mexico
Border control: passage and strategies of concentration
Limits and liminal transit: Checkpoints and terminals Transfer of illegitimacy and the ‘Palestinianisation’ of the border
Conclusion
265
268
270
271
272
274
276
278
278
285
287
CHAPTER TEN
291
10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6 291
292
296
297
299
301
304
CONCLUSION
The Israeli security sector
Hyper and radical securitised nationalism Racialisation and ethnic security
Science – an ethos and a strategy
Techno-conceptual shifts
The laboratory of Palestine
BIBLIOGRAPHY311
Acknowledgements
This thesis would not exist without the support, love, and patience, and not least
the intellectual engagement of many people. While writing a Ph.D. is the loneliest
process imaginable, it also involves teamwork. I would never have made it without
the support of family members, friends, and colleagues.
I would like to thank my main supervisor, Dr. Sune Haugbølle. Throughout
the bumpy road of writing this thesis, Sune has been a friend, a mentor, and a
trustworthy intellectual role model of unquestioned integrity. When I was a little
(or a lot) confused and lost in the Ph.D. process, Sune always displayed patient
respect for my ideas. Thanks, too, to Dr. Gorm Rye Olsen for his insightful comments and support.
In London, I would like to thank Dr. Laleh Khalili at London School of
Oriental and African Studies for her amazing mind, input, and support. Thanks
to James, Sherri, Siggie, Carlos, and others for lively conversations over coffee.
Thanks to Liz and Lynda for being great friends. Thanks to Frederik for letting
me crash. A huge thanks to Jo Kelcey and Lina Dencik for our valuable talks and
shared experiences.
To my friends and informants in Palestine, thank you for your hospitality and
willingness to share your stories with me. I am humbled by and deeply admire
your steadfastness and integrity. In Israel, I want to thank the people of so many
organisations who opened their doors to me and shared their wisdom. People like
you make me an optimist. I want to thank my informants for taking the time
to let me into their world. Thanks to Jeff Halper for good company among guns
and gems. Thanks to Rhys Machold for helping me navigate among Israeli arms
dealers.
Back in Denmark, a big thanks to my siblings Ivan Emil, Sonja, and Viggo
and to my aunt Marianne for being you and being there. Thanks to my amazing
friends for their encouragement and endless cheering in the midst of one of my
meltdowns. Thanks to Erik Mygind Du Plesses for being a great colleague and
friend and for making me laugh. A huge thanks to Patricia Forbert for stepping
in to help with layout and graphic design in the last minute.
At Roskilde University, thanks to Miriam Younes, Anders Riel Müller, Vera
Altmeyer, Thomas Vladimir Brønd, Mie Vestergaard, and Johanna Jansson for
sharing and caring. At the Department of Society and Globalisation thanks to
Cecilie Thorsted Flo for always helping with practical matters and guidance, and
thanks to Head of the ISG Doctoral School Dr. Lisa Richey for support and
professionalism.
1
At the Danish Institute for International Studies, thanks to Lars Erslev
­Andersen, Peter Alexander Albrecht, Christine Nissen, and Rasmus Alenius
­Boserup for support and friendship. Thanks to Poya, Saer, and Tarek for great
times and struggles in the crazy world of politics. Thanks to the Danish Institute
in Damascus for funding my fieldwork.
I would like to dedicate this thesis to my parents Niels and Lone, in gratitude
for their endless support and love. Thank you for being a true source of intellectual
and moral inspiration. You have taught me most of what I have needed learn in
order to write this thesis. Thank you for standing by your beliefs and teaching me
to try to do the same. Last but most important, I would like to thank Peter for his
love and support. I know I could not have pulled through the last year without
you. I can’t wait to come home.
2
Abstract
Even before the founding of the Israeli state in 1948, the Israeli economy has
grown steadily to become the epitome of a ‘high-tech nation’ that exports advanced
technologies and software and hardware to a global customer clientele. A key
pillar of this ‘economic miracle’ has developed and grows from the country’s vast
homeland security sector.
Israeli homeland security lies at the heart of Zionists nation and state building,
and expresses both the discursive and material struggles involved in establishing
and securing a Jewish state in the former British Mandatory Palestine. The social
history of Israel’s security economy is a tale of techno-conceptual shifts in the
techno-national evolution of Zionism.
The security industry produces a broad range of technologies and systems of
control, which have been developed over time to meet the needs of the Israeli
military and the growing settler community. In recent years, the industry has had
a large impact well beyond the cartography of Israel-Palestine. Building on original
empirical material and interviews with actors of the Israeli security industry and
fieldwork conducted in interviews and at defence and security fairs, this thesis
provides a social and economic history of the genesis, development, and practices
of the companies, institutions, and individuals that comprise Israel’s homeland
security sector. Its research focuses on how the volatile mix of security, innovation,
war, and racialisation has served to advance a distinct nationhood ideal, but has
also produced a variety of messy outcomes flowing from the state’s unfinished
character as a homogenised Jewish state.
The thesis engages critically with theories of nationalism, race, settler colonialism, security, and technological nationalism. It examines how Zionist visions of
ethnic nationhood and settler colonial impulses have led to a production scheme
revolving around security innovation, and analyses the deeper meaning and logic
of the dominant security narratives, i.e., the larger political content of security.
It discusses the ways in which Israeli homeland security is described and practiced
by the industry’s actors and entrepreneurs. The thesis is also about Palestine, i.e.,
how the land of Palestine has been reconfigured, ruptured, minimised, and lockedin and how it has served as a laboratory for the industry and helped to realise
settler colonial aspirations. It is an account of what security has meant and still
means for those living under Israeli rule, and how the control and managing of
Palestine has become an exemplar of security in Israel’s branding and engagement
on the global platforms of security trade and knowledge exchanges.
3
Terms and abbreviations
Aliyah
Immigration of Jews to British Mandate Palestine and Israel-Palestine
COGAT
woordination of Government Activities in the Territories
CR
Critical Realism
HLS
Homeland Security
IAF
Israeli Air Force
IDF
Israeli Defense Forces
MFA
Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Israel)
Mossad
Israel’s external security service
Nakba Arabic for catastrophe
NSI
National System of Innovation
OCS
Office of the Chief Scientist
Oleh/Olim
Newly arrived Jewish immigrant
OPT
Occupied Palestinian Territory
Shin Bet (Shabak) Israel’s internal security service
SST
Social Shaping of Technology
UAS
Unmanned Aerial System
UAV Aerial Vehicle
UN
United Nations
4
5
6
Timeline – Key dates
1882–1903: The First
Aliyah (wave of Jewish
immigration) begins.
An estimated 25,000-35,000
Jews immigrate to Ottoman
Palestine.
1896: Theodor Herzl
publishes Der Judenstaat
(The Jewish State) proposing the structure of beliefs
of political Zionism.
1904–1914: The Second
Aliyah – 20,000 Jews
migrate to Ottoman
Palestine, most of them
from the Russian Empire.
Year
1880
1890
1900
1949–1960s: Up to one
million refugees and
immigrants (many of them
from Arab countries) settle
in Israel-Palestine.
1967: The Six Day War,
(the Naksah) between Israel
and Egypt, Jordan, and
Syria. Israel gains control of
all of the West Bank, Gaza,
the Golan Heights, and
Sinai.
1917: The Balfour
Declaration – Britain seizes
Palestine from the Ottomans
and grants support to the
establishment of a ‘National
Home for the Jewish
People’ in Palestine.
1919–1923: The third Aliyah
of Jewish migration to
British Mandatory Palestine;
immigration of approximately 40,000 Jews.
1910
1920
1930
1940
1973: The Yom Kippur War
between Israel and Egypt
and Syria.
1975: UN General Assembly
adopts a resolution describing Zionism as a form of
racism (Rescinded in 1991).
1987–1992/93: The First
Intifada, Palestinian
uprising against the Israeli
occupation.
1936–1939: The Arab Revolt
in Palestine: a nationalist
uprising by Palestinians in
Mandatory Palestine against
British colonial rule and
mass Jewish immigration
to Palestine. British government’s ‘White Paper’ seeks
to limit Jewish migration to
Palestine to 10,000 per year
(except in emergencies).
1950
1960
1970
1980
1990: The USSR allows
approximately one million
Jewish citizens to migrate
to Israel.
1993: The signing of
Oslo I or the Oslo I
Accord (The Declaration of
Principles on Interim SelfGovernment Arrangements).
Establishment of the
Palestinian National
Authority.
1940s: The Nazi Holocaust
of the Jews in Europe
prompts efforts at mass
migration to Mandatory
Palestine. Jewish armed
groups upscale activity to
fight British forces.
1947: The United Nations
(Resolution 181) recommends partition of Palestine
into a separate Jewish and
Arab state with international
control over Jerusalem.
1990
2000
2010
2000: The Second Intifada/
al-Aqsa Intifada.
2004: International Court
of Justice issues advisory
opinion that West Bank
barrier is illegal.
2005: Israel withdraws all
Jewish settlers and military
personnel from Gaza,
while retaining control over
airspace, coastal waters,
and border crossings.
1948: Israeli independence,
Palestinian Nakba, breakout
of first Arab-Israeli war.
Armistice agreement leaves
Israel with more land
(including West Jerusalem)
than envisioned under the
Partition Plan. Gaza falls
under Egyptian rule and
Jordan annexes the West
Bank and East Jerusalem.
Out of their total population
of 1,200,000, around
750,000 Palestinians are
displaced into the Arab or
global diaspora.
2020
2006: Hamas comes
to power in Palestinian
legislative elections.
2008-9: Operation
Cast Lead in Gaza.
2014: Operation Protective
Edge in Gaza.
2015: Netanyahu’s
Fourth Government.
7
8
INTRODUCTION AND FOCUS OF
­RESEARCH
­
Preface
In 1951, Israel’s first Prime Minister and key founder David Ben-Gurion stated:
In our days…war embraces whole nations. It is a total war… what is
decisive is not only the strength of the army, but also the collective might
of the people as a whole, its economic, financial, technical and vocational,
scientific and organisational might, and above all else its spiritual power.
– David Ben-Gurion, 1951
With these words the pioneer ideologue set the path for the development of
an Israeli national economy that would steadily advance in mutually dependent
military and scientific innovation processes.
In November 2012, 61 years later, at Israel’s Second International Homeland
Security fair in Tel Aviv, Israel’s President Shimon Peres was the keynote speaker.
In his speech, Peres, clearly an icon to the huge crowd of Israeli and international
security experts, company representatives, military staff, and clients, made an
explicit connection between the current status of Israel as a one-stop-shop for
security and defence technology and the trajectories and ideological formations
behind the success of the Jewish state. He acclaimed the centrality of science and
innovation as key to securing the Jewish people. While strong domestic support
was deemed essential to excel, in order to have global and domestic economic and
industrial success, Peres emphasised the need for cosmopolitanism and a global
outlook. With clear emotion in his voice, he declared:
When it comes to science there are no borders – every excellence is limited by
time – we are just in the beginning of discovering the secrets of the world (Shimon
Peres, HLS Israel the Second International Israel Homeland Security Conference,
Tel Aviv, November 2012).
Peres also outlined the necessary ingredients for security and prosperity, and
pointed to Israel as an illustrative case:
9
If armies have arms, companies have ears. You act globally without frontiers.
Globality is individuality. You cannot have a global company and be a racist – if
you’re racist forget about selling. You have to listen to the people; globality is not
attached to the physical dimension of your country. Your country is not defined
by the square meter but by the amount of engineers and sciences. A country like
Israel must be great in technology or else it would not exist. If economists had
established Israel it would not survive (Shimon Peres, HLS Israel, the Second
International Israel Homeland Security Conference, Tel Aviv, November 2012).
In Peres’s vision of the future there will be no borders, only science, to control
and secure selected groups. However, in light of Israel’s position as one of the last
ongoing settler colonial projects and its status as an occupying power, Peres’s v­ ision
of the future systematically ignores the other side of the coin of technological
advancements: the repressive and exploitive side of Israeli security practices.
As part of the same fair mentioned above, we fair participants were transported in buses to the Port of Ashdod in the most southern part of Israel, only a few
kilometres from the sealed-off, besieged Gaza Strip. Here we witnessed a demonstration of Israeli arms and security technologies and anti-terror and anti-piracy
missions conducted by security and defence experts in cooperation with Israeli
military personnel. Surprisingly, this promotional event coincided with the start of
Operation Pillar of Defense, an eight-day military offensive against Gaza. As the
war was initiated by a series of targeted killings utilising armed drone technology
and intelligence data from surveillance drones, public and private sector buyers i.e.
the purchasers of Israel’s security technology from places such as the United States,
the European Union, Nigeria, China, and Italy sat watching a ‘war showroom’
composed of the very same technologies being used against real people in close vicinity. The signature James Bond theme song was playing in the background, thus
promoting familiarity and harmony between Israeli practices of war and the cognitive references of observer-consumers, including potential purchasers. P
­ erhaps
what was most peculiar about this scene was the fact that all of this took place in
Israel, an occupying power and one of earth’s most guarded and protected states.
A highly contradictory and bizarre reality prevailed at this security fair. On
the one hand, we witnessed a celebration of security as a public good and a sign
of ambitious innovation. It was obvious that cutting-edge and advanced security
technologies are being promoted and sold as emancipatory promises of a life free
from insecurity, a secure life in a borderless hyper-technological world. On the
other hand, just beneath this celebratory covering, a crude military reality of violence, separation, and occupation surfaced leading the technologies back to their
context of origin: Israel’s settler colonial practices and more broadly a growing
10
global industry of technologies of control. However, it was no surprise that this
surreal scenario was being played out in Israel.
At the border, in the airport, and on the sea, state agents and private Israeli
security actors are at war – a frontier war. In Peres’s view, Israel lies at the frontier
– at the outer edge of the wave, at the meeting point between savagery and civilisation. While fighting and stabilising a nation on this fine line has been an ethos
and idea informing Zionist practice since the founding of the nation in the new
territory of British Mandate Palestine, this frontier line has been expanding and
shifting since its inception. Israel’s permanent state of war and ongoing military
occupation provides the country’s vast entrepreneurial security sector1 with a range
of comparative advantages to think, make, and deploy security technologies in a
given battlespace2. The connection between the free flows of security so obvious
at the Homeland Security Fair and the steady advancement of localised practices
and techniques of security is a core engine of this dynamic. In this nexus between
the production of security and insecurity lies the contradiction of security as both
a promise of emancipation for some and at the same time the expression of a
repressive ideology and a system of dispossession and subjection for others. This
opens up even deeper questions about how security technologies are conceptualised, produced, and deployed as part of local and national war theatres and how
technological exchanges are dispersed into global flows of security technology and
capital. The political roots of these contradictory forces of security and insecurity,
as a nationalised ideology, a system of innovation, and a source of income are the
theme of this doctoral thesis.
1
2
By security sector I refer not only to the military (IDF) but also to other law-enforcement
agencies such as the police and paramilitary forces, the border guards and coast guard, the
intelligence and internal security services, and the military industries.
Inspired by Graham (2009), the research presented throughout this thesis deploys the notion
of battlespace (as a surrogate for battlefield). This distinction allows us to include practices and
events that take place virtually or at least not physically on the soil of Israel-Palestine.
11
Background
This research is about the historical and social shaping of technologies of
­security3 that has taken place as part of Zionist nation making and Israeli state
building. Israel’s capacities to govern and control are expressed through the
­extraordinarily vast and rapidly growing Israeli defence and security industry,
where ‘swords are turned into silicon chips’4. Israel’s defence and security industry
is a vital and strategically important sector and the country’s largest employer;
it is Israel’s single largest economic and industrial sector. It is a major player in
the global arms market. Jane’s, the defence analyst magazine, has ranked Israel in
sixth place for arms exports; it is widely believed that Israel has become the world
largest exporters of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) (Cook 2013). While its
arms-related trade is reported to account for somewhere between one-tenth and
one-fifth of Israel’s exports, these figures do not include the massive and growing
homeland security industry, which according to official figures includes more than
600 Israeli companies (Gordon 2009: 8).
This reality has grown from the condition that Israel is engaged in a permanent
frontier war that is seemingly without end. Today, the entire skeleton of one of the
world’s most volatile conflict sites of Israel-Palestine5 has become securitised and
technologised, and divided and enclavised to an unprecedented degree. It is a field
shaped by techno-conceptual shifts and the (messy) encounter between technology
and lives lived. In the scope of Zionist mobilisation for nationhood, a plethora of
practices, strategies, and devices have been developed to shape the Jewish nation.
Central to this has been Israel’s consistent striving to attain panoptical control
3
The research deploys the term security or homeland security (HLS) as an umbrella to encompass
arms, defence, security, and policing technology, and expertise and know-how. The kinds of
security ‘solutions’ that the Israeli security industry promotes (abroad) include material technologies, such as weapons and surveillance equipment and a wide range of security practices and
policies for population and spatial control. However, the strategies used to mobilise these security ‘solutions’ do not follow any clear divide between technologies and policies. Many Israeli
firms are involved in the promotion of both, often in combination with one another. When
discussing Israel’s modes of security or its model of security, the analysis does not focus on any
distinction between policy and technology. However this is not to equate or conflate them.
4
This term signifies both the symbolic and material shift in security innovation and technological
production in Israel. The phrase and the title of this thesis is inspired by a remark made by Netanyahu just before his re-election in 1997 explaining the positive effect of the military industry
on the broader civilian economy in Israel (Netanyahu 1997).
5
I refer here to the territorial space of British Mandate Palestine between the Jordan River and
the Mediterranean. For the purposes of clarity, when I use the word Palestine, I refer to the
occupied Palestinian territory (OPT), and when I refer to all of Historic Palestine, I use the term
British Mandate Palestine. When I use the term Israel-Palestine, I refer to the contemporary space
of all of Israel-Palestine (Israel proper and the OPT).
12
over the entire space and the people of Israel-Palestine. However, while Israel’s
modes of control have often taken on an offensive role, the actors of the industry
subsume and reverse war and policing schemes to those of the broader rhetoric
of security. This has provided Israel with the role as an actor or the ‘garantor’ of
maximum securitisation.
In a settler colonial condition where national movement is building a state
through settlement, territorial expansion and extraction of resources as expressed
by Israel, we are dealing with a permanent war economy. This is driven by a
shared narrative of both might, existential threats, impulses of expansion, and the
desire for ethnic separation. Indeed, it is no coincidence that Israel has become a
world-leading producer and exporter of arms, and defence and security technology
and techniques. In both mainstream and official Israeli government discourse, the
country’s security machine has reasoned and marketed itself as a shield against
barbarism, terrorism, and other menaces. Its self-portrayal as a country that has
succeeded in spite of surrounding enemies is core to the security industry’s ethos
of attaining battlefield experience and surviving against all odds.
Israel’s international impact as a model of a hyper-militarised high-tech s­ ociety
has been developed on a founding structure of a racially based colonial settler
state. Consequently, it has been integrated into the family of nations as a modern western regime. Its combined offer of savage struggle and technological advancement stretches beyond the borders of its frontiers in the Levant has taken
on global ramifications. Despite the country’s roots in violence, repression, and
political injustice, its systems of security technologies are widely celebrated and
sold as a ‘public good’. Arguably, the ongoing Palestinian resistance, armed and
unarmed struggle, and the place of the colonisers in global hierarchies of power
give Israel a prominent position in the global security economy. Indeed, as a global
provider of security, Israel offers a paradigm of modernity and stability on the
frontline. This paradigm has materialised into a portfolio of technological devices
and operative systems that are well described, and made available and accessible
to governments, police forces, militaries, and private contractors. In this way
Israel’s security practices themselves constitute a blurry line between suppression,
racialised governance, and security.
The project
This research tells the story of how security and technology shape social life,
and in turn how the social – the national – is shaped by the production and use of
security technology. The analysis unfolds how the Israeli-Zionist state and nation
building project has developed through technological innovation and strategies
13
of planning of new settler communities and by controlling and excluding the
Palestinian population.
Empirically, the thesis contributes new and original knowledge about the
­s­ecurity industry’s structural conditions and its inner dynamics, logics, and complexity, including the way in which the industry operates and promotes Israel as
the ‘go-to’ nation for defence and homeland security. The study provides a deeper
understanding of how the modern creation of order takes place. It illuminates how
social, international and racial order, and the order of accumulation are formed
through both the micro- and macro-politics of nationalism, war, and policing
mediated by technology, technical codes, and colonial aspirations.
The project describes how both security narratives and technologies are created
through nationalist efforts to unify and settle a population. It does so in order to
investigate how a nation state has developed technology to realise its goals of settling and developing a territory that is already inhabited by another national group.
Moreover, the thesis engages in a deeper examination of how security practices and
innovation work in tandem to realise the Zionist ambition to gather and integrate
global Jewry into a territory and state. By investigating the logics of control and
their physical manifestations, this thesis unfolds the trajectory of the story of why
and how Israel has advanced to become a ‘one-stop-shop’ for security and defence
technology, and the ways in which this affects the way governments and private
forces think and practice security. Its research unfolds both the constructive and
destructive sides of this endeavour, including the effects of the project and its
­security practices on the Palestinian population scattered across the terrain and the
way in which security (technologies) have ordered and designed life for the Jewish
population. Consequently, the project unfolds Israeli security as a way of realising
Zionism as a state-sponsored ethnic nationalism based on racial imaginations. This
is done by exploring how a co-thinking and co-imbrication of ideational and material factors creates certain notions and practices of security, and how it deconstructs
the very meaning of security as it is deployed, and practices vis-à-vis the Palestinians.
The purpose of telling this story is to understand the ingredients that go into
the creation of an ecosystem of security, and how such a system works in the context of settler colonialism. The question of producing both security and insecurity
requires a debate about the embedding of the production of objects and practices
of security based on theoretical deliberations on the relationship between technological nationalism and settler colonialism. The empirical crust of the project
allows the research to identify and examine both the broader lines of development
and the messiness of daily life on the ground.
14
The research questions
The overall research question of this thesis is:
How have Israeli security technology, practices and production developed over
time as part of the Zionist project of nation and state building?
The underlying questions that define the scope of this thesis centre on how security is produced as a dynamic yet complex and far from linear encounter between
securitised nationalism and military-industrial relations. This thesis not only asks
what technology is, it asks how technology is made, and the more political question, how it is used? The answers to these questions rest on the more fundamental,
academic question: how can technology be studied?
To unfold and operationalise this broad and abstract puzzle, the thesis suggests
three sub research questions. These will not be examined chronologically but
rather through the identification and unfolding of themes to answer the overall
research question.
The first question relates to the nature of Israel’s technologies, and their
­capacities and effects. It asks what are the particular conditions for Israel’? It asks
how Israeli technologies of control, pacification, and security have been developed
both as part of and through the settler colonial practices of the Zionist national
movement and Israeli state. It relates this to specific innovation processes linked
to institutions of science and military organs. In turn, this question is extended
to more empirically founded questions of how the production of security has
materialised into particular, often racialised ways of settling and clearing land,
and into modes of population control in cities, at the border, and increasingly in
cyber-space. In other words, how is security expressed in a variety of platforms
that are interconnected and yet retain their own characteristics and capacities?
The second research question centres on how the Zionist quest for a Jewish
state has materialised. This is done by examining the claim that this materialization
has happened through a state-led process of innovation and industrial development
with the production of security technologies as a core engine. In other words, I
pursue to provide refined answers to how the production of security has assisted
the establishment of a national system of innovation. And how in turn this has
been intertwined with the state’s policies and strategies for settlement and the
differentiated control of people groups within that territory.
The third question addresses the more global dimension of the puzzle. It does
so by asking: on a global scale, how are Israel’s security narratives and practices
exported and translated into more universal experiments and routines of security,
15
war, and policing? And, through which practical and discursive mechanisms does
the security industry extend its markets well beyond the cartography of Israel-­
Palestine? How are dominant security narratives and practices exported and translated into more universal experiments and routines of security, war, and policing
in other sites and locations?
The argument(s)
The core argument of this research is that security technologies are part of and
the result of intense processes of national engineering and innovation inscribed
deeply into the efforts and contradictions of realising a nation into a state.
First, the Israeli security industry has been a significant contributor to Zionist
mobilisation for nationhood and an engine in the Israeli state’s management and
control of both settler and colonised peoples. This means that in the formation of
the Zionist project, order has been fabricated and installed through wide-­ranging
securitisation and through war and control of people and landscapes. These
­processes have formed and shaped Israeli security thinking and modes of security
production. It is the congregate of a highly militarised political economy, a refined
settler colonial rule and intense processes of scientific innovation that gives the
Israeli security sector its potency. The role of military-industrial relations and the
alliance of these two sectors with state power(s) that is critical to the formation
of security.
Second, Palestine has become a site for experimentation where tests are carried
out intentionally. Technological refinement is achieved through testing that becomes a vector of improvements. Following this, the Israeli defence and security
industry is deeply embedded in the political project of settler colonialism; the
industry hinges on a correlation between innovating around specific techniques
of security, control, and management of populations and territory and the broader
aim of achieving economic growth on the state and well as on private/individual
levels. This argument rests on the analytical assumption that Israel’s visions of security and its attendant (in)security has been produced and constructed as part of
the Zionist project. These goals include escaping past atrocities, seeking national
unity, and mobilisation for the settler colonial project. In fact, the dual reality
of the security industry and the reality experienced by the colonised make for a
resourceful analytical scheme.
Third, ‘the Israeli experience’ is exported and emulated through exports of
security commodities, technological dissemination, and capital entrenchment.
The ‘experience’ reaches those interested in waging war and governing through
security the ‘Israeli way’ by transferring people and separating them under a logic
16
that is informed by the ordering principles of different human worth, the politics
of differentiation, and class/segregationist policies. Thus, Israel’s success in the
market of homeland security, arms, and defence systems can be attributed to the
Israeli experience of transforming globalised Jewish insecurity into a state-based
condition of security. Because Israel was conceived of, established, and sustained
through domination of the Palestinians and newly conquered territory, it is effectively a model of a suppressive regime and its spaces of dominations as conceptual
showrooms for others to visit, learn from, and replicate.
In the larger sense, we should take this (post)colonial condition seriously in
security studies and more broadly in studies of political economies of war and
suppression in various locales and contexts. This relies on the argument posed here
that new forms of security technology can be traced back to a concrete platform
of struggles and political injustice. Thus, there is a clear link between the kind of
security and war practiced in colonies across the globe, in conflict zones (of the
Middle East), and in cosmopolitan metropoles. Thus, while of a national-local
nature, Israeli security practices have developed a set of export dynamics that
reflects globalising patterns and technologies of racialisation and power organised
around changing ethic, ethnic, national, and class-based fault lines. This leads to
the concluding argument that Israeli security actors seek to tap into the needs of
those forces struggling to sustain the neoliberal order. The thesis argues for an
approach that takes both the role of material artefacts – the role of ‘things’ – and
the dynamics of capital seriously, while not neglecting the dimension of mental
and discursive theatres of war. This involves the promotion of a research agenda
that argues that security technologies are neither an empty receptacle of discourse,
nor do they have essential characteristics. Rather, technologies emerge out of
material-discursive practices.
Contributions
It has become increasingly difficult to ignore the impact that security policies
and practices have on our daily lives and our political decisions. Thus there is ample need for work that investigates empirically how security is developed as an idea
and a material object, as a sociotechnical system to create order and hierarchies,
and in turn, as a source of income
Overall the thesis supplements existing literature on Israel’s security practices
and settler colonial warfare by including two new perspectives 1) milieu insight
into the inner logics and dynamics of a national security industry 2) it provides a
fragment of Jewish and Palestinian history performed as a genealogy of industrial
and military technological development. More over the thesis challenges existing
17
literatures by providing a synthesis of Palestinian and Jewish (Israeli) (in)security
in one analysis, and by examining the social reality of the actors of industry and
lastly by accentuating the role of the material, of the security artefacts as a force
of politics.
This thesis addresses a gap in the literature on security, technology and nationalism by providing a study of the making and the use of security as it has developed
through the Zionist national project throughout the terrain of Israel-Palestine.
The study contributes a colonial genealogy of modernity that can enrich both the
field of critical security studies, Israel-Palestine studies, and broader debates on
techno-nationalism. It contributes to a growing academic body of critical security
studies that goes beyond both the analysis of discourse and material characteristics
and the understanding of technology as a neutral factor (Amoore and De Goede
2008; Bellanova and Duez 2012; Guittet and Jeandesboz 2009; Huysmans 2006;
Salter 2005). While relating the research to this agenda, it also seeks to take another direction by linking the question of nation and state building to processes
of innovation and the development and deployment of security technology.
The thesis is not only about the forces involved in a bitter, protracted inter-­
ethnic conflict; nor is it only about the social embedding of technology. It is about
the birth, production, and dissemination of tools with which to conduct modern
power and about the ways in which science, technology, power, and national ideas
and forces converge. In this way, the thesis provides an innovative model of how to
study the making of security as a social artefact, i.e. as a mechanism that goes well
beyond Israel-Palestine and speaks to other national and settler colonial contexts.
The research provides a unique insights into a world rarely explored from the
inside. The interviews and observations from inside the industry contribute to the
study of narratives of security and shift the focus from looking at the victims or
targets of security to include the producers of security and the logics of the oppressor.
The research also contributes to the promotion of a research agenda that is concerned with the ways in which the construction and visions of ethnic nationhood
are tightly linked to the ways in which security is practiced. Through an innovative
critique and rethinking of existing research, the thesis provides a critical account
of the separation between the study of military-industrial relations and more
­theoretically informed studies on nationalism and settler colonialism. This provides a substantial contribution not only to the academic field of Israel-­Palestine
studies, but to the multidisciplinary debate on the interplay of nationalism and
technology in the formation of control and security practices.
18
The case of Israel
Technologies do not merely assist and control everyday lives, they are also power­
ful forces that reshape human activities and their meaning. This holds true in particular in a settler colonial context like Israel-Palestine, where a high-tech nation merges
with a securitised and highly militarised racial state. Seen from this perspective, the
Israeli case makes for a particular interesting study. Even before the inception of the
state, Israel’s variety of settler colonialism – Zionism – has made the entire space of
Israel-Palestine into a security domain that entrenches the political economy of the
Zionist national project. In turn, this has been fortified by Israel’s permanent military
economy and steadily advancing systems of domination over the Palestinian people,
the territory of Israel, and the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT).
The case of Zionism and Israel-Palestine is conducive to this sort of analysis
because we are dealing with a highly securitised state, a huge military force, and
a nation-still-in-the-making with undefined territorial borders. The nature of the
Israeli state, i.e. the unfinished character of its state building project, constitutes a
fertile ground for understanding how security and innovation are conducted and
produced as part of the evolution of the nationalist project and the expansion and
consolidation of the state structure. Indeed, this intersection of war, security, and
industry has in Israel, as in many other places and spaces, been a cornerstone in
nation building and the creation of wealth.
While Israel is perhaps unique or special at this point in time, Israel is not
unique in history. We need to refrain from thinking of Zionism, let alone J­ udaism,
as exceptional. All national (colonial) projects wish to tell a particular story and
promote a particular narrative. Rather than promoting the idea of Israel as a
unique case, this analysis suggests that Israel represents a hyper-version of a securitised national project. While this study views Zionism as a nationalist movement
and a vector of settler colonialism, it rejects any argument that promotes an essential unique quality that separates Jewish nationalism from other nationalisms.
However, it does accept Zionism as an instance of nationalism that follows
a particular path of national interventions and realisations ordered through an
organising ‘grammar of race’ (Denes 2011a: 32; see also Wolfe 2006: 387–388).
In other words, Israel has features and attributes that can be found in other state
and non-state systems of dominance where technology and discrimination play a
central role. As the empirical chapters examine, Israel carries a range of attributes
attesting to its ideological basis, its resources, and its human and geographical
history. This provides it with particular, intense, and perhaps unique features of
racialised control.
In order to analyse the relations or dynamics of settler colonial nationalism
and military-industrial relations, this thesis examines the multiple functions of
security and industrial advancement in the moulding of the national and settler
19
colonial project of Zionism. It focuses on the ecosystem from the development
and roots of the systems of control to its materialisation as a fertile industry to the
marketisation of the conflict as it leads to a commoditisation of security. In the
wider perspective, the analysis unfolds an instance of the birth, production, and
spread of tools with which to conduct modern (state) power. By seeing security as
a narrative, a strategy, and an economy central to the process of making a nation
– Israel – and the unmaking of another – Palestine – the analysis engages with the
universal question of how representations of national, political, and ethnic identities connect and intertwine with security practices and processes of innovation.
Sources
In order to unify this plethora of forces and sources, the analysis here conducts
an active deconstruction of state and industry narratives of security, their practices,
and the imaginative geographies of control they invoke. It draws from numerous
empirical sources, and builds on interviews with representatives from various parts
of the security industry: private companies, state agencies, and academia. It also
employs observational data gathered at arms, defence, and security fairs in Israel or
with Israeli representation that were collected during 2012–2013, and secondary
sources of data, e.g. information gathered from security company material and
state agencies’ export and public relations units.
Combining industry narratives with critical perspectives on Israel’s settler colonial practices provides a particularly fruitful opportunity to weigh industry logic
against settler colonial realities. This empirical evidence helps us understand the
forces of power from within, as well as the highly volatile encounter between ‘insider’ and practitioner narratives, experiences, and strategies of self-legitimisation,
and the crude nature of the settler colonial practices as described in critical literature and experienced by those subject to dominance and control. Taken together,
these ambitions are realised in a fertile mix of conceptual and empirical analyses.
Organisation of material and structure of research
The chapters of the thesis provide qualified answers to the overall research
questions. The text works along three axes of organisation: theme-based, disciplinary, and chronological. In its empirical sections, the thesis works on a continuum
between the chronological and the thematic. The chapters lend historical and social
contextualisation to each of the themes with which they engage and introduce new
theoretical perspectives on an ad hoc basis to refine the analysis. In the empirical
part of the thesis unfolds a variety of themes, sites, and histories that help map
out the roots, logics, and effects of Israel’s settler colonial practices and the role of
the security industry therein.
20
The chapters of the thesis are structured accordingly:
Chapter One reviews existing research and literature as well as current research
trends and discusses methods and concepts developed in the thesis. It discusses
the thesis’ methods, research practices, and ethics and reflects on the researcher’s
(my) own role as an interpreter of a specific fragment of ‘reality’. It also addresses
the function of the research as politically informed work.
Chapter Two unfolds the theoretical framework and argument of the thesis.
It presents a framework for bringing nationalism and colonialism into the field of
innovation studies and studies of military industrial relations. It also establishes
an analytical association between territorial rule, knowledge production, state
practice, and the broader nationalist effort to achieve ethnic closure, forces that
are conjoined in the national quest for ethnic unity and the pursuit of state-society
congruence.
Chapter Three is the first of two background chapters. It unfolds a range
of conceptual and historical explanations of why the Zionist mobilisation for
­nationhood is a variation of settler colonialism. It introduces the sub-dynamics
of settler colonialism in order to increase our understanding of the inherent logics
and structures of power in Zionism. The chapter also proposes ways to understand
Zionism as an ideological force, a historical structure, and a racialised practice. The
chapter provides a framework for analysing the battlespace as a bio-political zone
of calculative strategies entrenched by differentiating ideas, practices of subjection
and improvement, and a path-dependent notion of homeland security.
In Chapter Four, the analysis unfolds a socio-economic history of the security
industry. It presents a short empirical baseline of the industry with emphasis on
the link between military and industry, and explores the roots and emergence of
the security industry and an array of shifts and critical junctures in Israel’s political
economy of defence and security. The chapter moves in a chronological fashion
and includes both the internal and external dynamics of the industry as well as
public and private alliances in the production of new technologies.
Chapter Five examines conceptually and empirically how scientific visions of
nationhood have materialised into a comprehensive science-based economy. It asks
how the alliance of science and settler colonialism has enabled the formation of
a successful Israeli security industry through the development and nurturing of a
state-based axiom of war and science. This includes the role of academic/research
institutions, the notion of Palestine as a laboratory for the security industry, and
the role of academic-military-industrial science parks in ensuring the industry
synthesis and prosperity.
Chapter Six examines how the steady technification and digitalisation of
­Israel’s practices in the occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) have affected both
21
I­ srael’s ruling practices and boosted the security industry’s cyber, digital, and software-based sectors. It also discusses the impact of trends of risk management,
predictive software, algorithmic control, and biometrical systems and how these
both draw from Israel’s long terms experiences in the OPT and attest to new ways
of mapping and controlling populations. This is further related to a broader trend
of commercialisation of military and settler colonial logics.
Chapter Seven challenges the celebratory accounts of the smart city, a new term
or phenomenon used to label highly technologised modes of urban planning and
control. It describes how the Israeli version of this concept represents a culmination of Israeli urbanisation and the de-modernisation of Palestine, consisting of the
combination of the desire to both facilitate improvement of urban life for some
while excluding others through surveillance and control. The chapter addresses
smart wars at the frontiers of the OPT and systems of urban control and policing
inside Israel.
Following a similar structure, Chapter Eight and Nine perform as an intertwined account of Israel’s border making and expertise in border control. Chapter
Eight draws from Zionism’s historically and ideologically generated multilevel
dynamics of border making, which ranges from the construction of human borders
to the demarcation of territorial borders. Chapter Nine traces how these visions
and ideas have been formatted into an industry of border control that includes
modes of separation, event detection, and control of passage.
The thesis concludes in Chapter Ten by reflecting on the content and consequences of analysing the links between national innovation, Zionism, security,
and capital accumulation. It proposes that Israel’s capacities and visions fit into
broader trends of thinking about and practicing control in the context of much
wider processes of technological nationalism, neoliberalisation, and the racialisation of security.
22
23
24
CHAPTER ONE
LITERATURE REVIEW, CURRENT RESEARCH TRENDS AND
METHODS
1.0 Introduction
The research represented here is inspired by and relies on various fields of research
and disciplines. It situates itself in a growing body of critical work on Global
Palestine that assesses the global implications of Israel-Palestine and the embedding of this conflict in larger geopolitical power structures. At the same time, the
thesis seeks to address more fundamental questions of the link between science,
technology, and nationalism in the production of (in)security6 and systems of
dominance. Consequently, in order to situate the thesis in relation to relevant
literature, it is vital to visit a number of sub-disciplines and themes that bridge
different literatures and integrate methodological insights from related research
areas in order to articulate gaps in knowledge and highlight the shortcomings and
merits of previous methods.
What is of particular interest in relation to the existing literature is to conceptually and empirically examine the bridge that connects nationalism (Jewish nationalism in particular) with technology and security. The ambition of the thesis is
to provide the field of critical security studies with a historical and empirical backbone that can help clarify and nuance the social process of materialising security.
In relation to the multifaceted field of critical Israel-Palestine studies, it is the ambition of the thesis to unfold a less exposed political reality of security production,
not as a counter narrative to existing literatures examining the effects of settler
colonialism, war and occupation from a variety of angles but as a complimentary
unique view into the dark side of planning and production. This newness lies in
the ambition to combine the examination of industrial and military structures
with an analysis of the discursive ontologies of security involved. Moreover along
more theoretical avenues the thesis contributes to both the field of technological
nationalism, the field of critical security studies and militarism both through the
research’ interconnection of these disciplines and scholarly fields and by inserting
the theoretical debates into a thoroughly examined empirical perspective.
The following review of existing and relevant literature is theme-based; it is
divided into sections representing the categories or subjects of the topics of the
research. I present a range of relevant academic work and from this derive the core
6
Inspired by Hyusman’s analysis of the ‘politics of insecurity’ (Huysman 2006).
25
tenets of the analytical rationale of the thesis. First, I seek to situate the research
in relation to the broader literature and historiography of Zionism and in the
broader strands and trends of colonialism. The review then unfolds a growing
and multidimensional body of literature. It engages with the global dimensions
and implications of Israel-Palestine that range from ideas on violence to political
economy, which is subsequently related to broader scholarly trends in the field of
surveillance studies and critical security studies, the field of (Israeli) militarism,
and work on the Israeli tech-economy. Throughout the review I relate this to the
present research.
1.1 The broader scope of Zionism and colonialism
The present research speaks to a rich and complex body of work on Zionism,
colonialism, and colonial warfare. What is key in relation to this research is both
to situate the thesis approach to Zionism in relation to existing academic debates
but also to demonstrate the ample need for research that investigates the interplay
between actors, artefacts and territory and capital in sustaining and refining these
structures.
Zionism has been analysed in the academic literature as both an ideology and a
set of social, political, and economic practices. A recurring question in the critical
literature on the nature and genesis of Zionism has been categorised as either particular (ideologically and historically exceptional) or universal (Israel and Palestine
as a node in nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism). The world
famous scholar Edward Said has highlighted the idea that Israel does not belong to
the world of ‘normal politics’. While he stresses predominantly American debates
on Zionism (Said 1985: 38–39), more pro-Zionist academics have committed
themselves to the idea of Jewish apartness, which Denes notes has contributed to
a sense of mystification (Denes 2011a: 12). However, as Anthony Smith’s theories
of nations and nationalisms prescribe, national claims often derive their ideals
from continuities of thoughts and practices (Smith 1995), which places Zionism
as one among many nationalisms that have been cultivated to promote nation
making and nurture state power. In this sense, this study approaches Zionism as
an ‘extreme case of the normal’.
In inter-Israeli debates, Zionism has been approached both from the perspective of nationalism, nationhood, identity politics, and colonialism. While academic
research on Zionism cannot be reduced to an intra-Israeli scholarly debate, Uri
Ram’s cataloguing of scholarly engagement with Israeli nationalism presents a
typology, or a division between distinct Israeli schools categorising and coming
to terms with Zionism as a concept and an evolving historical experience (Ram
2011).
26
As a member of the first studies of Zionism camp, Ram lists the Sociological
School of Elite Studies based at Tel Aviv University and concentrated around the
work of Shapiro (1991). This scholarship builds on works of American sociologists
such as Wright Mills’s power elite (also inspiring more Marxist/historical-material
approaches) (Wright Mills 1956). By extension, and as Ram argues, the perhaps
more explicit, second camp, the Marxist School coming out of Haifa University,
emphasises different class aspects of Israeli society and is also categorised as one of
many approaches to the study of Israeli nationalism. Inquiries into Israeli nationalism, however, are often disconnected from the question of the Palestinians and
issues relating to territorial division. They are instead concerned with the failures
or structural flaws of labour Zionism and inter-ethnic division.
The third camp is represented by the so-called Jerusalem School, which focuses
on the question of cultural identity and inter-relations between Jewish subgroups
in Israel (Ram 2011; Meyers 2009). The final school in Ram’s typology is the
­Colonisation School, which combines the historical and ideological specificities
of the Zionist nation and state making with broader ideas on colonialism and
violence.
Over the course of the last 20 years, this colonisation perspective on the genesis
and effects of Zionism has often – in the Israeli context – been represented by the
so-called New Historians or Revisionists. Beginning in the late 1980s, Israeli social
sciences went through a process of transformation that opened up the discipline to
new perspectives on Israeli society. The colonial perspective of the New Historians
questioned whether the Palestinians had fled (as the master narrative claimed), or
whether they had been purposely transferred and expelled by Israeli forces (Flapan
1988; Morris 1987; Shlaim 1988). In this endeavour, new knowledge has emerged
from the historical archives that has dramatically changed Israeli historiography
while bringing forth its own, new challenges (Selby 2005).
More generally, the colonisation perspective is the most critical contributor to
the founding myths of Israeli society (Sternhell 1998) and to the litany of injustices
committed by Israel against the Palestinians in order to secure Jewish statehood
(Khalidi 1961, 1992; Morris 1987; Pappé 2006). Early on, key Palestinian scholars
and historians, such as Khalidi (1961), had already documented the events of the
Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe) from the 1950–1960’s. Zionism has been examined
and debated intensively vis-à-vis theories and comparative cases of colonialism:
French Marxist historian Maxime Rodinson’s seminal work (1973) has historicised
and conceptualised Zionism as both a nationalist and a settler colonial movement.
Indeed, throughout modern history colonialism has exhibited different forms and
27
structures in various locales and territory such as New Zealand, Palestine, Algeria,
Australia, South Africa, and the Americas. This has invited a comparative view of
the Israeli collectivity with respect to other immigrant settler societies and colonial
projects (Wolfe 2006, 2012) and to more fundamental theoretical deliberations.
Marx largely conceived colonialism as part of the general conditions for the
expanded reproduction of commercial and manufactured capitalism towards the
formation of industrial capitalism. In Marxist accounts, Zionism has often been
critiqued and analysed as an extension of western (British and later American)
imperialist interests in Palestine (Cohen, 2011; Golan 2001). Anti-imperialistic
critiques of Zionism largely address the investment of foreign interests in the national project but do not capture the nature and effect of the actual process of colonisation (Kayyali 1977; Said 1978). This means that some Marxist critiques tend
to view Israel as an extension of imperialistic (western) interests in the Middle East.
Martinique-born Frenchman Franz Fanon offered a different perspective by
dealing with colonialism as mutually constitutive violence (Fanon (1968, 2008).
In his view, politics is domination that merges with violence. Based on his own
experiences of French colonialism in Martinique and Algeria, Fanon sees colonialism as a single formation and stresses the relational and mutually constitutive
aspects of political violence where violence is inherent in political structures of
power. In Fanon’s work, the settler is a key initiator of violence, where, ‘the settler
makes history and is conscious of making it’ (Fanon 1968).
Foucault’s work can also be related to colonialist tropes through the conceptualisation of colonialism as a sort of racialised governmentality. In this conception,
we must take note of the relationship between knowledge and power as a way for
the sovereign to practice and reproduce power (Foucault 2009). By extension,
and drawing from Foucauldian readings of representation, Edward Said’s thesis
on Orientalism revived the cultural critique of the colonial, and expanded on the
ways in which discursive portrayal of the inferior (dominated or colonised) ‘other’
helps to sustain strategies of exploitation (Said 1978). Thus, while Marxist scholars
stress the issue of exploitation and Fanon-inspired scholars focus on the relational
aspects colonisation, Foucauldian approaches are more interested in the form of
governance involved in the enterprise.
Virilio’s (2006) recent hypermodern analysis of the concept of acceleration as
a key motor of appropriation of land, resources, and people’s ability to resist has
enriched the settler colonial perspective by tying together the dynamic of violence
and spatial expansion. This includes an understanding of colonialism as a contrac-
28
tion of speed and power that is deemed key to realising specific strategies of (dis)
possession and territorial appropriation (Virilio 2006).
In the research on Israel as a colonial state, several scholars skilfully demonstrate
how Zionism has evolved in a relational process against the encounter with the
native ‘other’. A key figure in this debate has been Shafir, who argues that Israeli
society is best understood in terms of the broader Israeli-Palestinian relationship
and the struggles over land and labour (not inward-looking interpretations) (Shafir
1996). This analytical approach, Shafir argues, would benefit from the deployment
of models of European colonisation. Another scholar, Eyal (2006), offers an account of Zionism as a hybrid of multifaceted sentiments towards the natives, and
Piterberg (2008) successfully analyses Zionism through three hegemonic settler
narratives that lead to the conclusion that the relationship with the indigenous
population was the single most significant factor shaping Zionist practice.
However, while the Israeli revisionist accounts have received much attention,
the critical perspective on the conditions and events enabling Israeli statehood has
been present across earlier Israeli, Palestinian, and international scholarly work.
For example, in the 1970s Uri Davis explained how the specific forms of the
destruction of Palestinian society by the Zionist colonial effort should be traced
in the context of the consolidation of the pre- and post-1948 formations of the
state of Israel (Davis 1977). Likewise, in Beit-Hallahmi’s view, one has to depart
from Z
­ ionism’s ‘original sins’ and provide instead ‘an insight into the origins of the
Zionist endeavour as an attempted solution to the Jewish problem’ (Beit-­Hallahmi
1993a).
As a reaction to the revisionist wave, it has been suggested that Israeli scholarly
representation of Palestinian dispossession opened up avenues for Israeli representation of the victimised, which despite its self-examination and critical approach
claimed to represent the narrative of the oppressed. Masalha, for instance, argues
that the mainstream core of Israeli New Historians conceives of Zionism, despite
the injustices perpetuated in its realisation, as a national liberation movement of
the Jewish people. According to Masalha, a more fundamental understanding of
Zionism is required, one that needs to be understood against the backdrop of
both broader debates on colonialism and efforts to deconstruct the established
myths of Zionism as a national liberation movement. Masalha argues that the
emergence of this new segment of Israeli history helped bring to light the deep
asymmetrical power relationships between Israel and the Palestinians (Masalha
1992, 2007). The opening up of archives and the proliferation of examinations of
the conditions of Israeli state formation in turn facilitated Palestinian scholarship
29
and a growing production of scholarly work on the previously neglected narrative
of Palestinian accounts of the Nakba and the nature of the Zionist project vis-à-vis
the Palestinians. Thus what is important in relation to this research is the need for
a critical security study project to develop analytical capacities to take the above
structural considerations of Zionism into account not only as a baseline but as the
core mechanisms of domination and subjugation, from which patterns, movement
and change must be analysed.
1.2 The political economy of the Israeli security industry
In recent years, a raft of research projects focusing on various aspects of Israel’s
security and control practices have emerged, including examinations of Israel’s
relationship to other colonial, urban, or war-prone sites and a growing interest in
the role of private capital in expanding and sustaining these conditions (Azoulay
2009; Graham 2010b; Khalili 2013; Zureik, Lyon, and Abu-Laban 2011). A variety of scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds have critically shown
how Israel’s techniques of control developed through the occupation of Palestine.
A sample of these scholars’ contributions include the specifics of identity management (Tawil-Souri 2012) to incarceration (Hajjar 2005, 2006; Khalili 2013), and
lethal warfare systems (Denes 2011a; Graham 2010b; Weizman 2008). Moreover,
Havkin has exposed the outsourcing of security tasks of the Israeli post-Oslo
­occupation regime to private companies as part of a broader trend of redeploying
state power through outsourcing while retaining tight state control (Havkin 2011).
Others have provided excellent accounts of the micro-practices of surveillance and
classification of people at the border (Handel 2009, 2011; Lyon 2011; Tawil-Souri
2011a, 2012).
In addition, a range of core theorisations has been developed to conceptualise
the actions and strategies of the Israeli state vis-à-vis Palestine. Among these are
Yiftachel’s concept of ethnocracy (2006), Kimmerling’s idea of politicide (2003),
Ophir and Azoulay’s analogy of the camp (2005); Hanafi’s spaciocide (2006,
2009), Goldberg (2009) and Abu-Haj (2010) on racial Palestinianisation, and
Mbembe on the calculus of Israel’s necropolitical regime (2003). Others have written on the nature and role of Palestinian resistance and counter-surveillance such
as Allen’s (2008) work on sumud (Arabic for steadfastness) as an act of resistance
and Peteet’s analysis of resistance as ‘ritual performance’ (1994).
More generally, while some work includes the entire terrain of Israel-Palestine,
other accounts focus on the more limited scope of the post-1967 Israeli occupation. This has created a schism between a 1948 paradigm operating with the
30
social realities and the events taking place at each side of the green line (the 1949
armistice line) as one reality and the 1967 paradigm operating with Israel’s policies
in the OPT and Israel proper as separate units of analysis (Shenhav 2012). This
research analyses the Zionist project as a colonial project, but precludes teleological
explanations of the colonisation/occupation and suspends ready-made grand narratives. In this way, the research opposes a strict post-1967 perspective and argues
for a crosscutting research strategy that seeks to dissolve this schism by examining
terrains of dominance marked by changing and overlapping ruling strategies.
While these concepts establish both a conceptualisation and a political critique
of Israeli state policies, they do not address the role of industrial and specific technological forces in realising this array of state policies. In other words, they do not
as this research tries to, explain how modes of production are intrinsically linked to
and co-developed with Israel’s colonisation/occupation practices. Moreover, despite
its growing size, relatively little critical academic work addresses the security sector
itself. Indeed, until recently only a few critical examinations of Israel’s engagement
in arms production and trade had been published.
The most seminal work on the question of Israel’s arms trade is Beit-Hallahmi’s
The Israeli Connection, a mapping and analysis Israel’s arms exports to predominantly third world regimes Beit-Hallahmi 1987). The key accomplishment of
this study is the identification of a rationale or a strategy behind Israel’s foreign
engagement in arms sales and thus a qualification of the argument that Israel – due
to an overlap in its own colonial techniques and colonial and repressive realities
abroad – exports a logic of control that appeals to the third world repression of
anti-colonial and anti-authoritarian movements. Beit-Hallahmi concludes that
what Israel exports is the ‘logic of the oppressor… a feeling that the third world
can be controlled and dominated, that radical movements in the third world can
be stopped, that modern crusaders still have a future’ (Beit-Hallahmi 1987: 248).
Importantly the changes in political alliances, global power structures, Israel’s
security practices and the very production of security call for a re-examination of
Hallahmi’s endeavours.
Thanks to a growing body of work and of course the growth of the country’s
security sector, Israel’s status as a leader in homeland security (HLS) and counterterrorism has become widely acknowledged (Byman 2011; Gordon 2009; 2011).
Of particular importance to the emerging accounts are the roots and effects of
Israel’s comparative advantages, i.e. Israel’s alleged capacity to test its products in
real-world environments (Graham 2010b; Li 2006; Weizman 2011). In 2007,
Naomi Klein stressed the global appeal of Israel’s intense level of security and its
31
global branding as a ‘fortress state’ by describing the Israeli security setup as one
‘usually reserved for airports’ (Klein 2007).
In the most empirically detailed study of Israel’s homeland security economy to
date, Gordon (2009) situates Israel’s rise as a centre of homeland security, or as the
‘homeland security capital’ through a focus on a range of historical, technological,
and symbolic factors that give Israel’s HLS products and services important advantages in a global marketplace. Gordon unfolds the thesis of doctrinal emulation
and experience, which supports his argument of Palestine as a security laboratory
for the Israeli security industry. In Gordon’s view, the dynamics of the security
economy demonstrate the fertility of the link between Israel’s neoliberal economy,
its democratic features, and its strong high-tech sector.
Concurrently, albeit with a more intense focus on the nature of the techniques
of control, Graham, Li, Denes, and Weizman critically examine the security laboratory thesis and link it to Israel’s military thinking and its dissemination of
battlefield experience, expertise of control, and warfare to other sites and contexts.
These scholars share a focus on issues of doctrinal emulation, i.e. the ideational
and conceptual export of practices such as urban war, drone war, and surveillance systems informed by tenets of settler colonial violence. Li (2006) has shown
how Israel’s particular ruling-from-afar-strategy in Gaza – as part of its mantra of
‘maximum land, minimum Arabs’ – serves as a particularly fertile laboratory for
testing and optimising technologies. Weizman has spoken of the spatial dimension of Israel’s techniques of control in the OPT as ‘laboratories of the extreme’
(Weizman 2007: 9), not as the end point but as a phase in the Zionist project of
colonisation. By extension, Weizman has argued that Gaza – a hermetically sealed
zone – has worked as a laboratory for the testing of control of new technologies,
munitions, legal and humanitarian tools, and warfare techniques according to a
threshold philosophy of ‘how much can be done to people in the name of the “war
on terror”’ (Weizman 2011: 1).
From a different perspective, as part of his larger analysis of Israeli biopolitics
and racialising practices, Denes inserts the logics and modes of operation of the
Israeli security industry into the broader background of racialised violence and
biopolitical organisation inherent to Zionism’s permanent wartime order (Denes
2011a). He does so by asking how the specificities of Israel’s permanent war laboratories are being translated into more universal experiments in violence exercised
against increasingly uncertain ‘combatants’ (Denes 2011a: 171). He extends his
analysis of Israel’s export of UAVs by demonstrating how Israeli technologies of
war help compose a new militarised cartography into a field where western and
32
modern regime forms of security and expansion are deemed legitimate (Denes
2011b: 173). Graham’s work on new geographies of war takes a more intense look
at the military logics and practices of Israel’s warfare as part of a global shift in
war and the exercise of power. He unfolds the concept of ‘military urbanism’ and
explores the broader appeal of Israel’s methods of the urbicide of Palestinian cities.
Graham also points to the circles of imitation, partnerships, trade, and bi-partisan
rhetoric linking and integrating Israeli policies and discourses into the US-led
global War on Terror. According to Graham, this is a process through which Israel
is touted as ‘the ultimate security state’ (Graham 2010).
This literature speaks to the broader tendency to talk of diffusion of NorthSouth governance (e.g. Bowling and Sheptycki 2012). Here the entanglements
that buttress the ‘export-import’ industry of global policing can be described as
actual laboratories of security governance. An important body of literature has
developed recently that focuses more specifically on arms and security technology
production in Israel. As a response to this stream of laboratory analyses, Machold
(2015) recently unfolded a critique of existing literatures that challenges uncritical
acceptance of Israel’s ‘claim to universality’ and demonstrates the complexity of
Israel’s security mobility by adding the perspective of performativity to the debate
on the mobility of Israeli HLS. Machold does so to accentuate how technology
and policy are re-invented when exported across geographical locales and as a
way to define Israeli HLS dominance as a dynamic and still emergent process of
‘becoming’. Consequently, in contrast to industry claims and literature focusing
on the ‘Israeli brand’ as drawing on a singular experience or vision, this research
approaches the sector as complex and non-teleological movements and alliances
of interests among industry, military, and state strategies created by shifts which
emerge through vernacular shifts between grander ideas and politics of intent and
ad hoc events and routines of daily practices.
Naturally, the perspectives presented heavily influence the contexts in which security production and practice are analysed. Historical geopolitical shifts, changing
modes of production, technological breakthroughs, and new discursive framings
and staging of threats and risks have a huge impact on how security rationales are
identified and defined. While Beit-Hallahmi’s analysis took place in the context
of cold war geopolitics constructed around a bifurcation of east and west (as oppressive and emancipatory), the more recent literature on Israel’s security capital
and global reach is situated in the context of a new (imagined) and all-permeating
security geography marked by the global War on Terror.
33
Gregory argues that it was through the consolidation of these imaginative geo­
graphies linking the Israel/Palestine conflict with the US-led War on Terror that
Israeli security know-how has increasingly come to be conceived of as ‘applicable’
beyond Israel/Palestine (Gregory 2004). In this post-9/11 era, the notion of the
experience of Palestine has been globalised in new ways and a limited set of more
recent case studies on the logics guiding Israel’s relationship with the outside
world has been published. For example, Jones’s (2012) account of border and wall
construction exposes Israel’s engagement along the Mexico and the India-Kashmir
border, while Kilibarda (2008) looks into the Israel-Canada relationship and the
growing interdependence of both countries, particularly in the construction of the
War on Terror and the role of market-oriented policies in achieving this.
A huge amount of academic studies and newspaper and magazine articles have
exposed a wide variety of empirical realities mapping Israel’s global engagement.
These include Israel’s assistance to policing missions, border construction, military
training, and arms sales, post- 9/11 security and surveillance measures, police
assistance after terror events such as the Boston marathon bombing in 2013, and
in several cases in policing missions of urban riot control and rescue missions after
natural disasters and catastrophes. Rather than accepting one political frame in
relation to which Israeli security is analysed, it makes sense to expand the analysis
and go beyond a phase-based security trend to analyse Israel’s engagement as a
flexible force adaptable to a variety of contexts and narratives, such as global anti-riot campaigns, opposition repression, neoliberal urban planning, surveillance
and the refortification of racial state governance, the militarisation of policing,
and proliferation of security as a broader vector of liberal order making. (Please
note, this list is illustrative – there are many more instances of the globalisation
of Israel’s security systems and technologies.) Rather than describing the context
in which Israel invokes its security, it makes sense to focus on the mechanisms of
adaptation rather than essentialising the context. The lack of critical insights into
the security milieu and to the inner logics and social realities of the Israeli security
sector has led this researcher to further develop the security laboratory thesis by
extending it to industrial and ideological formations and developments from the
perspective of the industry.
1.3 Global Palestine
While scholarly work on the global implications of (Israel) Palestine is not a new
phenomenon, studies on Global Palestine specifically have proliferated recently.
While this category operates from a variety of perspectives, what the two literatures
share is a concern with the question of Palestine’s (and Israel’s) global implica-
34
tions, i.e. how Palestine is impacted by global events, trends, and flows of capital,
and how the question of Palestine is ingrained into larger power structures. The
contributions insist on redirecting the debate on Palestine away from its historical specificities and supposed uniqueness and inscribe its settler violent colonial
structures into global patterns of state and non-state violence. Rather than seeing
Zionism as an outcome of imperial relations, these studies locate Israel-Palestine
as a nodal point and key learning path in the constant reproduction and reconfiguration of violent structures. Taken together, critical research on Global Palestine
promotes a research agenda where the polarisation between the particular and the
universal is dissolved or redirected to a more innovative take on historico-political
intersections of local and global dynamics, or a dialectic of local and global factors.
Another key point under the umbrella of Global Palestine studies is the question of Palestine as a nodal point for circuits of violence and (counter)insurgency
strategies. In her work on the location of Palestine in global counter-insurgencies,
Khalili develops a model for how techniques of violence travel not just between
colonies and metropolises but also between different colonies of the same colonial
power (Khalili 2010). She unfolds the notion of horizontal global circuits through
which colonial policing and security practices have been transmitted from one
location to another. This work demonstrates Palestine’s geostrategic significance
in global hierarchies of power and the more general question of the embedding of
counter-insurgency techniques in state structures historically and institutionally.
Khalili’s view is similar to Collins’s innovative account of a Global Palestine
dynamic that is concerned with the techno-logic acceleration of social life and the
role of Palestine therein (Collins 2011). This is also similar to Ron’s work comparing Israeli state violence with the Serbian state’s ghetto violence in the 1990s that
shows how ‘frontier violence’ in the context of Israel’s occupation became highly
explicit (Ron 2003). In Collins’s analysis, Palestine is both a space and a concept of
confinement with far-reaching global consequences. His notion of Global Palestine
involves a process of ‘dromo-colonisation’, or acceleration, which globalises certain
practises while also creating new enclosures in which to confine certain groups
of people. In this way, Palestine becomes an object of securitisation and a model
of repression that functions as a learning model and an inspirational source for a
broader (technological) colonisation of social life that gives speed and acceleration
(borrowing from Virilio) a particularly central role. Consequently, how does the
thesis contribute to this growing field? It does so by going behind the scenes of
the production machine of security, and interrogates the very material structures
enabling the development and spread of techniques and technologies - the politics
of the artefacts involved in war and domination.
35
The Palestinian experience/racialisation
The notion of a Palestinian experience and its global spread is one core theme
of the Global Palestine perspective. The experiences of colonisation, occupation,
and control have been vividly described in the literature. Khalidi has shown how
the quintessential Palestinian condition takes place in all places and spaces where
identities are checked and verified (Khalidi 1997: 1). The notion of an experience
has been developed further by, for example, Abu el-Haj’s notion of the ‘racial
­Palestinianzation’ (2010) and Abu Laban’s (2011) notion of the ‘Palestinianization
of the racial contract’.
Others have spoken of the Palestinianisation of minorities in a variety of locations marked by both formal and informal exclusion mechanisms. Indeed, broader
treatment of racialisation has become central analyses of security as a mode of
social sorting which in turn rests on this proposed shift from geopolitics to bio­
politics (Dillon and Reid 2009). As a mix between a Foulcauldian-inspired view
of security as a mode of social sorting and an interface of ‘race’ and nationalism
(e.g. Balibar and Wallerstein 1991; Gilroy 2000), literature with a special focus
on racialisation and racialising practices has proliferated, providing security with
an ontological feature of control.
Amar (2009) provides an important view of how new forms of authority are
shaped by and give shape to racial missions of policing. He examines how the
dynamics of industries of security equate high degrees of social difference with
dangerous levels of risk. Amar (2009) also argues that new forms of authority
deployed by the neoliberal state entail a racialisation of the governance state (in
the context of globalisation), while Phillips (2007) shows how city spaces have
become zones of surveillance and racialised fear. In support of Amar’s work the
racialisation perspective of this research can help dissolve the north-south binary
in global security studies. It can also contribute to the promotion of a research
agenda that links forms of ethnic reification and racial formation in conflict zones
in the Middle East and other security poles to broader globalising patterns of
technologies of racialising and ethnicising state power.
In the context of Palestine, various scholars have examined Israel’s racialised
practices of control. Peteet (2009) has written on the racialisation of space, Jamal
(2008) has written on differential treatment as ‘racialized time’ and Abu-Laban
and Bakan have shown how surveillance in Israel-Palestine is marked by its racialised context (and asymmetric power relations) (2011). While these studies
emphasise the racialising effects on the Palestinians, they are less concerned with
the dimension of the Israeli state structure as a ‘racial state’ (Goldberg 2006) and
‘ethnocratic regime’ (Yiftachel 2006). The research seeks to include both perspectives by underlining the racialising effects of Israeli state and military practice and
the mobility of these practices.
36
The Global Palestine category also takes on a political economy perspective. In
their seminal Marxian account of Israel’s global economy, Nitzan and Bichler warn
against conducting studies based on the fallacy that Israel’s integration into the
global economy is new. Rather, they argue, Israel was born politically and financially out of imperial interests and through the benefit gained from global capital flows
(mainly those coming from the global Jewish diaspora and initially, German war
reparations). In their analysis, this globality is a persistent feature of the colonial
project and has been attained through Israel’s permanent war economy (Nitzan
and Bichler 2002). Marxian political economists argue that the collapse of the old
political consensus of Zionism has given way to a new economic consensus on free
markets based on the premise that ‘laissez faire’ is good, and state intervention is
bad. In Nitzan’s and Bichles’s view, Israel’s integration into the global economy is
basically eroding the collectivist ethos of Zionism on behalf of liberalisation and
the pursuit of accumulation as an ideology in its own right.
Other political economy perspectives stress how Israel’s geopolitics are depending on mainly Israel’s alliances with western European states and the US. For example, Shalev has shown how the immigration of resourceful individuals to the state
and capital inflow such as foreign gifts and assets of immigrants have driven the
economy’s major episodes of boom and bust (Shalev 1998: 31). Unlike Nitzan and
Bichler, Shalev detects and gives importance to what he sees as a tension between
Zionist ideology and economic and civil liberalism. Most recently, scholars have
approached the development of the Israeli economy from the perspective of the
effects of the so-called liberal peace paradigm and its deployment in the context
of the Oslo Accords. These scholars analyse Israel’s economy through the prism
of ‘peace business’, where so-called peace agreements produce lucrative spin-offs
for the economic elites involved (Franks 2009; Bouillon 2004; Hanieh 2008).
These are but a few examples, but they serve to highlight the broad scope of
research on the global perspective. In very broad terms, the literature on G
­ lobal
Palestine has worked as inspirational background for this thesis’ approach to
­examining the link between national narratives, territorial practices, and global
shifts in modes of control. The plethora of global perspectives on Palestine shares
the recognition of the role of state power and the commercialisation of security as
part of Israel-Palestine’s global impact and the impact of outside factors.
The research represented in this thesis inscribes itself into this line of work on
Global Palestine but as the same time speaks to a broader body of critical security
studies.
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1.4 Security studies, policing, and liberal war
Because the research for this thesis deals with the formation of security practices,
the Global Palestine perspective needs to be situated within the field of critical
security studies. The last decades the Copenhagen School of critical security studies
(e.g. Buzan et al. 1998; Huysman 2011; Wæver 2011) have provided a research
agenda that explores the processes and logics of securitisation, including the construction of (in)securities so key to the formation of dominant security practices
and discourses. Concurrently, the perspective of commercialisation and fetishising
of security has developed as a focal point for political economy and critical security
scholars (Neocleous 2008; Bigo 2001, 2014; Salter 2005).
In recent years, international relations and security studies scholars have increasingly emphasised the importance of the technological aspects of security
practices. These technological aspects include, among others, the use of advanced
biometrics, databases, and risk models or, for the purpose of border protection,
migration control, identification of individuals, crowd control, and other concerns
regarding population management or social control (Andreas 2000; Andreas and
Snyder 2000; Amoore and De Goede 2008; Marx 2001; Salter and Zureik 2005).
However, few of these studies incorporate larger scripts of state and nation building (let alone settler colonialism) into their analytical scope.
Because security innovation has often been initiated as a way to conduct colonisation as a modernising mission, so too has academic research dealt critically with
the sources of security innovation, e.g. counterterrorism by British police forces
in Northern Ireland (Sinclair 2011) and the American mission of policing in the
Philipines (McCoy 2009). These studies demonstrate that colonial territories and
imperial encounters were actual ‘laboratories of modernity’ (Stoler and Cooper
1997). Recently, more work has appeared that is critical of seeing policing and war
as separate projects. Critical accounts of the notion of asymmetric warfare now see
it as a form of invasion where war serves the useful purpose of inscribing military
might to a vulnerability and has pushed for the diminution of the distinctions
between civilian and military life that are integral to a culture of suspicion and a
generalised mood of fear and paranoia (Kundnani 2004). Khalili views asymmetric
warfare and insurgency as a form of ‘armed social work’ (Khalili 2013).
While Andreas and Nadelmann (2006) examine the internationalisation of
crime control and argue for its insertion into the field of international relations,
Neocleous argues that the disciplinary boundaries between warfare and policing
should be dissolved because they constitute part of the same project of liberal order making (2014). Instead, he promotes a research agenda that suggests we look
38
beyond the institutions of policing and security to the relationship between power
and peace. This idea is not new, but has gained more ground in the wake of the
War on Terror and the spread of new forms of communications and technologies.
The violence of liberal peace (Neocleous 2014: 8) and Dillon’s and Reid’s critique of ‘the liberal way of war’ both set the agenda for rethinking of established
distinctions between civil and military. They argue for a Foucauldian approach to
security that includes both biopolitics and geopolitics, and suggest a reading of
population control as a disciplinary mechanism.
Fundamentally, Foucault has grounded a critical perspective of security as a disciplinary mechanism that functions as orders of social control and war as a matrix
for techniques of domination. His work on disciplinary power adds surveillance
as a core element of disciplinary power. In his work Security, Population, Territory,
Foucault addresses how the general economy of power in society is becoming a
domain of security and by extension what is involved in the emergence of technologies of security (Foucault 2009) This perspective can add to the research of how
Israel’s techniques help establish modes and technologies of ordering in the broader
context of liberal governance through which hierarchies are built and order is produced and legitimised. This addition would also address the too narrow conception
of war articulated in international relations (IR) as a taken-for-granted category.
The question of the link between police power and war power also arises in
Foucault’s work, where population is approached as a correlate of power and an
object of knowledge (Foucault 1977: 79). By extension, his notions of biopower
and disciplinary power lay the groundwork for contemporary surveillance studies,
particularly in cases involving new forms of social sorting (Gandy 1993; Lyon
2003), which originates in biopower’s quest for adequate knowledge to manage
populations. The practices by which this correlate plays out resonates in the interrelationship of colonial practices and techniques of control. In addition, the
Foucauldian approach and its interest in how the territorial becomes the architect
of disciplined space have also spurred Edward Said’s critique of the relationship
between knowledge production and power/control in the Middle East (Said 1978).
The still advancing field of surveillance studies has also begun to penetrate the
field of Palestine studies. Recent researchers, such as Weizman, Lyon, Zuriek, and
Abu-Laban, stress the colonial and surveillance practices from the perspective of
a Foucauldian panopticonism of contemporary surveillance, which includes the
notion of self-disciplining inspired by Bentham’s panopticon of the prison. The
linking of surveillance and colonial studies calls for an analysis of the prevailing
relationship between power and knowledge co-imbricated with new technologies
of control. For example, Lyon integrates surveillance (2011) with Israel’s internal colonisation of Palestinians and shows how the Zionist project has gradually
evolved to differentiate it from other forms of classical colonialism. Handel (2011)
39
unfolds the notion of exclusionary surveillance and the production of insecurity
in the context of Israel-Palestine.
Security production hinges on the notion of science as a societal issue and a
force operating in alliance with those in power. The relationship between technology, imperialism, and nationalism has often been used to promote a logic of progressiveness linked to national aspirations. From the ‘age of empire’ (Hobsbawm
1983) to our ‘colonial present’ (Gregory 2004), studies demonstrate that past
colonial techniques are often reaffirmed and reactivated in the present. In addition, proponents of the Copenhagen School of critical security studies have called
for a sociological approach to study the links between science and securitisation.
For example, they point to the interface between science and securitisation and
categorising scientific facts as units that can be mobilised in securitisation claims
(Villumsen Berling 2011). Rather than focusing on the process of securitisation
as a speech act as a form of communicative action, what is of concern to current
researchers is an accentuation of the innovation process, i.e. the way in which
security is envisioned, produced, and deployed as both a political and technical
artefact.
A range of work highlights Israel’s path of rapid development in order to explain the country’s sophisticated tech-economy. Most recently, Israeli entrepreneurs
and businessmen (Senor and Singer 2011), in their non-academic, celebratory
accounts of Israeli innovation and high-tech production, spread the message of
the ‘miracle story of Israel’s economic successes’ to a global audience of business
entrepreneurs and help promote Israeli innovation as a positive side effect of Israel’s
particular story, huge military sector, and rapid modernisation. While the celebratory accounts provide key facts and background and reflect a crucial branding
trend that can optimise exports, they are fundamentally political documents.
One of the more serious academic accounts of the roots of the success of Israel’s
growth, authored by Gambardella and Arora (2006), highlights the link between
rapid growth and high-tech and compares Israel’s rapid growth to the rise of the
economies of Brazil, Israel, China, Ireland, and India. In the same vein, Breznitz,
in his widely quoted work that compares Israel and Taiwan, deploys Gershenkrohn’s modernisation theory of economic backwardness (1962) to explain Israel’s
rapid growth and modernisation, i.e. why late developing countries develop more
rapidly (Breznitz 2007). More fundamentally, the question of the connection
between the tech sector’s rapid growth and the Israeli military has also been addressed in Breznitz’s analysis of the role of the Israeli software innovation systems.
This work demonstrates how the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) works as a collaborative ‘public space’ created by the military that facilitates the sharing of ideas and
40
collective learning oriented towards the invention and improvement of security
products and services. This use of the IDF corresponds to both Gordon’s (2009)
analysis of the security industry as a collaborative space, Porter’s concept of (hightech) clusters (2000), and Breschi’s and Malerba’s work on mobility and transmission of new knowledge between actors that is eased by cultural and geographical
proximity (Breschi and Malerba 2005). These works add a spatial dimension to
existing theories that emphasise the importance of social networking and the role
of both formal and informal institutions. Taken together, much of the research on
Israeli innovation systems speaks to a broader engagement with what Freeman has
called national or regional innovation systems (Freeman 1987; Lundvall 1992) as
a domain of economy following the cases of Germany, USSR, and Japan.
Concurrently, in a raft of more sociological work, a range of scholars has pointed to a set of unique relationships between the Israeli armed forces and the local
high-tech industry as explanatory background for the Israeli high-tech boom of
the 1990s. Examples of this work include the notion of social capital in the linkages between high-tech companies and military defence systems (Honig, Lerner
and Raban 2006). In addition, management and innovation studies often analyse
Israel as a special or extreme case of state building among other state development
projects. However, this work fails to address the deeper origins and structure of the
state’s political economy and the colonial reality of Israel’s military engagement
and takes little critical account of the ideology behind the ventures and the steady
growth of the neo-liberal economy.
Other work stresses the relationship between military dispositions and the
broader economy. Reppy’s analysis of defence visions notes how older symbols of
military hegemony have become less relevant to security systems that have become
rooted in the civilian rather than the military economy (Reppy 2000: 5). In the
same vein, Dvir and Tischler examine the changing role of the defence industry
in Israel’s industrial and technological development to demonstrate how Israel
has been successful in transforming the country’s civilian industry and military
sectors into a successful high-tech sector (Dvir and Tishler 2000). Such an analysis
requires looking at the effect of the defence industry on the economy through a
set of dependent variables such as technological development and defence needs
of the country. Such considerations reach into the broader debate and literature
on (Israeli) militarism and military-industrial relations.
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1.5 Militarism and the military-industrial complex
In recent years, militarism has generated renewed interest in international relations
(IR) scholarship. However, few accounts investigate the corporate aspects of security and the ways in which the actual security production cycle connects to broader
questions of state power and ideology. Studies of Israeli militarism as a societal
phenomenon and as a military-industrial complex have been conducted largely
by Israeli scholars and have tended to focus more on elites, the institutional level,
and the boundaries between civil and military rather than on industrial-military
relations, let alone commercialisation. In the context of the debate on militarism
the thesis seeks to break the boundaries of the study of civil-military relations
and instead develop the network thesis of how security practices, production and
actors co-constitute and negotiate a given system of domination. In this way the
research alludes to the spree of critical militarism scholars who approach the Israeli
military-industrial complex as an interlinked network.
Academic work in Israel on militarism has developed through a series of waves
of trends and traditions. The first wave focused on national security decisions dominated by a functional-structural approach, which assumes a separation between
military and civil society (Janowitz 1964; Luckham 1971). The second wave challenged this assumption by examining the broader effects of civil-military relationships (Lissak 1984). The third wave focused on how the IDF affects society in the
broadest sense (Ben-Eliezer 1998). For example, Lomsky and Ben-Ari investigate
the place of the military in the relationship between state and civil ­society and on
war as an integral dynamic of society. While Yuval-Davis (1985) and Kimmerling
(2001) successfully link militarism and military service to patterns of gender,
power, and inequality, others have traced the evolution from ‘obligatory militarism’
to ‘contractual militarism’ (Levy, Lomsky-Feder and Harel 2007). In the same
vein, Cohen examines the IDF’s path of development from a ‘people’s’ army’ to a
‘professional military’ (Cohen 2008), while Levy’s ‘materialistic militarism’ focuses
on the social rewards of military engagement (2007).
Other scholarship has dealt more specifically with the elite level of the military,
in the context of the relationship between political and military institutions (Maoz
2006; Peri 2005). More recently, Ben-Eliezer (1998) discusses the ‘special’ Israeli
military mentality, and argues for a sociological approach that focuses on subjective
interpretations offered by representatives of the military. Perlmutter (1968) stresses
the importance of social organisation, politics, and culture in order to create a
more comprehensive understanding of war (Perlmutter 1968). In a similar manner,
Kimmerling writes about war as a distinct social phenomenon in Israel, a view
that reaches beyond the confines of the more conventional institutional approach
and views war as integral to Israeli society. He does so by addressing two ‘deep
42
cultural codes’ – militarism and Jewishness – (Kimmerling 2001) and highlights
the persistence of the state as a key player in the relationship between the cultural
sphere and the might and myth of the military.
As a refinement of critical military studies, a (social) network approach to
studying military elites has also come to the fore. Whereas earlier accounts of
Israeli militarism stressed Israel as a ‘nation in arms’ (Ben-Eliezer 1995), social
network scholars suggest that thinking of militarism in terms of policy networks
better highlights informal dynamics, i.e. the existence of a highly variegated and
changing security network whose members are involved in all aspects of public
life in Israel. This social network approach includes a range of Marxist critiques
of the military industrial complex in the 1950s as part of a broader literature on
permanent war economies (Melman 1974; Cliff 1957; Milward 1979). (For works
on Israel’s permanent war economy, see Nitzan and Bichler 2002).
Published in 1956, Wright Mills’s The Power Elite analyses the military-industrial complex not just as an economic force (of military, political, and corporate
actors) but as an inner circle, a social class, and a social and psychological entity and structure that is detrimental to effective decision making (Wright Mills
1965). The Power Elite perspective gained ground and readership in the context of
the Vietnam War and the growing clusters corporate-military actors, companies,
and institutions. Inspired by Mills, Uri Davis’s Utopia Incorporated, published
in 1977, examines the links between class, kin, state, and corporate power as an
engine in the nascent Zionist project of colonisation (Davis 1977), including
military and security production and involvement. More recently, the network
approach has been revived by De Graff and Apeldoorn (2010), among others, who
use Social Network Analysis (SNA) to examine the embedding of agency in US
military-­industrial structures in the decision making process conducted among
neo­conservatives before the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Work has also been published about triple-helix systems. For example,
­Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff (2005) provide key insights into the nature of university-industry-government relations. This work connects research systems to social
context, where the interactions between the helices convey the deeper logics of
knowledge infrastructures of society (1996), and the changing role and nature
of governments in relation to broader processes of innovation and laissez faire
capitalist economies (1995).
More recently, the developmental processes of science in their interactions
with their social context have emerged in Science and Technology (STS) literature (Gummet and Reppy 1988). In addition, scholarship in the same field deals
with the impact of new weapons systems on national and international security
(e.g. Gleditsch and Njolstad 1990). For example, Ellis’s social history of the machine gun demonstrates the integral role of social, political, and cultural factors
43
in weapons innovation (Ellis 1987). In fact, there is a range of studies on specific
weapons systems and empirical studies on the structure of defence industries (Ball
and Leitenberg 1983). And more recently in their new critical approach to Israeli
militarism, Sheffer and Barak (2006, 2010) argue for analyses that address the
political culture of militarism that is the foundation of social exchanges between
military, civilian, and political actors of the Israeli security network.
All of these studies provide insights into their various subjects. However, even
when taken together, they do not give us a clear road map for how to study arms
and security innovation processes. The need still exists for a more dynamic approach to the relationship between the sciences, technology, and military-security
through the study of the sociotechnical network that characterises the heterogeneous character of technological development. While these critical accounts provide
an excellent critique of civil-military relations, we need more research that provides
deeper insights into the corporate arm of this network. Looking at the military
sector from the viewpoint of the security industry can help shed light on how the
security network shapes and is shaped by corporate interests. In this way while
taking on the network approach the research further addresses the question of the
relationship between the individuals and institutions intent and the way in which
security is produced and deployed as an artefact.
All together at its core the thesis seeks to contribute to the academic body of
work that questions and examines the way in which security is produced with
a strong emphasis on the materiality of that process. The research provides an
original contribution by bringing in new knowledge as to how ideas of security
are materialised into both modernizing and de-modernizing practices of nation
and state building. Too often this perspective has been neglected in both critical
security and area studies. In part the research rectifies this neglect by expanding
the existing analytical frame of Israeli (state) violence and it does so by showing
the breadth and depth of the venture in one unified account.
Consequently this thesis inscribes and positions itself in relation to a growing
body of critical work on Global Palestine. Its research seeks to add the dimension,
materiality, and technology to studies of Zionism and techno-nationalism, and
more broadly introduce these ideas to the agendas of critical security studies.
The research provides a critique of one-dimensional (in)security narratives and
challenges accounts of security production that are either too abstract and theoretical or too focused on narrow military capacities. The research relies on a growing body of critical security studies in relation to Israel-Palestine more broadly,
while it seeks to incorporate the perspective of both technological nationalism
and ­racialisation into the frame. This perspective injects important information
from the practical field of security and the disciplines of critical political economy and science and technology studies. In addition the research focuses on the
44
fertile space between structures and individuals, which can help ease the tension
between cultural studies and political economy perspectives. This is a research
agenda that takes the nature and capacities of technology seriously without lapsing
into ­celebratory analyses of their roots.
Based on this review, the following section outlines the methodology and the
philosophy of science on which this thesis has been developed. To obtain a clearer
view of socio-technical processes, we must de-compartmentalise the social sciences
and draw the natural sphere closer to the social one, and technology closer to
politics.
1.6 Methodology and research questions and practices
This chapter is an account of the thesis’ methodological foundations, research
design, field practices, and the technical processes that contributed to the design
of this study. I conclude this chapter by reflecting on questions about the ethics
of research and the role of political emotions.
1.7 Background of research
My academic and political interest in Zionism and the social and political history
of Palestine predates this research. Throughout my academic studies in the field of
development, international relations (IR), and political economy, I have consistently been engaged in scholarly work and debates on the Israel-Palestine impasse
and its global implications. On and off over the course of the last seven years,
I lived in and visited Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Tel Aviv, working in the field of diplomacy and more recently conducting fieldwork for this thesis and other research
projects. It was in the course of habitual travel between Ramallah in the West Bank
and the high-tech bubble of Tel Aviv that I began to think about the link – not
just between a prosperous and highly industrialised Israel and a de-modernised
impoverished Palestine – but between the overwhelming security installations in
place in the OPT and the increasing celebration of Israel as a high-tech nation.
However, when consulting the literature on Israel-Palestine and Zionism, I found
that the strong tendency of social studies of Zionism has been to focus on historical
debates and narratives that have limited explanatory power and insights into this
conundrum of security technology and settler colonialism.
Overall, I unfold this research as a kind of genealogy of the Israeli security
industry and its practices. As I analyse these in the context of a national project of settler colonialism deeply inscribed into a project of modernisation and
de-modernisation, I term the conjunction or research process a colonial genealogy
of modernity. While this thesis does not perform a particularly rigid genealogical
45
analysis, it addresses genealogy in the sense that it seeks to examine ‘the history of
the present’ (Foucault 1977; Garland 2014: 377). It demonstrates ‘how the history
of the present deploys genealogical inquiry and the uncovering of hidden conflicts and
contexts as a means of re-valuing the value of contemporary phenomena’ (Garland
2014: 365).
This can be done by examining the concrete and abstract institutions in which
certain objects become objects of knowledge and domination (Foucault 1993:
203). According to Foucault, genealogy is not the examination of a timeless condition, but rather an examination of ‘the constitution of the subject across history which
has led us up to the modern concept of the self’ (Foucault 1993: 202). This means that
we are looking to history not as a single unified history, but as complex processes
to be dealt with in their specificity and locality. A central element in this genealogy
or history of the present is the effort to analyse the (power-laden) dynamic, or the
co-constitution of subjects (people) and objects (material artefact).
In its concern with the relationship between discourse, political economy, and
power, this project has its roots in the broad tradition of critical social science,
drawing more specifically from the tradition of critical realism (CR). This is accomplished in conjunction with key themes concerning the operations of power
in the work of Foucault. By drawing on critical realism’s philosophy of science
and the methodology of retroduction, I suggest here that it is possible to outline
a critical framework that exhibits an intricate understanding of the relationship
between discursive and material forces and their power relations.
1.8 Technology, power, and critical realism
Although philosophical ideas remain largely hidden in research (Slife and Williams
1995), they still influence the research process. In the social sciences, human
agency is in part determined by beliefs, desires, motives, and goals (Fay 1994).
In line with the critiques of one-dimensional celebratory approaches to studying
the relationship between technology and nationalism, this thesis is guided by an
overall concern with the re-articulation of the relations between ideational and
material forces. While utopian techno-enthusiasm and ‘paralyzing anti-technology’
(Avgerou and Walsham 2000) are predicated on law-like relationships between
technology and social outcomes (Smith 2006: 194), causality and scientific laws
(as a constant conjunction of events) do not capture underlying unobservable
entities (Maxwell 1998) and possible causal processes (Cartwright 1983). This is
especially true when taking into account the flow, tampering, and improvisation
that shapes technology in the interaction between daily practices of social actors
and the larger national, scientific power structures in which they are embedded.
This research views the process of science and scientific knowledge as historically
46
emergent, political, and incomplete (Smith 2006: 200). This means that development and use of technology does not follow a straightforward causal relationship.
In my approach to case studies, I ask about underlying mechanisms instead of
asking what and how many questions; I also ask how and why questions as posed
by a case study research strategy (Yin 2003). A case study is a strategy of inquiry
in which the researcher explores a program, event, or activity process. It is bound
by time and activity and is based on the collection of data over a sustained period
of time (Stake 1995). This is done in order to open up the black box of linking
empirical conjunction (Hedström and Swedberg 1998), or to convey the means
through which causal relationships appear (Shadish, Cook and Cambell 2002).
From a political economy perspective, this thesis operates in a tense field between
post-structural ideas stressing the notion of discursive representation and the more
material tenets of historical materialism. This tension produces a question: is it the
actors or the techno-national settler colonial project that plays the starring role in
the (interrelated) stories of this thesis?
To alleviate the tension between material, rational, and constructivist representative approaches, I argue for a post-modernist approach where technologies need
to be examined in relation to power/knowledge discourses (Schech 2002). This
implies focusing on diverse cultures, socioeconomic conditions, and the experiences and conceptions of the actors involved (Avgerou and Walsham 2000: 2-7),
rather than arriving at new knowledge through an objective scientific framework
of hypothesis testing. This involves an interpretive method that focuses on human
constructs as drivers of change (Smith 2006: 196).
In science, the building of a theory is ‘seeking to account for the state(s) of
some thing or (things)’ (Weber 2003: vi). Indeed, theories need to refer to something or else they lose their meaning (Archer 2000: 154–155). In this light, a
strong constructivist approach – ‘there is no correct and incorrect theories but
there are interesting and less interesting ways of viewing the world’ (Walsham
1993: 6) – carries the risk of rejecting any rational basis which might fall into a
hazardous, ‘anything goes’ attitude. Thus, while this study accepts the constructivist premise that meaning is constructed by human beings as they engage in the
world they are interpreting, and subjective meanings are negotiated socially and
historically, it also points to the existence of a material reality that shapes our lives.
The philosophy of science approach ingrained in critical realism is a useful bridge
between these disciplinary tensions.
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Critical realism seeks to transcend some of the classical dualisms in social
sciences such as positivism versus constructivism and structure versus agency
(Bhaskar 2002: 19-22). In short, ontologically critical realism focuses on what
produces events (or in this case, experiences) rather than a causal link between
events per se. Central to critical realism is that the explanation of social phenomena
is achieved by revealing the mechanisms that produce them (Archer 1995). When
applied to the research of the production system of security, critical realism rearticulates the importance of understanding context and underlying social m
­ echanisms
in conjunction with tendencies among actors and companies. In this way, CR
is anchored in the critique of positivist approaches to the social attainment of
knowledge. In other words, a realist approach to research does not presume to be
able to identify defining or determinate causes for all social outcomes. Instead,
it appreciates that explanations and causation will always be contingent on the
mechanisms or the context in question.
With critical realism as an overarching framework, the process of technological
production can be conceptualised as an open system in which multiple contingent
causal mechanisms, both extraneous and internal, exist. This means that manifest
experiences are not the primary object of knowledge, but rather that the method
should focus on uncovering generative mechanisms which may or may not mani­
fest themselves as experiences. Knowledge is conjectural and antifoundational
(Phillips and Burbules 2000). Thus, when seeking to understand the experiences
and behaviours of humans, uncovering the mechanisms that underlie such experiences and behaviours is required.
Foucault’s concern with power and, more importantly, his understanding of
power relations are entirely consistent with CR (see Selby 2007). Power, according
to Foucault, is manifested in the instruments, techniques, and procedures that are
brought to bear on the actions of others. It is exercised in the ‘modalities’ of what
he refers to as ‘domination’ and ‘governmentality’ (Foucault 1980; Hindess 1996).
Both of these ideas shift the study of power away from a centralised, dominant
subject/object of power, such as the sovereign or as here, the coloniser towards the
mutual relationship between ruler and ruled:
Power must be analyzed as something which circulates, or rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localized here
or there, never in anybody’s hands, never appropriated as a commodity
or piece of wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net-like
organization. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads;
they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising
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this power. They are not only its inert or consenting targets; they are always
also the elements of its articulation. In other words, individuals are the
vehicles of power, not its points of application (Foucault 1976 in Dirks,
Eley and Ortner 1993: 214).
The idea of disciplinary power understands the phenomenon as exercised in the
mechanisms, technologies, and practices of society; it is not restricted to specific
actions of one group or actor over another. Power is therefore exercised in the
conducting of the (govern)mentality of and between individuals and as operative
in the relations between our material and discursive constellations.
A Foucauldian framework is also useful in cases where the tasks of the interpreter is to ‘write a detective history’ by ‘putting together the various pieces of the
puzzle so we can see the sufficient conditions for the emergence of the problem
or issue under investigation’ (Kendall and Wickham 2008).
As such, power should not be understood as merely laws or regulations of the
state. Rather, it should be understood in terms of the technologies and the norms
in ‘a society of normalisation’ (Foucault 2003) that operates in a variety of state
and non-state contexts, in the names and concepts, and indeed in the objects –
including people and practices – to which they refer. Critical social science, on the
other hand, maintains that the purpose of research should be guided by a commitment to alleviate unnecessary and unwanted human suffering – latent and manifest – by exposing and explaining power structures and relationships (Fay 1994).
However research cannot be reduced to questions of truth and falsity, but amounts
to a ‘critical judgment on the truth or falsity of their beliefs’ (Sayer 2000: 49).
As such, in a Foucauldian spirit, power goes beyond the study of ideology, why
the idea of power does fit with the concern with ideology in critical social science.
Here focus is on the ways in which meaning establishes relations of domination.
1.9 Research methods and practice
A critical realism approach does not entail a specific method for social science.
Indeed, it criticises any intention to develop a specific method for scientific work as
such. It does, however, as Danermark et al. (2002) point out, offer some guidelines
as how to approach social science research through the framework outlined above.
This thesis is based on an interdisciplinary framework. Its research engages
with a story of networks and binaries conjoined as relations of domination. It
investigates a history of shifts and leaps and seeks to describe a social history that
49
abolishes borders between micro and macro and between economy and politics.
Edlund and Nilstun have attempted to pin down such interdisciplinary research:
‘The most characteristic idea of interdisciplinary research today is (to) approach a
whole range of complicated problems, (...) and (attempt) some kind of integration
of data’ (Edlund and Nilstun 1986: 37). The combinations of knowledge implicit
in interdisciplinary research might even lead to new knowledge. In pursuing critical methodological pluralism in this study – the production of security in a settler
colonial context – this thesis attempts to achieve a comprehensive and critical
appreciation of the relationship between systems, structures, institutions, agents,
and discourse. Therefore, it makes use of mixed methodological tools that analyse
stratified understandings of social reality, not those that reduce phenomena to just
the level of the individual or to just the level of social entity, but rather to discern
different levels of strata which entail emergent powers (Danermark et al. 2002).
This mixed method approach involves the use of both qualitative and quantitative
methods so that the overall strength of the study is greater than only one methodological tool (Creswell and Plano Clark 2007). To do this, it may be necessary
to eliminate the long-standing distinction between quantitative and qualitative
research methods. Indeed, one should complement the other in what is usually referred to as methodological triangulation (Deacon, Bryman and Fenton 1998: 47).
Moreover, the thesis adopts retroduction as its research strategy. Retroduction
is a method of conceptualising that requires the researcher to identify the circumstances without which something (the concept) cannot exist. The method
differs from deduction in that it is not logical. Both abduction and retroduction
are analytical tools used in critical realism. As argued by Danermark et al., critical
realism understands causal analysis to be based on modes of inference that include
not just induction and deduction but, crucially, abduction and retroduction as
central modes (Danermark et al. 2002). The method of retroduction enables the
explanation of something about the world not by drawing linear causal links and
describing law-like relations between observable events, but through the use of
conceptual abstraction (Danermark et al. 2002). In this way the research comes
to (re)interprets and (re)describes structures and relations in new contexts of ideas
and aims in order to find the prerequisites or the basic conditions for the existence
of the phenomena studied. In this study of the production of security technology,
what is being highlighted as part of this broader social theoretical argument are the
central mechanisms for understanding not the entire system as a whole but more
specifically the key features of the system that connect settler colonial practices
and nationalist impulses to technological innovation in the current constellation
within the framework of the ideas under investigation.
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In the analysis of research, retroductive inference will not move a researcher
from a basic premise or hypothesis to a conclusion (Danermark et al. 1997).
It takes some unexplained phenomenon and proposes hypothetical mechanisms
that if they existed would generate or cause that which is to be explained. Used in
conjunction, these forms of inference can lead to the formation of a new conceptual framework or theory (Danermark et al. 1997). As Mingers argues, through
retroductive interferences ‘we move from experiences in the empirical domain to
possible structures in the real domain’ (Mingers 2004: 86-88). Moreover, unlike
the case of abductive inference, employing retroductive inference calls for bringing
assumptions to the research. It is the a priori knowledge that allows the researcher
to question and clarify the basic prerequisites or conditions for a priori assumptions or theoretical frameworks.
Danermark et al. (1997) suggest that the use of the term ‘conditions’ refers to
the circumstance without which something cannot exist. Employing retroductive
inference in the process of analysis makes it possible to explain events and the
social process that causes events. This includes describing and conceptualising
the properties and mechanisms that make an event or incident happen, and then
describing how different mechanisms are apparent under different conditions
(Danermark et al. 2002: 74).
In this thesis, I move beyond theories of security towards a more comprehensive
understanding of the actual and real conditions under which security technology is
innovated, incepted, produced, deployed, and sold. There are significant strengths
in each different method used here. Essentially, however, these methods should
be regarded as one methodology. Indeed, the historical and institutional context,
semi-structured interviews, and textual analysis have all informed one another
throughout the research process, all in ways that pertain to different theoretical
concerns. As such, the development of background issues and the identification
of basic areas of research interest inform all these strategies of research, which in
turn inform each other.
Studying of extreme cases (extreme case sampling)
Studying the case of Israel as an ‘extreme case’ entails studying the conditions
for the production of security technology that are are more obvious and intense.
The term ‘extreme cases’ refers to the study of specific cases where the mechanisms
under investigation exist in a ‘purer’ form than usual (Danermark et al. 1997).
Studying extreme cases allows the researcher to learn about the conditions for the
‘normal’ area under investigation by researching the extreme or manipulated (the
abnormal), i.e. the study of Israeli security as a highly intense and securitised state
51
marked by an overly and explicit ethnic nationalism. This allows us to study and
understand what characterises security (potentially in a purer form). I work to
show how the extreme case of the Israeli security practices and the industry can
teach us about the relationship between security and nationalism more generally.
Halliday argues that area studies is a complex phenomenon, where lapses into
‘regional narcissism and over-specialization’ (Halliday 2005: 10) are common features. By introducing a broader theoretical framework and arguing for the present
case to be a variant rather than an exception, the study seeks to minimise this risk.
Limitations of scope of analysis
Israeli state making and security concerns and practices constitute an historical
event that needs to be analysed in the broader regional context of Middle East state
formation. Both these processes are intertwined and share important similarities.
This chapter does not prioritise its comparative, intertwined account of how Israeli
state resembles and relates to state formation in Arab states and the pervasive role
of European colonial powers herein (Owen 1992; Ayubi 1995; Halliday 2005).
What is more, and perhaps more critical, is the lack of attention given here to Israel’s
broader regional security concerns in relation to Arab states and hostile groups. Nor
does this analysis include regional security concerns, threats from cross-border
opponents, and organised activity against Israel targets. Even though this analysis
is interested in the internal ‘other’ and its relationship with the sovereign, clearly
this is a huge challenge that opens up the critical question of whether the thesis
paints an accurate and sufficiently comprehensive picture of Israeli security.
However, in defence of this decision, I have focused in the empirical portions
of the analysis on how Israel’s security companies refer to the OPT and the internal ‘others’ as well as on those technologies in play vis-à-vis Palestinians and
in relation to intra-Israeli relations. The comparative regional perspective missing
here is clearly a shortcoming for which I bear the responsibility. Moreover, I do
not include and analyse the question of Israel’s nuclear arsenal and weapons (and
the broader regional debate and race attached to this), which is certainly critical
to the state’s security narrative and sector. However, this is a matter of priority and
a conscious decision I have made because of the wish to access the field. Needless
to say, the Israeli nuclear sector is completely off limit for outsiders, which would
have inhibited my aim to understand the sector through my own field work efforts.
What is more, clearly the Israeli security industry and (security) tech sectors are
in general highly gendered fields often dominated by masculine, even patriarchal
values and structures of domination. In addition, the aspects of gendering are
critical as much research also points to the profoundly gendered effects of security
52
practices (Enloe 1990; Cockburn 1998; al-Ali 2007), let alone the role of gender
relations in war (Goldstein 2003) and settler colonial domination (Mogensen
2012; Smith 2010). Due to space constraints this research has not engaged with
this critical aspect of security and reproduction of power relations in the perspective of gender and gendering despite my own position as a female researcher in
this particularly male dominated field.
Data, fieldwork, and interviews
This thesis brings together empirical data and insights based on fieldwork.
I weave together data from sites in Israel, Palestine, and extraterritorial sites such
as arms fairs, and draw from a numerous sources such as secondary literature,
statistics, promotional material, and government publications. While the analysis moves between territorial sites, it does not present a complete account of a
particular site or place; rather, it demonstrates the variety and extent of control
across territorial scales.
The empirical body of the research provides a unique view into the heart of
­Israeli security industry as viewed, framed, and lived by its actors. Over three
visits to Israel over the course of 11 months (July–September 2012, November
2012, and June 2013), I conducted 24 semi-structured qualitative interviews with
company representatives, analysts, academic staff, state agency officials, and NGO
members working across the broad spectrum of security, defence, science, and trade.
The second portion of my empirical data and observatory studies originated
with my visits to four defence and security fairs and one high-tech fair – four in
Israel and one in France. The fairs visited were:
––
––
––
––
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HLS 2012, the 2nd Israel International Homeland Security Conference in
Tel Aviv, Israel, 11–14 November 2012;
ISDEF, the 5th International Defense and HLS Expo, Tel Aviv, Israel, 4–6
June 2013;
Eurosatory, Land and Air and Defense and Security International Exhibition,
11–15 June 2012;
Unmanned Vehicles Exhibition and Conference (UVID), Airport City, Israel,
8 November 2012; and
International High-tech Conference (HTIA), Technion’s Centennial Anniversary, Jerusalem, 11 September, 2012.
In addition to the interviews and fair visits in the fall of 2012, I was ‘embedded’ in the Israeli security company International Security and Defense Systems
53
(ISDS)7 for a three-day study-inspiration trip for ISDS customers. ISDS operates
under the patronage of Israeli-Argentinian security veteran Leo Gleser. Deemed
a ‘showcase’ trip for Gleser’s global clientele, the promotion tour was titled ‘Top
Technology and Transfer of Knowledge, Grand Event in Israel’. The event’s programme was organised to coincide with the major security fair ‘HLS Israel 2012’
organised in Tel Aviv by the (MFA) Affairs and the Israel Export Institute, where
Gleser brought his customers and participated himself in panel presentations8.
The idea of insight into such milieu is inspired by Gusterson’s (1998) ethnographic work on scientific communities (in this case, nuclear scientists). First, this
work demonstrates the existence of socio-political pockets containing particular
logics and worldviews that are inherent to all kinds of societies. Second, Gusterson’s
use of methods of elite studies demonstrates that discourses of science are not something outside culture; rather, that the scientists’ rationales are part of a politico-scientific logic of an internationalised culture (Gusterson 1998: x–xi). As Gusterson
argues: in order to understand national and international power dynamics, it is
key to understand local contestations of power (Gusterson 1998: 5–6). The goal
of this research is in line with Gusterson: to remedy the general absence of this
sort of milieu knowledge of Israeli security by including the agents involved in
the production of science, i.e. a cultural perspective on the production of science
which takes into account interrogation of power institutions, their individual
agents, and their broader ideological agendas and power structures
The choice of semi-structured interviews and textual analysis supported by
­ articipant observation and historical analysis provides the holistic multi-dimenp
sional methodology which critical social science requires. Interviews generally
involve a data elicitation approach beginning with ‘the experiences as expressed
in lived and told stories of individuals’, but culminate in texts subjected to inter7
8
54
International Security and Defense Systems (ISDS) is ‘a worldwide influential, sophisticated
security consultancy and integrator in homeland security, defence, maritime, and aviation security, infrastructure, multi-national enterprises and the security of mega-events’ (ISDS, 2012).
Among places where ISDS has provided its integrated systems is the US embassy in Rome; in
addition, various celebrities such as Elton John and Madonna have had their security provided
by ISDS. On the company’s customer list appear numerous airports, private industries, and
national police units across the globe. ISDS headquarters is located south of Tel Aviv in Nir Zvi,
but it conducts most of its trainings from its Brazilian office at the outskirts of a favela.
The programme was split between socialising and testing security technology with Gleser and
his international clients at his ranch in Nir Zvi south of Tel Aviv, and participation in a range of
promotional tours around Israel. (Glaser himself was once a high-ranking security expert for the
Israeli airlines company El-Al in Spain and Scandinavia. As a young man, he was a leading force
in the Argentinian Zionist youth movement Ashomer Hatzair (The Young Guards) in Buenos
Aires before he relocated to Israel to make Aliyah and developed his booming business.)
pretive analysis whereby researchers attempt to ‘situate individual stories within
participants’ ‘personal experiences’ and ‘their historical contexts’ (Creswell 2009:
54–55). In this sense, interviews are very useful.
Berger outlines four kinds of interviews: informal, unstructured, semi-structured, and structured. Informal and unstructured interviews provide little control
in the conduct of interviews, whereas structured interviews rely on a specific set of
instructions that guide the interviewers. (Berger 2000). Semi-structured interviews,
which are used in the context of this thesis, generally seek to promote an active,
open-ended dialogue. They rely on certain areas of questions to ask respondents,
but are generally not concerned with standardisation and control. (Deacon et al.
1999: 65). What semi-structured interviews bring to the methodological approach
of this thesis is a comprehensive framework within which to understand the textual
analysis, while the textual analysis in turn illuminates the data gathered from the
interviews. All interviews were conducted in English; only very few participants
allowed recording during the course of the interviewing. Therefore, quotes and
field notes rely on the exhaustive notes I took during the interviews.
Throughout the field research process, the interviews were subjected to pre­
liminary topical coding. Instead of performing a thick ethnography, the individual
actors interviewed and quoted play across the political and economic enterprises
analysed in this research. Such an approach understands social phenomena to
be constituted in the practices of agents situated in the social world, rather than
being able to extract analysis based on purely instrumental understandings of
agents or simply by native representations of experience (Bourdieu 1990). In this
way, the use of semi-structured interviews contributes to the concerns with the
practices that operate within and through the material and discursive production
of security technology.
This interviewing method places any study of macro-level structural and historical analysis, as well as the actual text, in the context of the central actors who
engage in the practices of security production. Structural constraints are in turn
only adequately understood through the practices of the agents they envelop and
the discourses that are produced. As such, observation provides a context which
often helps to explain what people do, but it is limited in understanding why
they do things, what motivates them, and what anxieties they have (Berger 2000).
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Ethical concerns: Research in conflict zones and questions of access
and assigning blame
The ethical issues relating to the research are multi-leveled. They relate to
the overlying question of how to conduct politically informed research without
assigning absolute blame, to field access, and to the issue of the role of political
emotions in research.
Field research in conflict zones and racialised warfare is challenging for both
methodological and ethical reasons. I conducted my fieldwork in a clearly compromised and compromising terrain fraught with racism and structural violence,
and also of two competing and often contradicting narratives of (past) suffering
and security. As Wood argues, in conflict zones, the usual imperatives of empirical research (to gather and analyse accurate data to address a relevant theoretical
question) are:
…intensified by the absence of unbiased data from sources such as news­
papers, the partisan nature of much data compiled by organizations
­operating in the conflict zone, the difficulty of establishing what a representative sample would be and carrying out a study of that sample, and
the obvious logistical challenges (Wood 2006: 373).
However, most of the actual fieldwork and interviews I conducted did not take
place in active combat zones, but in stable locales in industrial zones and protected
security fairs. While this provided a sense of normality, at the same time traveling
between the occupied Palestinian territories, experiencing life under occupation,
and in a few hours arriving back to my Tel Aviv apartment, provided a particularly
stressful and contradictory setting in which to work.
The specific focus of the research took these conditions to the extreme: in a
settler colonial context, the ethical world of arms production is fraught with radical
politics, racism, and a naturalisation of violence. However, it is important that the
researcher avoid lapsing into unethical research practices such as playing the ‘blame
game’ at the expense of presenting new knowledge and perspectives. Rather than
seeking to assign political blame to specific parties, this research is informed by an
anti-racist ethics and a view that allowed me to work both with (or within) and
against racial imaginaries under an empowered system of subjugation as a social
and political phenomenon. A critique can be made that the focus on the side of
the Israeli security sector and logics fails to take into account the entire picture of
the Israel-Palestine impasse. I accept this critique and acknowledge that a stronger
focus on the reciprocity of violence and the effects and influence on the broader
Middle East geopolitical complex would have taken the analysis in a different
direction and perhaps presented a different view of the Israeli security industry.
56
That being said, the thesis has consciously focused on settler colonial technologies
as an object of inquiry because also as this is what is (re)branded and sold abroad.
A key challenge of the research process was to gain access to desired informants from the Israeli security industry. Clearly, the nature of the field of security
production meant that the question of access became both a challenge and a key
ethical concern. As Undheim reflects: ‘Where access is problematic, there is always
an ethical issue involved’ (Undheim 2006: 18), and as Kvale argues: ‘interviewing
in qualitative research is a moral inquiry’ (Kvale 2007). These issues were at play
in the research process, especially when, as Creswell argues, ‘an ethical issue arises
when there is not reciprocity between the researcher and the participant’ (Creswell
2009: 91). Clearly, interviewing actors involved in developing and using technologies used for repressive measures inhibited this reciprocity.
In retrospect, I am aware that I made mistakes during my field research that
­relate to my practices of fieldwork and interviewing. For field research to be ethical,
research subjects must consent to their participation with the full understanding of
the potential risks and benefits (Wood 2006). In the context of my field research,
this norm of informed consent became a complex matter because deciding what
were the risks and benefits of participation was difficult in this particular context.
How could I explain the purpose of my task without excluding myself from access?
Considering the nature of the field and the positions of the desired informants
throughout the research process, setting up interviews was not an easy task. Out of
many emails and countless phone calls only few accepted (there were few refusals
but many requests drew no response). When I contacted companies by email,
I attached the background of my research and included a letter from my home
university. When establishing contact by phone, I provided a short introduction
of myself and the name of my affiliated institution. Most company representatives
were uneasy and seemed hesitant to participate, I assume because of the political
sensitivity around their enterprise and their fear of industrial espionage, (several
of them referred explicitly to this during some of our subsequent conversations.)
In some cases – possibly after the potential informant had conducted an online
background check (viewing my previous work on Palestine), the interview was
cancelled, in most cases without a stated reason. Early on in my fieldwork, I made
the conscious decision to focus on the vocabularies and framing of my informants rather than confronting them with my analytical perspective. While I at no
point provided false information about my identity or the purpose of requesting
an interview, I framed my interest in a given company’s capacities and expertise.
When engaging in conversations and observing at fairs, I always made sure to wear
my badge with my full name, title (researcher) and institution (university), and
distributed business cards. However, while I never directly misrepresented myself,
I did not actively correct all misunderstandings of who I was and why I was there.
57
Presenting the premises of my work posed an ethical challenge for me. When
I realised that many of my informants had perspectives that were irreconcilable
with mine, I took a more neutral stance than what the framework of settler colonialism might imply. I began to refrain from using words, such as ‘occupation’
and ­‘Palestinians’ that industry representatives might consider biased, political, and
even anti-Israeli. While this restrained me from targeting the interviews according to my planned themes, the problem also became an opportunity to become
familiar with the industry’s own internal logics and worldviews. And it became
the only way to obtain access.
One dilemma in conducting fieldwork is deciding whether or not to challenge
lies told by informants (Wood 2006: 386). In the course of my interviewing, this
was both a practical and ethical issue. Manoeuvring in this milieu of war apologists, the idea of trying to challenge the dominant narratives of civilisational
clashes, Palestinians as potential terrorists, and the general perception of security
as a common good seemed like climbing a very steep and dangerous mountain. If
I confronted the liar, it might result in hostility toward the project and cut off the
flow of the conversation. On the other hand, silently consenting to the rationale of
perpetrators of violence tore at me. I resolved not to challenge the lies told to me
but to invite elaboration in a bland and naive way, which incidentally often led to
extremely useful material that reflected the speaker’s ideology, values, analysis of
events, and so on (Wood 2006: 386). To counter this during the course of interviewing, I asked the informants how they perceived of their own role and responsibilities, which provided an opening into the moral and more private universes
of the actors. What is more, as the fieldwork progressed, displaying too much
familiarity with the indigenous jargon could also put pressure on the conversation,
as informants typically preferred unfolding their monologues uninterrupted.
A gender aspect arose from these experiences. All of the interviewed were male;
clearly, the role of gender relations affected the interviews and established an obvious asymmetry and distribution of clearly demarcated roles. In some sense, this
created an awkward situation, as the masculine, knowledgeable expert in detail
saw it as his task to enlighten me, a young female researcher, about the wonders
of a given product. On the other hand, on several occasions I was both directly
and indirectly excluded from conversations about a new piece of technology or big
business. My position as a female in a ‘man’s world’ clearly gendered my experiences in the field. What is more, an ethical challenge often mentioned in research on
conflict zones is the ensuring of security of the data gathered (particularly sensitive
data that might have political implications if in the wrong hands) (Wood 2006).
In this case, my concern was somehow different: while I feared questions from
airport security and state officials about my endeavours, at no point did I fear for
my own security. However, the nature of the research and the particularities of
58
working intensively with representatives of weapons and repression put a great
deal of emotional stress on me throughout the process.
Political emotions
This research was not unaffected by political emotions. Unquestionably, there is
always an affective dimension to fieldwork in the social sciences. An important part
of the description stage of the study is to acknowledge the role of the researcher in
describing, and consequently, designing the research and interpreting the findings
(Danermark et al. 1997). In line with constructivism (Crotty 1998), the description stage involves acknowledging the assumptions that the researchers bring to
the research. I considered my emotions in the field throughout my research.
Emotions are often structured by, and arise from the field encounters themselves. As the field of Israel-Palestine is both a traumatised and a politically fraught
site, field emotions clearly affect collected data, the framing of that data, and the
interpretation process. The pressing question then is how my political emotions
as a researcher and an inherently political person affected the research process?
Hage speaks of an emotional self, which is the space of self-constitution, the
actual set of emotions (Hage 2009: 66). In the study of political realities, the researcher is guided by his/her own political emotions. Based on his own experiences
doing fieldwork on Israel (Palestine), Hage warns of the risks of reducing Israel
or Zionism into an abstract as an ‘evil person’, which only allows the researcher
to think in categories like Israel or Zionism as a strategic abstraction. These are
challenged in the field, where the researcher moves between the analytical and the
participatory (Hage 2009: 59–79).
Participant observation in politically fraught contexts asks us to negotiate
­between not two, but three modes of participation in reality: the emotional, the
analytical, and the political. This creates an ambivalence which Hage refers to
as ‘ethnographic vacillation’, or a friction between the three (Hage 2009). This
vacillation was an ongoing condition in my research. While personal and political
experiences, identification with and identification through are critical sources of
research, Bourdieu’s point that there is a difference between the logics of politics
and the logics of intellectual inquiry (a friend-enemy logic in which intellectual
inquiry cannot operate) is worth remembering (Bourdieu in Hage 2010).
Emotions can also be a resource. They are ripe with knowledge, and as Hage
emphasises, there is a (academic) value to considering political emotions in the
field as being characteristic of the field itself. While academic inquiry into the
case of Israel-Palestine is an intellectual minefield, Davies argues that the role of
political emotions is not negative per se, and that emotions in the field are not
mere gratuitous interference but an entré into knowledge. The emotional can assist
the analytical because emotions are ripe with knowledge and engagement. Indeed,
59
they argue that the ideal of complete emotional detachment from the field, the
idea that the there is no such as thing pure investigation simply does not exist.
Instead, we should ask:
…how far methods mould subjectivity, not into patterns that efface all
emotions (for this kind is indeed impossible) but into patterns that produce
emotions of a different order, and also into attitudes too often prone to
privilege only cognitive learning and cognitive driven procedures of social
research (Davies 2010: 13).
Thus, instead of viewing emotions as something that should be controlled and
restrained, emotions should be reported and unconcealed. As Davies and Spencer
argue, emotions should be lifted out of the margins in methodology and provide
an opposition to the idea that subjectivity has only a corrosive effect upon the
process of research (Davies and Spencer 2010: 2). Rather, the researcher’s emotional experience should be seen as an opportunity to understand and develop
a re-humanised methodology that exposes the real research process, including
hidden facets and resources. While I aspired to assure and sustain the logics of
intellectual inquiry throughout the analyses, as a researcher, I am inevitably caught
in this process of vacillation between the emotional, the analytical, and the political. In this sense, I consider this thesis to be a piece of politically informed and
engaged work fused with an advocacy and participatory worldview (Heron and
Reason 1997). The intellectual scope of the thesis departs from anti-racism and
tenets recurring in work that searching for counter-hegemonic epistemologies.
This is done by considering the voice of the dominant from the vantage point of
the beneficiaries and architects of a system of domination.
In Hage’s analysis, emotions proliferate in encounters with the informants and
the researcher adopts the emotions of the actors in the field. During my fieldwork
I was differently challenged by the a priori distance I felt from my research field
and informants because they belonged so completely to an alienated world of arms
and profit maximisation that I associated with militarised Zionism and the pursuit
of profit at the expense of others. Seeking conversation and even socialising with
apologists for Israeli warfare, who in some cases even bragged about the success
and experience in the field, was an ambivalent endeavour for me. In encounters
with representatives of this ethos, my emotions were definitely affected by negative
prejudices. At the same time, in some instances these negative presumptions were
challenged when I conducted interviews. In meetings with the concrete ‘other’,
the abstract ‘evil industry’ representative was personified. Instead of being the
abstract ‘evil person’, a given informant became human and often unfolded his
personal story and trajectory as part of the interview. As I was allowed into the
60
informants’ personal perspectives, stories of anti-Semitic persecution in the past
and more everyday life perspectives of fighting and suffering under the auspices of
the neo-liberal Israeli state painted a more nuanced picture of individual perspectives than the simplistic view of actors as merely servants of the state. I also kept
in mind how political, social, and educational institutions in Israel (as in other
colonial contexts) shape the political mind. In turn, this created an emotional
friction between my structural perception of settler colonialism and the emotional
effect of humanising this abstract image. However, at times I was sadly astonished
by the harshness of claims and descriptions of the Palestinians as innately inferior,
which again distorted the clarity of my analysis.
What is more, the crudeness of arms and security technology also invoked
some distinctive reactions on my part. Hastrup (2010) has argued that in fieldwork
we should consider the inter-subjective meeting (between people) but also as a
concept playing out in the encounter between subject and the material environment. The raw emotional reaction when confronted with technologies of death,
destruction, and oppression deeply affected the lens through which I studied their
relationship to the social world. Whereas the very landscape, the physical terrain of
Israel-Palestine, the disruption of land, settlements, and enclosures when moving
from site to site in the field deepened my emotional affiliation with the side of
the colonised. Last, in the course of writing this thesis, Israel has conducted two
military offensives in Gaza. Witnessing these spectacular outbreaks of violence
and Zionism’s ‘habits of destruction’ (Khalili 2014), I tried not to forget how the
use of the very technologies I was researching deeply affected my perspective and
emotional state.
This journey of my research has confirmed my role as an outsider to life in
Israel-Palestine. As an outsider looking in, and flying in and out of this traumatised
piece of land, I will never be able to understand the experience and feelings of each
national group, and I have no intention to pretend otherwise.
The next section of the thesis continues to develop the intellectual and theoretical scope of the thesis.
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62
CHAPTER TWO
FOUNDATIONS, THEORIES, AND CONCEPTUAL
­REFLECTIONS
2.0 Technological nationalism, settler colonialism, and security as
­national innovation
2.1 Introduction
Corroborating qualified theoretically informed answers to the research questions
of this thesis requires a comprehensive analysis informed by critical ideas on nationalism, settler colonialism, science and technology, and security, which together
can push forward a research agenda. A theory is a set of interrelated constructs
(variables), definitions, and propositions (Kerlinger 1979: 64) based on a theoretical rationale defined by questioning how and why the variables and statements are
interrelated (Labovitz and Hagedorn 1971: 17). This chapter introduces an outline
of the theoretical architecture, thematic foci, and vocabularies of the thesis. Overall,
the chapter answers the question: how can we conceive of security as a modality of
technological-nationalism, and in turn how is settler colonialism dependent on technology and security to ensure its vision or dream of establishing state-nation congruence
between a Jewish state and nation?
This chapter investigates nationalism as a motor of technological innovation,
and offers a framework for analysing how nationalised security is a core source of
and platform for innovation in a settler colonial context. It explores a range of concepts that shape and form a conceptual frame that seeks to merge ideas on the links
between settler colonialism, nationalism, innovation, and security. It investigates
how nationalism, settler colonialism, and the notion of technological nationalism
are entangled in the genealogy of the Israeli security industry and practices.
The chapter also offers some perspectives on how to merge or co-think the military industrial complex with innovation processes, ideas on nationalism, sovereignty,
and techno-nationalism. This provides the advanced tools necessary to analyse how
security technologies are developed and deployed in the broader context of a national
colonial project and a process of rapid industrialisation. The framework is composed
so as to understand both the material and ideational forces (and their internal dynamics) that shape and form security and provide it with meaning. This is why the
research examines Zionism’s security rites as an instance of technological nationalism.
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The chapter is organised into three subsections. While this format is not meant
to suggest a decoupling of theoretical concepts, it allows room for discussion at
different levels of abstraction. First, the chapter outlines the intertwining dynamics and processes of settler colonialism and connects it to the broader ideas of
racialised nation making and state building that lie at the heart of the study. By
suggesting a range of relationships between racialisation, colonialism, statehood,
and war, I indicate an analytic approach toward Zionism as an instance of nationalist calculation and practice that rests on particular historical experiences and the
socialisation of an imagined community into a racialised state structure. The second
part of the chapter moves on to instill the conundrum of nation-state relations into
the perspective of technological nationalism and national systems of innovation (NSI).
It does so by arguing for a constructivist approach to the making and shaping of
technology. Finally, I suggest an alternative approach to studying the military-industrial complex by providing some ideas as to how security should be understood
as a mode of governance and a source and platform of innovation that is not only
contingent on national structures but is part of the structures’ substance.
In its analytical matrix, the thesis sits between the more abstract and general
and the very concrete and specific (Lund 2014). To stress the link between universality and historical particularities, this chapter seeks to move between general
perspectives on state power and its origins and effects and more specific localised
and historically situated perspectives on how this has prevailed in the case of Zionist mobilisation for nationhood. The key contention that underpins the combined
theoretical assemblage is that the articulation of cultural hegemony through the
political and economic forces at play happens across different levels operating
simultaneously (Worth 2009).
2.2 Nation-state incongruence and state-sponsored nationalism
In more conventional avenues of international security research, especially the
neorealist school, it is assumed that that nationalism can be approached as a ‘force
amplifier’ or simply a ‘technology’ that allows states to extract its resources as well
as manpower, which enables preparations for war (see, for example, Clausewitz
and Ropoport 1982; Mearsheimer 2011). However, in order to grasp the roots of
this force as a source of social and economic power, this reductive interpretation
seems too simplistic and lacks an understanding of how the nation is formed
and shaped. Moreover, there is insufficient explanatory power in instrumentalist
views that economic changes make it both expedient and necessary for states to
promote the creation of homogeneous populations. Claims such as Gellner’s – that
the emergence of nationalism followed the particular demands that changes in
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weaponry, doctrines, and tactics placed on states throughout the course of the
eighteenth century – suggests that military requirements paved the way for nationalism (Gellner 1983). However, this argument does not account for the ways
in which nations develop.
This nationalism-as-technology interpretation is also problematic because it
deduces the process from the outcome without looking deeper and confuses the
relationship between nationalism and technology. Such confusion then leads to
an overly functionalist explanation about the rise of nationalism and its relationship to science, innovation, technology, and security. Rather than reducing and
instrumentalising the origins and rise of nationalism to an innovation, it is highly
pertinent to reverse this analytical prism by asking how nationalism and when in
the context of a state project its associated state-sponsored nationalism are sources
of innovation (of security technology) and how in turn innovation has provided
time-space specific conditions for realising nationalist goals. This calls for a better
definition of the national, and of nationalism and its relation to state power.
The analysis of this thesis is informed by an understanding of how the concept
of nation – as a social entity – and the formation of state-sponsored nationalism
are central to innovative processes. By drawing from modernist and post-structuralist perspectives on nationalism and state-society relations, I argue here for
a conceptualisation of nationalism as a force that comes into shape through the
formation of its inner and outer boundaries and through the constantly negotiated
incongruence between nation and state. In short, I wish to substantiate how the
construction of the nation is a performance of ideological power combined with
lucid economic tactics contained by a nationalising force. I do not present a comprehensive debate on nationalism here, but rather define and operationalise some
key ideas as to what constitutes the national in order to relate it to settler colonialism and the study of technologies and security that appears in the later sections.
Thinking the national
Nations in general are not primordial givens (Denes 2011). They are the outcome of exercises in social engineering, including the fabrication of kinship patterns (Denes 2011b; Hobsbawm 1983). Haas refers to the nation as a ‘socially
mobilized body of individuals, believing [or imagining] themselves to be united by
some set of characteristics that differentiate them from outsiders, striving to create
or maintain their own state’ (Hass 1986, 726). Nations have been advanced as
direct outcomes of the conscious efforts of actors (Hechter 2000) whose exercises
in social engineering (Hobsbawm 1983) invoke kinship patterns intentionally
contrived by the scholarly efforts of intellectuals and more broadly by social and
political engineers of a nascent political, national movement (Denes 2011a).
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This thesis’ research draws on this constructivist approach, which suggests
that the study of nationalism ask about the ways and techniques with which the
national communities are imagined and produced. As Anderson (1983) proposes, that ‘if nations are imagined to involve a deep horizontal comradeship’, an
analysis must trace knowledge to determine the ‘peculiar style in which they are
imagined’ (Anderson 1983: 15-16). Anderson grants importance to the specific
knowledge involved in a given articulation of a national idea. In this light, nations
and nationalism in general should be understood by asking which epistemic and
material configurations made it possible initially to engage in the articulation of
the nation as an imagined political community that is both inherently limited
and sovereign. And, by extension, how does nationalism succeed in creating a
sociological landscape with a presumed fixity?
Clearly an inquiry into state-society relations motivates a nuanced view of
state power. While state and nation should not be conflated, neither should state
power be seen as a unitary, homogenous force. In general, state-formation is more
commonly attended to by processes of ‘institutionalised coercion’ (Mann 2005).
In his seminal work, Tilly defines state-building as consisting of measures that
‘produce territorial consolidation, centralisation, differentiation of the instruments
of government, and monopolization of the means of coercion’ (Tilly 1975: 42).
Hansen and Stepputat (2001), inspired by Foucault, describe the state as the effect
of a wider range of dispersed forms of power, while Dean, from the perspective of
governance or governmentality, has shown that unitary and condensed images of
the state can be an obstacle to identifying politics as the ways in which social life
is made governable (Dean 1999: 25). This leads to a problematisation of the state
as a (material) object of study, both in concrete and abstract terms, while continuing to take the idea of the state seriously. In Foucault’s work, the transition from
political control (sovereignty) over territory to the art of government is captured
in the notion of governmentality. In order to understand the ideological frame of
a national project, one needs to look at the conditions enabling its realisation,
including state policies (of technological innovation).
Nationalisms rarely materialise as stable institutional units. Rather, they
fracture when they encounter an unfinihed or incomplete state to contain their
identity and emancipatory ideas. The lack of congruence between national community and state format marks the starting point for new struggles and forms of
dissent. Therefore, the conceptual separation between the state and society is an
important analytical tool to convey the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion
in the dynamics of those domains. While the ideals of nationalist movements’
aspirations are almost never realised, a central part of state formation should be
understood as the sovereign’s, i.e. the state’s attempts to install population design
through the development of an organised body of coercive measures. As Gellner
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notes, there is a nationalist principle based on European experiences that the
political and national unit should be congruent. Like other ideological/national
visions, the ideal of harmony rests on reaching the point when ‘population’ folds
into nation’, as Thacker asserts in his account of biopolitics (Thacker 2005: 36).
Moreover, the design of the state relies on the technologies in place to limit the
scope of nationhood and the development of administrative capacities of coercion.
Incongruence rests on a vision of congruence, which in practice can cast off social
(violent) struggles, where the remedial ends of achieving state-nation congruence
becomes a form of political practice. The conditions of unachieved congruence
between nation and state, discussed in Brubaker’s seminal work on the notion of
´nationalising nationalism’ (Brubaker 1996), is critical to the formation of national
practices. In Brubaker’s view, incongruence stems from a refusal to negotiate the
incongruence between nation and state, i.e. the inability of the state or the sovereign to align its practices with national community practices due to the presence
and/or interference of those external to the national community.
Throughout history, struggles to establish congruence have been far from
smooth. As Wimmer highlights in the European cases of nation building and state
formation, the processes and struggles have been intrinsically linked to the vocabularies and practice of ethnic cleansing and ethnocide (Wimmer 2002: 3). In fact,
nationalism in Wimmer’s inquiry is evaluated as an appeal for a state-mediated
creation of order and stability that is not confined to specific geographical locales.
This means that if the ensuing incongruence is not remedied and the human
and territorial terrains are not unified in a homogenous national-state complex,
measures of ethnocidal state building can be invoked. Thus, rather than modifying
the ideal correspondence between a national construct and a state structure, the
dominant version of (military, economic, or demographic) nationalism rests on
a vision of exclusionary kinship structures (Denes 2011a: 20). Disrupted nation
state ideals provide the impetus for state repression and exclusion in order to secure
the vision kinship closure that represents the (utopian) merge of nation and state9.
To summarise: the formation of nationhood is a reciprocal process between
internal and external forces involving irredentist struggles and incongruence between national visions and the conduct of state power. This struggle is charged
with meaning, especially when considering the relationship between the national
and the tenets of the enterprise of settler colonialism.
9
On a side note, while the ever-imprecise condition of nationhood is a common feature of
nation making, in the case of Zionism it has remained a central concern for the national engineers, a mobilising tool and a source of constant renegotiation over the meaning of the national.
67
Settler colonialism
Studies of nationalism also involve looking at the relational ‘other’ and the binary dynamic of conflicting national narratives. Given the evolutionary character
of a nation, its power and legitimacy can be limited by the existence of other surrounding nationalisms. In settler-colonial projects, the struggles of national claims
to land are key. While settler colonialism and its associated nationalism definitely
hinge on and grow from an idea or an imagined community, there are fundamental
differences. In both instances, dominant groups subjugate social imaginaries of less
powerful groups in society. However, they differ in the geopolitical or territorial
dimension. Because vernacular nationalism (as in the case of Arab nationalism)
can in fact have much in common with metropolitan representations, in the settler
colonial context of Israel-Palestine two conflicting national imaginaries mirror the
conflict over land.
The variations of colonialism have impacted the way we understand and study
their effects. The minimum distinction is the difference between orchestrated subjugation of native resources to imperial economies and the systematic erasure of
native life to make way for successor societies. The latter, according to Fredrickson,
is pure settler colonialism (Denes 2011a; Fredrickson 1988). The ‘pure, non-mixed
colony’ (a colony based on the settlers’ own labour power) stands in contrast to
the plantation colony model. The former involves settling land permanently, while
settler colonialism is considered pure colonialism. In the latter, the employed
labour consists of local or indentured labour; in the case of a ‘mixed- colonies’
model, both settlers and indigenous populations are involved in the labour market
(Shafir 1996, 2005). Wolfe refers to settler colonialism as a structure of elimination
(Wolfe 2006, 2012) when he addresses the forms of settler colonial pursuits that
are central to the more specific variety of pure settler colonialism (Shafir 1996).
Turner describes the emancipatory nature of this endeavour in his seminal account
of American settler colonialism: ‘The spaces of frontier labour represented a new
field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past’ (Turner 1921: 38).
Wolfe’s (2006) perspective presents settler colonialism as both entailing a positive
and a negative side. It attempts to dissolve native societies, while simultaneously
erecting a new colonial society on the expropriated land base. It is exactly the
binary between the act of dispossession and improvement of life and expansion
of space for the settler that underlines the settler colonial features of Zionism.
Settler-colonialism is a both a complex social formation and a continuous
reworking of what nationalism (in this case Zionism) means as it evolves over
time (Wolfe 2006: 390). It allows the settler population to expand at the expense
of the land and livelihood of the natives. As Denes describes it, the generation of
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nationhood takes place through a relational opposition or in a ‘dyad’ between what
was before and what came after, i.e. between settler and native (Denes 2011a).
The peculiar forces of pure settler colonialism lie in this dyad of destruction and
construction. Being a settler colonial state means in the most fundamental terms
that a structure based on a rule of the (racial) difference between groups of people
exists (namely natives/indigenous, settlers/colonisers, and occupier/occupied).
These binaries are governed by a politics of different human worth. Butler (2003)
evaluates the moral political economy of human worth. She describes this as a
process of ‘differential allocation of grievability’, whereby decisions are made on
a discursive basis or ‘the cultural frames for thinking the human’ and shaping the
rules that determine who falls outside ‘the category of human’ (Butler 2003: xv).
It is through this process that the decision is made that ‘some lives are grievable,
and others are not’ (Butler 2003: xv). In turn, this dominant discourse ‘operates
to produce and maintain certain exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively
human’ or a part of ‘the nation’ (Butler 2003: xiv-xv). Butler’s meta-perspective
can inspire an analysis of the ways in which state institutions, including security
and military apparatus, have governed through exclusion of minorities or natives
(its relational ‘other’) and sought to consolidate itself as a nation through a politics
of difference.
What is important about national (imagined) communities is not only that
they are constructed, but also how and with what tools that construction occurs.
Moreover, as nationalism is connected to a settler colonial project, we must consider how conflicting narratives (and power relations) are woven into the struggle over
land or rather, in the systematic replacement process. In the context of Zionism
(and other national movements), the construction of the community based on a
racialised reading of the nation is key to the settler colonial process. Consequently,
understanding the mechanisms of the racial state is crucial.
Nation, state and ‘race’
The question of state-sponsored national representation touches upon the fundamental question of the racial state (Goldberg and Solomos, 2002; Goldberg, 2006).
The relationship between race, racism, and nationalism is a complex one (Barkan
1992; Gilroy 2000). Several scholars have dealt with various aspects of the relationship between race as a fictive device and its relation to power. Foucault’s accounts
of biopower (1977) demonstrate how the co-constitution of states and populations
depart from ‘anterior logics of nationalist purification’ (Denes, 2011a: 20). Fundamentally, the racial state is not static in the institutional sense, but a political force
that fashions and is fashioned by economic, legal, and cultural forces. Racial configurations facilitate the fabrication of order based on myths and memory and are
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an impetus for both the discursive production and the ideological rationalisation
of modern state power. Racial states manage economically by determining both
ideological and practical access and closure (Goldberg 2002). Notions of kinship
and race are aligned in racial states. As Alonso argues, kinship is a strong tool for
order making: ‘Kinship tropes substantialize hierarchical social relations and imbue
them with sentiment and morality’ (Alonso 1994: 384). Joseph and Nugent term
this historical co-definition of race and the state, which in their modern manifestations rests on state articulation of racially configured and racist commitments
(Joseph and Nugent 1994). And as Tilly tells us, the apparatuses and technologies
employed by modern states have ‘served variously to fashion, modify, and reify the
terms of racial expressions, racist expression and subjugation’ (Tilly in Goldberg
2002: 235; Tilly 1994).
The notion of race is not to be understood as a category of analysis, but, as
Brubaker demonstrates, as an analytical strategy to understand social and political
practices constructing notions of race (Brubaker and Cooper 2000: 5). Rather
than accepting any myth of otherness or apartness, the analysis incorporates the
notion of race as a staging of distinctiveness – what Brubaker and Cooper refer
to as the ‘political fiction’ of the racialised nation (Brubaker and Cooper 2000:
5). This means that the reproduction of a political myth (of raciality) remains an
analytical point about how difference is constructed (in the case of this thesis,
through security). In Goldberg’s view, the racial state is not merely or reductively
because of the racial composition of its personnel or the racial implications of its
policies. Rather:
States are racial more deeply because of the structural position they occupy
in producing and reproducing, constituting and effecting racially shaped
spaces and places, groups.... They are racial, in short, in virtue of their
modes of population definition, determination and structuration
(Goldberg 2002: 104).
This means that states have acquired part of their modernity through racial
assumptions. This resonates particularly with the logics of colonial regimes, as the
historical trajectory of the colonial state developed in relation to European discovery, pacification, commerce, and rational administration of non-Europeans. In this
light, it makes sense to wonder about the implications of state-based r­ acialisation
of governance.
What we can conclude from this iteration of scholarly input is that the racialisation of national practices takes place through the vector of the racial state.
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However, in a settler colonial context, the incongruence between national and state
is an inherent feature and a permanent source of struggle and instability. What
remains is a theorisation of the role that innovation and technologies (of security)
play in remedying these conflicts.
The next chapter conceptualises how state and nationhood come to match,
correlate, and even clash, but perhaps more critically, how nationalism and technology intertwine in the creation of nation and statehood.
2.3 Technological nationalism and national systems of innovation
In 1934, Mumford called for a better understanding of the dominant role of technology in modern civilisation, which he saw as linked to the ideological and social
preparation for modernisation. As he saw it, ‘the machine has become a substitute
for God or of an orderly society’ (Mumford 1934: 4). Approaching science as either
non-political or determinant cannot adequately describe the role and scientific
practice and technology of society. Indeed, decades of research of sociological and
constructivist approaches to the study of science and technology have rendered
this implausible. More common today is the suggestion that science is political, or
more succinctly, that science is inevitably, intrinsically, or essentially political (Blume
1974: 1; see also Frickel and Moore 2006). Here science is understood as the body
of knowledge widely accepted by the scientific community, and concurrently as
technology that encompasses both hardware and knowledge of the industrial arts
(Layton 1974). In a more Foucauldian mode, science is a mechanism and tool
codified in human practice for managing or manipulating a (social) object:
The techniques that permit one to determine the conduct of individuals, to
impose certain end or objectives. That is to say, techniques of production,
techniques of signification or communication, and techniques of domination (Foucault 1993: 203).
Consequently, in constructivist technology studies, technology is not only
about productivity and mechanics, it is also about innovation and changes. As
a dynamic, change through innovation can radically change the process of production and come to redefine the relationship between humans and technology.
Certainly, science and technology are connected to normative choices and political
engagement (Bijker 2009).
While a long lineage of work insists that ‘the biggest and the best’ are guarantees of democracy and freedom (Winner 1980), key scholars in the critical
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sociological camps of science and technology have worked to emancipate science
from society, to democratise science (Bijker 1992), or to show the ‘dark side’ of
science and technology (which is part of the rationale for this study). In the larger,
general sense, constructivist approaches to science and technology have worked
under the concept of the social shaping of technology (SST) or the social construction
of technology (SCOT) (see for example Pinch and Bijker 1984) or the sociology of
scientific knowledge (SSK), which often has a strong political economy focus. Constructivist studies of science and technology come in a wide variety, from mild to
the more radical (Sismondo 1993). The mild or moderate versions merely stress
the importance of including the social context when describing the development
of science and technology (e.g. Douglas 1987; Kranakis 1997).
Although rarely explicitly discussed, it is fair to say that these authors assume a
realist ontology of technology. The more radical or critical versions of constructivism, which this research reflects, argue that the content of science and technology
is socially constructed. Radical constructivist studies of science and technology
share the same background, have similar aims, and are even being conducted by
some of the same authors (Barnes and Bloor 1982; Collins 1985, 2001). Here,
the truth of scientific statements and the technical working of machines are not
derived from nature; they are constituted in social processes and are contingent on
power relations that are embedded into the making of technology. This thinking
is unfolded later in this thesis in the context of settler colonialism (and warfare),
which carries both constructive and destructive features (Wolfe 2006), power
relations and the drive to install order through social hierarchies are the source
of innovation.
While it is risky to say that things do not matter at all, Edge and Williams
usefully identify three core analytical handles to grasp in order to analyse not only
the form of technology but also its social implications:
––
––
––
The direction and the rate of innovation;
The form of technology, including the content of the artefacts and practices;
and
The outcomes of technological change for different groups in society
(Williams and Edge 2006).
Thus, the challenge is to elaborate a model for analysing the social process of
technological change. The methodological relativism offered by the Social Shaping
of Technology model (SST) allows us to address technologies as many ‘things’
that normally are not considered as technologies, for example cities (Aibar and
Bijker 1997; Hommels 2005), economic markets (Pinch and Swedberg 2008),
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and even family units and relations (Thompson 2005). In the context of the present research, it makes sense to speak of security as both a system of technologies
and a form of applied science expressed through socio-technological artefacts and
systems.
In the larger sense, this way of approaching science and technology belongs
to the scholarly camp of SST, which explores which patterns and instances of
social shaping the design of technology follows. Approaching technology from
a constructivist perspective, i.e. assuming that technology is socially (and politically) constructed, offers a conceptual framework for politicising technological
cultures and to better understand how society (including politics) is technically
built. Technological culture consists of sociotechnical ensembles that prove there are
choices behind the design of artefacts and that the trajectory of innovation systems
reflects the ‘general characteristics of a society’s technological ensemble’ (Williams and
Russell 1988: 11).
In fact, we should not think of technology in terms of singular artefacts, but
more as holistic systems and interconnected units. This approach suggests both
an implicit critique of technological determinism, i.e. that technology determines
social and economic life, and a warning not to take technology for granted in the
social sciences. While social scientists take technology for granted far too often,
neither should a (political) analysis accept any dominant rhetoric of technology.
This research rejects the economist approach, which is often based on the neo-classical assumption that technologies will emerge readily in response to market demands (Coombs et al. 1987). However, it also warns of analyses that reduce the
material to social interplay and relations only. I suggest approaching technology
(and technological change) as a socio-technical ensemble or a technological system
(Hughes 2004) that includes both social and technological elements.
The latter notion of ensemble is less restrictive because it motivates questions
about the impact of technology on society and activates the metaphor of a seamless web of technology and science deployed in Hughes’s technological systems
approach. Perhaps the broadest concept is the notion of a technological culture
that invites inclusion of constructivist arguments and questions about society
and cultural specificities writ large. I argue that we need to take artefacts seriously
and pay attention to the characteristics of technological objects. Such a study
can be conducted by looking at how artefacts contain political properties, and
consequently study both the mechanics and effects of the technologies (Bijker
1995). As Winner’s asks, ‘do artefacts have politics?’ (Winner 1980). The short
answer to that question is yes, they do. However, the real question is, what are
these politics? (Bijker 2006).
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The research for this thesis also highlights the politics of technology (Winner
1980) in order to sustain the argument that ‘technology is politics pursued through
other means’ (Latour 1988), which is an analysis that entails a social explanation
of a piece of science or of an artefact (Latour 2000: 107). Across the spectrum of
(critical) science and technology studies, scholars have sought to classify different
kinds of politics within science. Shapin and Schaffer distinguish three ways that
science is conceived as political: first, the scientific community is a political community; second, science plays a role in politics outside the laboratory; and third,
there is a conditional relationship between the polity of scientists and the wider
polity (Shapin, Schaffer and Hobbes in Brown 2014). Similarly, Bijker (2006)
suggests even more ways in which technology is political. They show different ways
that science is political, but as Brown’s critique notes, the research rarely explains
fully what it means for science to be political (Brown 2014). Through this analysis,
I seek to remedy Brown’s critique by analysing both the genesis and effect of political science (and technology). I analyse nationalist aspirations, state-sponsored
nationalism, and racialised colonial visions as key sources of innovation and of
the shaping of technology.
To summarise: the production of technology is a site of politics as well as a
site of innovation. Science and technology mediate the struggles between national
forces, and as such become a core pillar in the evolution of both nationalist ideas
and practice and pave the way for their insertion into state institutions. The next
chapter examines the connection between the technology and nationalist impulses
and structures, how they form national socio-technical systems as part of ideational
and material nation building.
The ‘national dream’ is technological
A dominant stream in high-modernity and post-colonial developmentalist
­nationalisms has established the belief that technology is a key tool to realise
the nation and a vector for measuring the success of the nation and state (as described by Mitchell 2002). This corresponds with Anderson’s (1983) exhortation
to consider the conditions needed to ‘think’ the nation and the way in which
this is articulated not only by intellectuals but as performed convictions fused by
both material practice and discursive ideas and between elite ideas and popular
practices. (See Hroch’s argument in his ideal-type description of the (uneven) path
from elite ideal to popular consensus, Hroch 2004: 81). However, scholars have
spent less time analysing how settler colonial national projects have used technological production and innovation to construct their nation, conduct differentiated
state policies, and mediate the relationship between nation and state by excluding
­innovation and deployment of security practices.
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Adria argues that ‘technology limns the identity of the modern nation state.
Under the surface of technology’s metallic sheen, political and cultural conflicts
are accommodated, resolved or set aside’ (Adria 2010: 45). To go beneath this
surface, I argue that technological nationalism in a settler colonial context hinges
on security innovation and that innovation depends on the social bias of the
nation-state complex.
In 1986, Charland cogently wrote that the national dream is ‘an instance of
technological discourse’ (Charland 1986: 196), and is often closely tied to technological progress and breakthroughs. In Charland’s view, technological discourse
rearticulates a rhetoric that gives rise to the materialisation of nationalism. He
refers to this as ‘technological nationalism’, which refers to the rhetorical use of
technology for the purpose of developing a nationalist project (Charland 1986:
197). This concept combines the idea of technological progress with the sentiments and goals of nationalism, where the state seeks legitimacy for its actions by
‘rhetorically creating a nation that mirrors its own objectives’ (Adria, 2010: 46).
In fact, Charland argues that technological nationalism is the state’s raison d’etre,
whereby the very story of a nation depends on technology.
While the concept accentuates ideologies rather than technological policies
(although the two often conflated), techno-nationalism is often used to underscore the role that the authorities of the nation-states play as policy makers in
the field of science and technology, and, implicitly, of the national geographical
spaces where the relative measures turn out to be effective (Nelson and Rosenberg
1993). In this way, technological nationalism examines the rhetorical devices and
techniques within nationalist projects relative to their adoption of technology as
both medium and subject.
The literature on techno-nationalism diverges on the question of whether
technology is a cause or an outcome of nationalism. This divergence relies on a
differentiation between viewing technology as a social process or as a system (that
hinges on social processes). Anderson (1983) describes cultural narratives and
commitment as a precursor and mobiliser of technology, i.e. national sentiments
and structures as a condition for technological advancement. By contrast, the technology as effect approach assumes pre-existing national sentiments that thrive and
spread through the exploitation of technology and the fostering of technological
advances (Amir 2004, 2007). In this perspective, nationalism is seen as an impetus
for technological advancement.
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Amir describes the ways in which nationalist rhetoric influences the symbolic
and physical construction of technical artefacts. In his analysis of technological
nationalism and the Indonesian aircraft industry, he lists three functions of technological nationalism. First, it functions as a medium of national integration of
social and cultural forces in national sentiments through ‘the sublime of technological systems and artefacts’ (Amir 2007: 284). Second, technologies are not merely
physical objects but are constituted by collective symbolism, experiences, myths,
and languages and histories blended together, and third, technological nationalism serves to mediate political and cultural interpretations of nationalist spirits.
Amir’s approach is well developed in studies of Asian nationalist movements where
rhetoric about progress has been deployed to install legitimacy.
To reconcile the cause-effect debate, Poster argues for what he calls a ‘profound
bond with machines’ (Poster 1999: 236) in order to dissolve the cause-and-effect
approach, which means that technology is both a cause and an effect of nationalism. This reflects a move from a social constructivist approach to technology to
a view of technology and society as co-constituting. Drawing on Poster’s dialectical approach, this research approaches technology and nationalism as existing
in a dialectical relationship that recognises the ideological basis of social action.
­Nationalism’s progress can be traced by the social trajectory of certain technologies,
which means that the evolution of a certain community influences the emergence of innovation patterns that might reveal path-dependent (Page 2006) or even
locked-in (Arthur 1989) modes of production and innovation. In more concrete
terms, the community influence can shape the perception of different innovative
priorities (e.g. civil rather than military) and the implementation of specific innovative structures, e.g. research and development (R&D) departments. In more
critical accounts, technological-nationalism is viewed as a rhetorical strategy to
gain political power, as ‘technology promotes a cultural experience in the service
of national interests’ (Charland, 1986). Rather than choosing either perspective,
it makes sense to present a taxonomy of the relationship between security production and technological nationalism as mutually constitutive forces, particularly in
the context of settler colonialism, where the national systems of innovation and
expansion of territory and its exploitation are intertwined.
Techno-globalism versus techno-nationalism
Techno-globalism and techno-nationalism have become two core issues in the
economics of technological change; both have important theoretical and empirical implications (for a useful discussion see Edgerton 2007). In the literature on
the relationship between nationalism and technology, two camps have developed
that display a divergence in how the roots of innovation are viewed. Stressing how
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global trends and structures have penetrated spheres of innovation and production
since the 1960s, a range of critics has challenged the emphasis of the nation in the
study of technology. The so-called globalists claim that national and, in general, regional boundaries have become increasingly irrelevant for both state-owned
and private security companies, which already act and move in virtual globalised
spaces (see, for example, de la Mothe and Paquet 1996), and often assume that
technology turns the world into a ‘global village’, thereby eliminating the national
level as the level of analysis.
By contrast, the nationalist or localist camp (see, for example, Becattini and
Rullani 1996) emphasises that material and immaterial resources (such as intellectual capital) are crucial platforms for systems of innovation to be globally
competitive. Innovation-centric, techno-nationalist understandings are central to
national histories of technologies. The nationalist perspective assumes that the key
unit of analysis for the study of technology is the nation, and that innovative state
units have R&D budgets and cultures that diffuse and use technologies.
As far as the theory is concerned, the solution to this techno-globalism/techno-nationalism dilemma depends on the choice of the relevant unit of analysis
for studying technological change. This point has been clearly recognised by the
literature on the national systems of innovation, which has recently become a
more eclectic and geographically neutral innovation approach (Edquist 1997).
The ­dilemma is even more crucial from an empirical point of view because different economic policy actors and different science and technology policy measures
turn out to be effective depending on which scenario is deemed the most relevant.
While the systemic approach of national innovation favours the ‘localist’ perspective, it makes sense to determine how the relationship between techno-globalisation and national innovation systems operates.
As Edgerton argues, the claim of nations and states to techno-nationalism can
be risky. Indeed, it is important to think not only of nation-technology but also
of technology-state relations (Edgerton 2007), including the relationship between
state and the position of technology at the global level. From a political economy
perspective, the insistence on the national relates to the role designated to the state
in the global economy. Both Marxist and globalist perspectives place the state as
a ‘political nodes in the global flow of capital’, where the state actually becomes a
form of class relations that constitutes global capitalist relations (Burnham 2002).
This approach, as presented by Nitzan and Bichler, gives the state as well as other
national actors a limited regulatory role reproducing global hegemony (Nitzan
and Bichler 2002). As Bonefeld argues:
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The state itself cannot resolve the global crisis of capital. It can however,
enhance its position in the hierarchy of the price system by increasing
its efficiency of capitalist exploitation operating within its boundaries
(Bonefeld et al. 1995).
However, not giving credence to state-society practices runs the risk of under­
estimating the power and impact of more specific social practices, which also
gives political projects their constitutive force in the material world. Therefore
the already described social base of the state structures the system of innovation,
which cannot be reduced to global capitalist relations. Thus, in order to avoid
capital-centric analyses, I argue that the mediation of nation-state relations and
the proliferation of a specific techno-nationality and boundedness to territory are
key factors in technological innovation. This is the case in particular in a settler
colonial context where the nation-state incongruence is an intrinsic feature of the
drive to innovate. Thus the central question is, how technology has national roots
or character?
Montresor’s (2001) work on technological systems (TS) addresses a variety of
components of this system that can support an understanding of how innovation
platforms connect to state practice. These components include 1) the notion of
techno-territoriality, where technological innovation is tied to specific land and its
resources, 2) the notion of techno-sovereignty, which is defined by the institutional setup, and 3) the notion of techno-nationality. Or, as Patel and Pavitt (1991)
suggest, techno-localism is a conceptualisation of innovation with linkages to
specific contexts.
In Montresor’s view, techno-nationality (2001) involves the cohesion of innovative agents, i.e. a community with shared knowledge, culture, and ideology. In
terms of ideology, the celebration of the ‘inventive citizen’ has been an important
part of modern nationalism everywhere. As a result of this emphasis on national
inventiveness, the relationships of nations and technology are particularly prone
discussion in terms of invention and innovation. In this way, the concept of
techno-citizenship or techno-nationality speaks to the notion of the SST camp.
Here ‘relevant social groups of potential users’ (Pinch and Bijker 1984: 414) shape
and drive the choice of a certain technological configuration. In a settler colonial
setting this notion of producer and user is particularly pertinent as the innovation
process in itself is biased towards a ruling strategy based on racial imaginations
and ethnocratic features.
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Techno-nationalism is not to be seen as solely instrumental, but as governed
by dominant, fluid self-understandings and collective narratives rather than self-­
interest per se. This perspective incorporates the relevant social-economic context,
which is not driven by masked strategic devices. While the new knowledge produced through techno-national mechanisms relies on the institutional set-up and
the production structure, there is ample space to take into account power relations
and the historically formed context of innovation. At the same time, the social
shaping of technology provides a more general connection with techno-nationality recalling the notion of a ‘society’s technology ensemble’ (Russel and Williams
1988: 11). While the techno-nationality component embraces the importance of
the national, the penetration of global forces of capital and borderless innovation
has spurred a debate on the fallacies of speaking of innovation within the framework of the national.
Taking these arguments into consideration, this research holds that techno-­
national systems of innovation still matter. In a settler colonial perspective, this
assumption is even stronger because the desire to settle territory and make it appropritate to intervention is indisputably dependent on innovation and industrial
development. The distinction between state and nation in evaluating the effects
of globalisation on technology is crucial, especially in the case of settler colonial
regimes where the settler community (in this case the Jewish community) deploys
state policies as tools to exclude non-members of the envisioned nation. I contend
that colonial national movements relying on a certain communality of language
and (historically) formed institutional settings which works as an enabler of innovation is particularly pertinent in the context of an evolving process of state
and nation making such as Zionism. Moreover, the techno-globalist perspective is
critical when exploring the export dynamics of outputs of the innovation.
The following section demonstrates how the idea of a national structure of
innovation (NSI) is an integral part of the field of techno-nationalism.
Structures of innovation
So far, I have proposed that when analysing technological production, the unit
of analysis of system should be the system, the ensemble, and the culture. When
seeking to unfold the genesis and effects of a national system of innovation, it
is crucial to refrain from deriving explanatory value from singular technologies.
Techno-nationalism is implicit not only in any number of national histories of
technology, but also in many policy studies of national systems of innovation.
This chapter argues that ideas of globalised innovation or techno-globalism cannot
fully capture the innovation process, and discusses why it is pertinent to add the
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dimension of nationalism (as practice and ideology) to the study of innovation
(of security and warfare technology).
Since it first proliferated in the 1930s, the literature on innovation has moved
progressively from the level of the individual towards larger organisations. While
Schmookler (1966) focuses on demand and market determinants, Freeman looks
at the role of R&D institutions within large firms and came to emphasise the role
of social and political institutions that accompany technical innovations (Freeman
1987). While Von Hippel (1988) focuses on the impact of inter-firm interaction
on processes of innovation, Nelson (1992) focuses on the link between the state
and innovation where the state is seen as the key supplier of scientific and technical knowledge to the (security) industry. Over time, the literature broke with
past claims and began to focus on collaboration, and in the 1990s the idea of a
structurally determined innovation process proliferated. This development opened
up a broader debate on the link between the national and innovation processes,
which today provides significant theoretical battleground for a growing school of
innovation studies.
Freeman points to how the choices between alternative technical solutions are
strongly rooted in the specific history of the nation-states (Freeman 1987). Based
on List’s (1909 (1841)) concept of national system of production, Lundvall was
the first to coin the idea of a national system of innovation (NSI) (Lundvall 2010;
Godin 2009; Komninos 2006). The idea of an NSI is key to understanding the
social and political bias of industrial production and more broadly, the mediation
between nation and state, which is based on the key argument that domestic interaction can explain the national system of innovation. Today the systemic nature
of the innovative process (Edquist 1997) seems almost indisputable.
Within the NSI school, the study of innovation structures engages both the
social and economic embedding of modes of production that is closely linked to
the basic tenets of technological nationalism. The core of the NSI concept is to
approach innovation as a network of public-private institutions for initiating, producing, and diffusing new technologies (Freeman 1987), which is an institutional
setting that affects both production and marketing processes (Edquist 2000).
Proponents of the NSI approach claim that national systems of innovation are ‘the
network of institutions in the public and private sectors whose activities and interactions
initiate, import, modify, and diffuse new technologies’ (Edquist 1997: 8). In both
Freeman and Edquist’s analyses, learning through networking and by interacting
is seen as the crucial force in organising clusters and the essential ingredient for
the ongoing success of an innovative cluster. Clusters are the result of complex interactions between different kinds of agents (such as firms, universities, and public
and private research institutes) within specific geographical and historical contexts.
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Nelson explains the NSI as a structure that is part of a deliberate government
policy that includes both state regulation and informal coordination that results
in a public stock of knowledge that would develop homogeneity and linkages
among national agents of innovation (Nelson 1992). While techno-nationality
is formed through the NSI, clearly it is not only states that nurture systems of
innovation. Knowledge generation can also take place on sub- and supra- (global,
regional) levels. This critique follows Porter’s work on clusters and comparative
advantages, where, for instance, geographical proximity and regional bonds are
the basis of collaborative innovation (Porter 2000) and not necessarily a pure
product of state policy.
Within the NSI school, the study of innovation structures engages with both
the social and economic embedding of modes of production closely linked to the
basic tenets of technological nationalism. Indeed, innovation also relates to how
breakthroughs have been inscribed into broader social and economic histories.
Thematically and empirically, the intersection of innovation and nationalism has
often been studied in relation to a range of historical breakthroughs such as broadcasting (Charland 1986), communication (Deutch 1953), and printing (Anderson
1983). As Winner notes: ‘scarcely a new invention comes along that someone does
not proclaim it the salvation of a free society’ (Winner 1980: 122). Some studies
emphasise the particularly fertile role of the military in innovation, for example,
the close ties between radio technology and the military. However, in general there
has been less focus on the ‘dark side’ of these progressive breakthroughs. While
MacKenzie and Spinardi’s (1995) work on nuclear weapon system technology as
embedded in a political selection milieu touches upon the socio-technic process
of arms production, the wider notion of security as a techno-national system of
innovation has yet to be explored fully.
In a settler colonial context, the articulation of new technologies relates to
the realisation of settler colonial ambitions. Where some techno-national innovations depend on physical domination (such as rail transport or the radio) that
is bounded to and annihilates space, a settler colonial perspective takes on both
dimensions. In order to connect the central of role of security with the broader
question of the link between NSI and settler colonialism, the chapter asks how
security can be conceptualised as a nationalised concept and a node of innovation
for settler colonial efforts.
2.4 Security as national innovation, security as a substitute
It makes better sense in this research to speak of security power, technology, and
ontology rather than of military power, technology, and ontology, particularly
because in a settler colonial context the drive for security (and its attendant inse-
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curity) goes beyond outbreaks of violence and warfare. (See Part Three for a more
detailed explanation). Security is an innovation-centric technology; it is a source
of innovation and requires refined technological innovation. In short, security is
a techno-national concept.
In the context of analysing a national security economy, the importance assigned
to innovation as a process and a national structure is clearly related to the concept
of the military industrial complex or the triple-helix system (see Peri 1983, 2005;
Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff 2005). Conventional theories of military-industrial
relations in particular distinguish between civilian and military sectors in their
functionalist approach to civil-military relations (Janowitz 1964; Luckham 1971).
Ideas on the military-industrial complex focus on the relationship between the
military and manufacturing (the role of military spending on the overall economy)
and military competition among nations.
Articulation of the concept of the military-industrial complex originated in the
1930s and accelerated in the context of US studies of capitalism in the 1960s and
centred on the relationship between government and the defence industry, which
led many to warn about the industry’s influence on political decisions (Guéring
1936; Rundquist 1978; Eisenhower 1987). This body of work includes corporate
and military power in its analyses of political decision-making, and largely assumes
that military bureaucrats, together with businessmen and leaders of the defence
sector, have a huge influence on military spending decisions. Yet while military-industrial relations have been studied and theorised largely within the context of the
Cold War’s arms race and military spending, Rosen argues that the perspective
barely made it into the repertoire of international relations theory (Rosen 1973).
While conventional approaches to these complexes critically examine the hidden
power dynamics and networks behind military echelons, they fail to incorporate
broader schemes of industrialisation and technological innovation into the study
of military/security innovation and production. In more critical work, the military
industrial complex is most often seen as a coalition of powerful groups and bodies
that shares an economic, institutional, and political interest in increasing defence
expenditure (Mills 1956), and security and defence companies are seen as highly influential in shaping government definitions of security needs (Kaldor and Schmeder
1997). Consequently, defence industries not only shape industrial production and
the interchanges between civilian and military technology sectors, but are also contributory and proactive in the shaping of military engagements in and of themselves
(Woodward 2004). According to Woodward, military-industrial and state relations
are not merely organisationally close, but form a socio-economic system.
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Chomsky’s critique of the military-industrial complex as a limited analytical
prism is instructive. He argues that the analysis of military production should include not only military/security production but also industries in general (Chomsky
in Baraka 2003). This proposal corresponds well with Melman’s seminal work on
permanent war economies based on the ideological view of war as a source of
economic growth that has produced an economy spawned by military systems as
a military form of state capitalism (Melman 1974: 12). The integration of civilian
and military economies (including measures to convert technologies) provides
civilian strategy with ‘strategic meaning’ (Smit 1994: 600). I argue that the civilian-military divide is further dissolved in a settler colonial context of state and
nation building, where security innovation is a key pillar of both ideational and
material development10.
From a political economy perspective, this research asserts that in a settler
colonial system, there is little or no difference between the production of military
and civilian technology. As Gummet argues, the military-civilian divide is an institutional rather than an intrinsic distinction: ‘there are no “civilian” and “military”
technologies, only military and civilian markers’ (Gummet 1991: 27). This claim
is not made to take technology out of its context; it is intended to propose that
the labelling of technology as either civilian or military is a reflection of the nature
of the institutional setting in which it functions or is being developed without the
technology itself showing military or civilian characteristics. In the case of Israel,
innovation has been closely tied to a national (or national colonial) project and
the state’s war economy. In addition, when speaking of war economy, security
makes for a far more sweeping conceptualisation than the military because of the
ever-expanding boundaries of security and because all spheres can be connected to
it. Both cultural and material militarism, which is central to the social experience
of both nation and state building, also shape a national system of innovation.
In any military-economic dynamic there is unification of security, order, and
accumulation, which is not just formative to war itself but to the ways in which
liberal society operates. This force is shaped according to the state’s institutional
setup and in order to fit the conditions of disorder or disobedience against the sovereign that can threaten a state and nation building projects and the economic interests herein. Collins refers to the concept of ‘endocolonisation’, which is defined
10
Studies like MacKenzie’s (1990) history of guided missiles, Hecht’s (1998) history of nuclear
power in France, and Vaughan’s (1996) account of the US Challenger disaster demonstrate
that techno-nationalism can be productive for the analysis of classical political research
­questions, too.
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as the socio-economic logic of an era ‘in which war is increasingly indistinguishable
from the endless preparation for war’ (Collins 2011: 27). Thus, rather than speaking of military or state of emergency, national settler colonialism is bound into a
much more fundamental social construction of national, or homeland security.
Reppy argues that a country’s vision of defence can be located in the national
system of innovation when the older symbols of military hegemony become less
relevant to security systems (Reppy 2000). Here, I suggest that a country’s security vision carries the same potential through the close relationship between
the establishments of what security means and the national vision in which the
­formation of security is embedded. Then how do we approach security as an idea,
a techno-national concept, and as a practice?
Critique of security
Conducting critical work in the security science field has become a ‘dangerous’
endeavour. Using the word security may bring about what one is trying to avoid, as
Huysmans (2006) has argued. In other words, the positive connotations attached
to the word create an image of security as a public good and a guarantee of security
rather than a political project associated with a problematic, heavily loaded term.
A wealth of critical security studies has consistently challenged the discourse of
maximum security as a managerial discourse whose political roots are masked by
an obsession with refining and improving techniques and efficiency (Bigo 2001;
Dillon 1996; Neocleous 2008).
Rather than just accepting perceptions of security (threats) as the cursor of
Israel’s security vision, it is pertinent to embark on what Neocleous has termed
a ‘critique of security’ (Neocleous 2008), which asks about the background, narratives, and the meaning of security in a given context. This is done to challenge
conventional ways of thinking about security that focus on threat perception or
a view on security that Booth famously termed ‘the absence of threats’ (Booth
1991). To push for a more critical view does not mean that there are not real and
tangible security threats and needs ‘out there’ that should be managed. Instead, it
means that in order to understand how security and order making happens and
coalesces, it is necessary to understand security as part of a cohesion-based state
making – as part of a political project.
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In his 1949 novel ‘War is Peace’, George Orwell described the intrinsic relationship between war and peace and how they are mutually dependent and work
within the same space of political power (Orwell, 1949). According to Massad,
Zionist thinkers reflected on this well before Orwell and implanted it into their
colonial strategy:
‘Peace’ will always be the public name of a colonial war, and ‘war’, once it
became necessary and public in the form of invasions, would be articulated
as the principal means to achieve the sought after ‘peace’ (Massad 2013).
Massad further argues that war and peace each hide behind the other as one
and the same strategy, thereby blurring the lines between offensive and defensive
security provisions. Police work and warfare, therefore, become part of the same
enterprise of order making (Neocleous 2014). The obsession and oversaturation
of security in our societies play into this confusion. Security extends into broader
aims of social control as part of what Khalili, inspired by Kilcullen, captures in the
notion of ‘armed social work’ (Khalili 2013). Here, social order is installed through
subtle/redirected violence, whereby government and governance tactics incorporate
violence into their routines.
Certainly policing is often presented as a service to the public, and is seen as
encompassing a set of institutions, practices, technologies, and forms of knowledge
which aim to establish a ‘regulatory power to take coercive measures to ensure the safety
and welfare of the “community”’(Dubber and Valverde 2006: 2). However, from a
more critical perspective, policing and warfare are part of the same disciplining
project (Neocleous 2014) and, as Amar contends, represent a ruling logic where
a high degrees of social difference is equated with dangerous levels of risk (Amar
2009) whereby policing becomes a tool for selective pacification in times of ‘peace’.
Moreover, the elision of the use of these techniques of control in counterinsurgency and those deployed in missions of internal policing reflect a blurring of
the categories of combatant and civilians (Khalili 2010). Thus, rather than seek
to unfold a refined distinction between peace and war, it makes sense to examine
how the interconnection between pacification, policing, management, destruction,
and warfare are not contradictory forces but make up the settler colonial nexus
of power and order making. Neocleous (2014) argues that the liberal orders’ key
tactic is pacification. This form of domination entails both war and policing.
In his view, security related to military spending, homeland security, policing,
imprisonment, and associated industries represents a major economic enterprise
with a self-serving rationale of its own (Neocleous 2008). In Neocleous’s view, the
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ideological separation between war and policing has imposed a banal dichotomy
of models on accounts of security, such as the ‘criminological model’ versus the
‘military model’, the ‘militarisation of the police’ and the ‘politicization of the
military’, or the coming together of ‘high intensity policing’ with ‘low-intensity
warfare’ (Neocleous 2013: 8–9). He also argues that such models ‘obscure the
unity of state power…. ‘ (Neocleous 2013: 9).
More fundamentally, in order to accept the notion of security as a national system of innovation, we need to comprehend security as an epistemological
system that is given meaning by being inscribed into a nationalist project to be
realised through a national system of innovation. Security as technology is both
an empirical and conceptual artefact in which the idea of a thing and an idea
elide. It makes sense to think of security production as a conceptual construction
of empirical object deeply embedded in an epistemological system. In this way,
security is the artefact: it is a substitution or a ‘placeholder’ for an assembly of
nationalist aspiration. Thus, providing a social explanation to security means to
replace some object pertaining to nature by another object pertaining to society
that can be demonstrated to be its true substance (see Hacking 1990). Foucault’s
description of security as an all-encompassing system is quite remarkable:
What is involved is the emergence of technologies of security within mechanisms that are either specifically mechanisms of social control, as in the
case of the penal system, or mechanisms with the function of modifying
something in the biological destiny of species. The general economy of power
in our societies is becoming a domain of security (Foucault 2009: 25).
The development of technologies is more than a linear, rational progression.
It is a component of a messy, co-constitutional relationship between society and
culture, whose social norms are embedded within the very specification of technology, which in turn reflects and reproduces certain dominant logics. The reflections of Desrosiéres on statistical reasoning are a useful way to understand
how these logics produce certain discourses of truth that can make space open
and accessible to intervention. According to Desrosiéres, statistical reasoning is
a social mechanism for knowledge selection that transforms certain results into
recognised facts (Desrosières 1998). This process can further be illuminated by
what Hacking describes as the powerful coupling of ‘there is’ (statistical reasoning)
and ‘we must’ (its associated plan for action) (Hacking 1990), which sanctions
(political) actions through the production of discursive reasoning. The process of
producing knowledge then becomes a sort of biopower, a particular set of information organised to achieve power driven by interests, and in Samman’s work is
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seen, as a tool to legitimate the ideology of the settler colonial regime by enabling
the transformation from perceived (desired) to conceived space (Samman 2013).
Over time, these logics have constructed the political landscape and have divided
and inscribed the governed bodies with managerial codes based on an ideologically informed politics of difference. Codes relate both to the ideological core of
any control regime but also to how the landscape is imprinted with codes that
constitute the colonial (security/military) architecture.
The innovation around new security technology is then to be perceived as a
codification process: it is informed by and produces new codes. In order to identify
the technical code for the innovation process, this research looks at how practices
of transfer, separation, settlement, and urbanisation have produced a certain way
of looking at the world and coping with its problems. It examines how security
technology has grown into a global enterprise of security techniques, technologies,
commodities, and practices conducted ‘the Israeli way’.
In order to do this, it makes sense to analyse the broader issues of the political
economy of nation building. I suggest that the scope of the research should be
extended to the case of Israel and the Jewish and Palestinian experience of exile
and return and how this has been mirrored in the Zionist ideology. Rather than
limiting security to a vector of remedies against threats, security in a settler colonial perspective is a national vision, a tool for governing, and a discourse through
which to govern. Dillon identifies security as a ‘technique of power’ working as
‘a principle of formation’ (Dillon 1996). The security visions of the actors in the
security industry are inherently linked socially, economically, and ethically to the
logics of the state. In the political theatre, security closes opposition to further
security provisions as the goal of minimisation, sidelines other concerns, and mutes
attempts to deconstruct its pretexts. In order to understand how order formation
takes place, the ways in which security and insecurity are imagined and practiced
by the sovereign carry strong explanatory power.
Foucault’s notion of calculated technologies of subjection as part of the pursuit
of power and wealth is a useful means by which to provide a broader perspective
on the methods and techniques of security technology:
If the economic take-off of the West began with the techniques that made
possible the accumulation of capital, it might perhaps be said that the
methods of administering the accumulation of men made possible a political take-off in relation to the traditional, ritual, costly, violent forms
of power, which soon fell into disuse and where superseded by a subtle,
calculated technology of subjection (Foucault 1977: 220-221).
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While Foucault demonstrates the centrality of these techniques to strategies
of accumulation, clearly security is a practice resting upon a discursive condition
(Hansen 2006). On the discursive level, security strategies are used to counter a
perceived threat or as a label for various processes of securitisation. In Collins’s
words, to ‘name security’ entails a process of securitisation that serves to mask
its deeper aims: ‘Settler colonialism is a political creature that refuses to speak
its own name. Instead it speaks of security’ (Collins 2011: 50). As the dominant
perception of security produces and organises ‘subjects in a way that is always
predisposed towards the exercise of violence in defence of the established order’,
security is intimately linked to violence (Neocleous 2008).
Deconstructing a security vision is not only about identifying the route to
emancipation from insecurity. It is in this imagination of security that the principles of formation and ordering lie. Security becomes a mode and a vision of
hierarchical ordering based on the ruling interests and visions of state-bound elites.
In the settler colonial context of the Zionist project, the very notion of security is
impossible to separate from the settler colonial state’s ideal and visions of ethnic
security. This also means an amalgamation of governance, war, and security into
one unified system.
Security is an idea embedded in broader vision of realising nationalist goals,
conducting state practices, and legitimising liberal governance strategies based
on differentiated logics of rule. This makes it a techno-national concept, where
ideas on nationalism inform technological innovation and technological capacities
come to draw the contours of the nation. Security practices, i.e. the deployment of
security technology, rely on government strategies and the modes of the strategies
of resistance of those subjugated. Consequently, what we should explore more critically is the way in which security and its provisions are imagined, produced, and
consumed. In addition, we should pay attention to how insecurities are captured
and taken to reflect certain needs of security. And last, we should consider how
processes of innovation and the production of associated technology lead buyers
and consumers into obsessive cultures of maximum security and an even broader
culture of insecurity.
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2.5 Conclusion
In order to understand the relationship between security, state, and national building, the ‘black box of technology must be opened. It needs to be opened to allow
the socio-economic patterns embedded in both the content of technologies and
the processes of innovation to be exposed and analysed’ (MacKenzie and Wajcman
1985; Bijker and Law 1992; Williams and Edge 1995).
The overall aim of this chapter is to provide theoretical input about how technological innovation is directed, selected, and deployed. This implies approaching
nationalism as an imagined set of ideas constituting a community of shared beliefs
and interests, and seeing the relationship between nationalisms and state practice
as struggles of representation and continuous (unattainable) attempts to establish
congruence between nation and state. By extension, it has been suggested that the
permanence of the incongruence between nation and state so central to settler-colonial struggles are mediated through innovation.
However, because settler colonialism provides technology with a mediating
role in the sovereign’s strategy of creating a stable relationship between state and
nation, this chapter has provided a multifaceted critique of the celebratory ideas
and accounts of technological nationalism as emancipatory and democratising.
The chapter has also made the case that the concept of technological nationalism
can help unfold how the connection between technology, nation making, and
state building is both a material and discursive process that is coinscribed with
nationalism and colonialism.
The chapter has disentangled and explained the notion of Jewish nationalism/
Zionism and the state of Israel as modern techno-scientific society, which is a
variant of securitised nationalism enabled by and shaping a national system of
innovation based on a state of permanent settler colonial warfare. While state
building, nationalism, and militarism have been consistently linked in the literature, the broader notion of security has not been applied to nation and state
building to the same degree. Thus, the chapter has suggested taking into account
how the intertwining of security, techno-nationalism, and innovation structures
produces a particular notion of securitised technological nationalism that works
both as a liberal discourse of security practices and as a more explicit recipe for
settler colonial warfare developed through the mediation between state and nation.
These ideas and perspectives have planted the seeds for the thesis’ two background chapters on the history and nature of Zionism and by extension the social,
economic, and industrial history and trajectory of the Israeli security sector.
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CHAPTER THREE
3.0 BACKGROUND I: ZIONISM, NATIONALISED SECURITY,
AND ISRAEL’S MOBILISATION FOR NATIONHOOD
3.1 Introduction
This chapter unfolds the nationalist thoughts and practices of Zionism as movements and variants amounting to a settler colonial project (Wolfe 2006, 2012).
Its analysis details how Zionism represents a case of how human and capital accumulation merge to realise a movement’s goals of national self-determination.
This is realised through moves to securitise the entire space of Israel-Palestine by a
tightly knit and closely associated system of violence. This system hinges upon the
construction and moulding of a nationalised community defined by the ideological
measures of inclusion/exclusion.
The chapter first unfolds the claim that Zionism is an example of settler
c­ olonialism imbued with a set of particularities. The analysis places Zionism along
a continuum of colonial ruling systems in order to draw from both the general
and the particular circumstances of the enterprise. It then discusses a range of
modalities of settler colonial control, and state and nation making, including the
role and nature of structural violence, the notion of Israel as a racial state, and the
notions of ethno-classes, and ethnic capital. It introduces a biopolitical perspective on the battlespace of Israel-Palestine and finally, discusses some ideas on the
specific nature of Israeli homeland security as an ontological concept and a settler
colonial mode of rule. The chapter also provides a historico-conceptual frame to
establish key points of Zionism. While the discussion takes a holistic or hegemonised view in order to show the larger contours of the Israel-Palestine, this is not
meant to reduce Zionism to one unified experience, narrative, or group. Instead,
this exercise allows us to get a handle on what Zionism is in order to discuss its
diversity, contradictions, and sub-narratives in the subsequent empirical chapters.
3.2 Zionism as nationalised settler colonialism
The case of Zionism and Israeli state building enables us to see some general features of settler colonialism with enhanced clarity (Wolfe 2012). Analysing Zionist
nation making as a sophisticated process of social ordering calls for a multifaceted
approach that seeks to identify a framework that does not essentialise any ideas
of ‘Jewish apartness’ and Zionist experiences to a banal ‘Jewish question’, or to
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a mere intra-capitalist struggle over territory and means of production. Avoiding
these pitfalls requires an approach that seeks to historicise the Zionist experience
in the context of broader trends of racialised governance and control, the political
economies of militarism, and modern-day war and policing. At no point does this
analysis conflate Zionism under one unified system or pretend that it is helpful to
‘fix’ Zionism under a static definition. Rather, the aim is to demonstrate the flexibility
through which the materialised practices of social and economic engineering enabled
by and enabling the securitisation of the Israel-Palestine complex have prevailed.
Historically, Israel was created as a state for the Jewish people. Its founding
was based on a (permanent) state of emergency and enacted by legislation based
on the ingathering of and granting of citizenship to world Jewry. This took place
in a formative period for the entire Middle East region that was marked by the
process of state making under and in the aftermath of European colonial rule.
By 1917, under the British Mandate in Palestine, Great Britain was required
by treaty to implement the provisions of the Balfour Declaration, i.e. securing
a ‘National Home for the Jewish People in Palestine’ (Owen 1992: 9). While
this account addresses the formation of the Zionist state and the making of the
Israeli state, it cannot be detached from the concurrent making of other states
in the region, which took place under colonial control, with Britain and France
as its ‘masters’ (Owen 1992). It included the drawing of boundaries by external
powers that firmly laid the foundation of political life in the region, including
many unsolved problems such as disrupted boundaries, nation-state incongruence,
and ethnic and religious tension. This process also failed to ensure a state for the
region’s ethnic minorities (the Kurds) and the lack of action to doing so by force
majeure (the Palestinians) (Owen 1992: 10).
The first waves of Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine began in the late
1880s and culminated at the time of state formation in 1948. Since 1967, Israel
has occupied Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem (unilaterally annexed in 1980),
the Egyptian Sinai (from which Israel withdrew in 1982) and the Syrian Golan
Heights. Since 1967, the racial governance system of Israel has developed into a
fine web of religio-ethnic contingent differentiated rule through the continued
occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights11. This
11
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Since 1967, Israel has fought only one conventional war, in 1973 (and arguably a second in
Lebanon in 1982). Since then, it has engaged in a range of attacks and counterinsurgencies in
1978, 1987, 1993, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2006, 2008, and 2012 that were connected more or less
to the post-1967 occupation.
has been supported by the steady institutionalisation of different legal systems depending on the religion, ethnicity, and geographical distribution of people (further
refined through different occupational systems in East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip,
and the West Bank).
In very broad terms, this process of Zionist colonisation can be divided into
four periods:
1.
2.
3.
4.
The pre-state era: initiation of the Zionist movement into the first waves of
Jewish immigration to historic Palestine supported by the Jewish National
Fund and the World Zionist Organisation in the 1880s, among others.
Zionist collaboration with the British – from the 1917 Balfour Declaration
to the collaboration with the Palestine British Mandate from 1923–194812.
Between 1948–1967 Palestine was divided and further colonisation occurred
beyond the borders demarcated in the Partition Plan13.
The post-1967 era has been marked by military occupation and settlement
construction in the OPT, combined with policing of citizens inside Israel’s
internally agreed upon borders.
From the outset of Zionist migration to Palestine, the Israeli strategy of building the nation has been two-fold: ‘designing a new Jewish Nation while refashioning Palestine as Jewish’ (Denes 2011: 34). When the nascent state was established
in 1948, according to Israeli historian Segev, the new state institutions, in alliance
with economic and political elites, established three objectives:
1.
2.
3.
12
13
To prevent the return of Palestinian refugees and expel those who succeeded
in returning;
To relocate (and occasionally to transfer) the population of partlially empty
villages and neighbourhoods and Palestinian villages adjacent to the new
borders and to transfer Palestinian-owned lands to Jewish settlements; and
To establish political control over the Palestinians and segregate them from
the Jewish minority. (Segev 1998).
By the end of British colonial rule in the late 1940s, Zionists groups owned 5.8 per cent of the
land in Mandatory Palestine.
The United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine was a UN proposal intended to follow the
termination of the British Mandate. In November 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted
a resolution recommending the adoption and implementation of the Plan as Resolution 181.
The resolution recommended the creation of two independent Jewish and Arab (Palestinian)
states and the Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem.
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These goals have been pursued through a steady process of colonial expansion
and consolidation.
In the course of its state making process, the new Israeli government created
the Plan Dalet14, which outlined operational orders to destroy Palestinian urban
sites and transfer the population to refugee camps in or outside the territory in
order to clear space for Jewish settlement (Khalidi 1961). Khalidi describes how
Plan Dalet was developed as a ‘master plan for the conquest of Palestine’ that laid
out specific coordinates for future settlement and population transfers based on
offensive military operations (Khalidi 1988). These practical expressions of future
settlement clearly indicate the Zionist movement’s objective to transform British
Mandate Palestine into a Jewish state; they are distinctly settler colonial in nature.
(Abu El-Haj 2010; Massad 2000; Rodinson 1973; Mansour 1936; Nassar 1911).
From 1948 onward, this destruction of Palestinian urban centres resulted in the
strategic compartmentalisation of Palestinians in urban yet de-developed (i.e. low
level or non/existent development, see Roy 1991) urban centres and zones, installation of a cantonisation process (the dividing into cantons), and efforts to prevent
modernisation of urban structures and the industrial production apparatuses.
According to a broad spectrum of scholars critical of Zionism, Israel as a settler
state is still in the making today (Khalili 2013; Lockman 2012; Masalha 1992,
2000; Rodinson 1973). It continues to be territorially unfixed and to expand its
geographical scope through continuous and systematic settling, annexation, and
occupation of Palestinian territory (Gordon 2008; Tawil-Souri 2012; Yiftachel
2006; Zureik et al. 2011). Inspired by scholars of overseas colonial settlements,
such as Moore and Frederickson (Fredrickson 1988; Moore 1966), Shafir provides
a materialist analysis of the evolution of the Zionist project that stresses the conditions and consequences of the project on the ground as opposed to in abstract
terms (Shafir 1996; see also Lockman 2012). He demonstrates shows how Zionism (as a case of pure settler colonialism) involves a process of forcible removal or
destruction of the native population realised through a strategy of exclusion based
on demographic and territorial calculations, i.e. the distribution of land and the
concentration of natives and settlers in it (Lockman 2012; Shafir 1996, 2005).
Israel’s expansionist objectives align with Bateman and Pilkington’s basic definition
of settler colonialism as ‘a policy of expansion based on the notion of “unoccupied”
or “virgin” territories’ (Bateman & Pilkington 2011: 1).
14
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Plan Dalet, or Plan D, is seen by many as the shadow, or dark side of Israel’s state making
process (See Khalidi 1961) leading to the expulsion of hundreds of native Palestinians.
A steady expansion of territory has been key to the realisation of the Zionist
ideas of Jewish emancipation. Indeed, despite internal differences and priorities
among elite groups, militants, and ideologues, Zionism colonised native land not
by way of exploitation, but by way of dispossession, which is an integral component of the traditional pattern of colonisation (Davis 1977: 8; see also Said 1978,
1995). After 1948–49, Ben-Gurion and his contemporaries refrained from trying
to conquer the remainder of Mandatory Palestine not because they preferred less
land, but because of demographic considerations based on the principled commitment to not sharing land with Arab inhabitants (Lockman 2012).
Settler colonial violence not only targets populations, it prevails in the broader objective of restructuring the political geography of Israel-Palestine. In Said’s
words, colonialism (of which Zionism is a variant) can be understood as an act of
geographical violence discursively and practically (Said 1978). The colonisation of
space is not (only) an historical era of territorial expansion, it signifies the intention of the colonial power to dominate and control by reproducing the dynamics
of spatial production (Samman 2013). As Lefebvre further argues, space is both
a condition and an action; the production of space is conditioned upon the material and mental aspects of producing things in space and producing space itself
(Samman 2013). According to Sternhell, the internal Zionist disputes (the struggle
between labour and revisionist rights over how to reach the objectives) did not
revoke the overarching objectives of settlement and colonisation themselves. The
ensuing national ideology was to conquer as much land for the Jews as possible
(Sternhell 1998).
In the mainstream Zionist narrative, the idea of Palestine as empty land ready
for settlement downplays and obscures the confrontation and extreme violence
necessary to create these empty spaces in the colonialist imagination. When the
existence of the native is acknowledged, he/she/they are portrayed as inferior,
scarcely human, and closer to animals than civilised people (Sa’di 2011). Settler
colonialism entails both ignorance of the native and the built-in violence. This
is especially true in the case of Zionism’s land grab and its division of labour
along ethnic/racial lines, which entails a degree of replacement of existing structures with new ones. Therefore, settler colonialism carries with it a deep-seated
relational dimension. From the outset, Zionist leaders were concerned with ‘the
Arab problem’ (Habe’ayah Ha’arvit) or ‘the Arab question’ (Hashelah Ha’arvit’),
which related to both the Palestinians’ ‘internal challenge’ and the larger Arab
world’s ‘external challenge’. When Zionism rose as a political force in the late 19th
century, there was little mention of the natives of Palestine as an internal problem
(Masalha 1992). However, as the waves of Aliah (Jewish immigration to Israel)
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accelerated, the messy realities of the encounter with an already existing Palestine
became clearer. In 1937, Solig Soskin, the political advisor to the Zionist leaders,
warned the Zionist congress that Zionism’s arrival at the moment of a material
and territorial realisation of a nation state was dependent on the expulsion of the
natives as a prerequisite for the project to succeed (Denes 2011a: 33–34).
Because the colonial process of the extraction and replacement of peoples
cannot avoid encounters with the natives, the colonial experience comes to hinge
on both the concrete experiences of these encounters and the more abstracted representations of the native ‘other’. The settler colonial project will always carry with
it an implicit structure of both eliminatory (Wolfe 2006) and relational (Fanon
1968) violence. As a reciprocal political force, a settler colonial perspective on
­Zionism points to the indigenous population as the single most important element
shaping settler societies: ‘the interaction with the dispossessed is the history of who
the settlers collectively are’ (Piterberg 2008: 57). For the Israeli settler colonial
project, the internal ‘other’ – the Palestinian – is the constituting external for the
(heterogeneous) settler community. In addition to its expansionist nature, from
the outset the national project of national engineering, as Sa’di (2011) demonstrates, was based on demographic politics and the calculation of how to secure an
ethnically stable Jewish state. Social and legal categories based on ethno-religious
identity were enacted in Israel-Palestine, and were characterised by hierarchies of
entitlement and rights to citizenship. These population engineering efforts also
included a threefold strategy of decreasing the size of the minority population,
rearranging its spatial distribution, and subjecting it to a tight regime of control
and surveillance (Sa’di 2011). Consequently, these dividing lines became decisive
for the structuring of the population of the entire terrain of Israel-Palestine into
a hierarchical structure guided by a complex set of overlapping and historically
contingent distinctions between citizenship and nationality.
Concrete measures of mobilisation of Jews into the new state structure were
institutionalised into the state apparatus. A key vector in Zionist state formation
has been the aim to institutionalise the ‘right of return’ as a universal right for all
Jews. According to the first act of Israel’s provisional council of state, ‘the State of
Israel shall be open to Jewish immigration’. In practice, the course of immigration has
been a complex, racialised selection process underscored by the strategy of balancing
demographic calculus with absorption capacities and economic considerations. The
‘ingathering of the exiles’, i.e. abolishing all restrictions on Jewish immigration,
was given legislative expression in 1950 in the Law of Return and the 1952 Law
of Citizenship, which enabled every Jew to become an oleh (a newly arrived Jeish
immigrant) when setting foot on Israeli soil. Indeed, once the state was established,
it claimed to represent not only its inhabitants but also Jewish people everywhere.
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When the Israeli nation had to be gathered and constructed within its territory
in a short period of time, the meticulous ingathering gave birth to a national ruling
logic that rests on biopolitical visions of national completion. Fundamentally, the
process of population engineering in Israel was realised through the experiments
and experiences of settler-colonial practice designed to unify the nation (Denes
2011a). Israel’s national system of innovation as Zionism’s nationalised order can
be related to the concept of a biopolitical battlefield. Here, the sovereign’s decisions
are made on the basis of calculated schemes of racialised control and violence.
These schemes entail a process of racialisation of the battlefield as practices of
ethnic differentiation, where the quest to Judaise the land is central. It is in this
battlefield that the merits of the construction of difference attain real consequences
for the ways in which peoples are governed.
As Hacking (1975) reminds us, numbers (in the form of data set and statistics)
were originally collected for the government’s simple purposes of maintaining
revenue and military strength. Only after the collection of numbers began did the
process create a new motive, what Foucault calls bio-politics, i.e information aimed
at controlling classes of people or the whole of society. The question of Zionism’s
population management ties into more general observations of how the generation
of knowledge and data on a defined population has been a key biopolitical strategy of the modern state power (Foucault 2009; Hacking 1990). Controlling the
demographics in Israel-Palestine has also been related to intra-Jewish debates and
challenges. According to Shohat, Zionism from the outset has been engaged in a
form of population engineering that has two interlinked processes. The first is the
rejection of a Muslim-Arab context for Jewish institutions, and the second is the
idea of a common Jewish past that began in the European Ashkenazi shtetl15 from
the sixteenth century (Shohat 2006). In this perspective, erasing the Arab-Jewish
dimension of the Sephardic-Mizrahim nexus was a key strategy because it disturbed the constructed Jewish-Arab binary (Shohat 2006).
According to Shafir (1996), after the years of state formation, the interests of
Zionist national capital and the Zionist workforce came to intersect. This has provided a basis over time for exclusionary measures to develop a labour market with
as few Palestinians in it as possible, especially in its top layers (Ram 2011; Shafir
1996). Moreover, the modus operandi of the World Zionist Organisation (WZO)
with its pure settler qualities lay in Zionism’s precept of nation building through
Palestinian exclusion and demographic calculation schemes initiated by a national
15
The Ashkenazi shetl refers to the Jewish centres in eastern and central Europe that predate the
Holocaust and pogroms.
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movement in search of a state (Shafir 1996). Thus, as a ‘pure colony’ version of
settler colonialism, Zionism did not take shape as a classical form of overseas expansion, but as a force that transcends the divisionary pattern of metropole and
colony. As Denes describes it, the generation of Zionist nationhood took place
through a relational opposition or in a ‘dyad’ between what was before and what
came after, between settler and native (Denes 2011a). The peculiar forces of pure
settler colonialism lay in this dyad of destruction and construction.
Destruction/construction
Wolfe’s views on settler colonialism help us understand the ideology of Jewish
nationalism as a materialised practice of what is termed ‘a structure of invasion’
(Wolfe 2006). Recalling that race is a construction used as tool to define and
organise the national community, Zionism employs what Denes refers to as a
constructed yet powerful organising grammar of ‘racial unity’ (Denes 2011).
This speaks to Goldberg’s emphasis on the ‘racial inception of the state’ as a
fundamental condition (Goldberg 2006). According to Wolfe, settler colonial
impulses have been forged through centuries of foreign expansion of other forces
in other colonial sites. In the case of Zionism, the logics, which were moulded
abroad, were associated with class struggles inside Europe and the experiences of
Jewish diaspora – life under waves of anti-Semitism and exclusion from national
communities. The settlers brought with them to Israel-Palestine what Wolfe refers
to an ‘invasive inheritance’ (Wolfe 2006: 385–387). As in the case of other settler
colonial movements, Zionism is bound up in a structure of elimination (Wolfe
2006: 387). Indeed, settler colonialism is viewed fundamentally as a system of
destruction that seeks to replace (Wolfe 2006). This structure is deeply tied to the
reigning ideas and practices of ethnic transfer of indigenous groups and policing
originating in ideas of separation between coloniser and colonised.
Within the invasive structure of Zionism, violence is mediated and regulated
through cultural and legal codes that realise the nation through settler colonial
state building. Wolfe’s perspective presents settler colonialism as having both a
positive and a negative side. While it works toward the dissolution of native societies, it erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base. It is exactly the
binary between the act of dispossession and improvement of life and expansion
of space for the settler that underlines the settler colonial features of Zionism.
­Therefore, settler-colonialism is a both a complex social formation and a continuous reworking of what Zionism means over time (Wolfe 2006).
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Settler colonialism allows the settler population to expand at the expense of the
land and the livelihood of the natives. On the positive side, the settler colonialism’s
replacement process naturally causes the sovereign to erect new structures made
to fit the needs of the settlers in the quest for nationhood. As a variant of settler
colonialism, Zionism oscillates between policies of subjugation and moments of
expulsion, which often happen simultaneously in different yet interlinked locales.
This duality of deconstruction and construction characterised Israel’s violence towards the Palestinians even before the state’s inception. In these deeply structural
elements lies the parallel processeses of judaisation and de-arabisation (Falah 1996).
The social and demographic engineering of the settler community is a corner­
stone in the Zionist quest for nationalist separation from the native. On the
constructive side, Zionism has tried since its inception to recreate the material
and geographical reality of the Jewish people. These efforts have been supported and facilitated by a cultural-ideological revolution of Jewish nationalism that
changed the content of Jewish culture and life by changing the geographical and
demographic realities of historic Palestine. Zionism provided global Jewry with
an offer of escape from life in the diaspora and a mental release from the bondage
of the past. Because Israel/Zionist security is in large part bound up in a vision of
freedom from the insecurities of diaspora life, the revolutionary and emancipatory tropes of Zionism are central to the construction of an analytical framework
that views Zionism’s promises to settlers as a guarantee of security and prosperity.
Not only is Zionism prescribed as emancipatory, it is also a return to a home of
belonging. As the Israeli Declaration of Independence states: ‘The nation was
expelled from its homeland by force’ (Ben-Gurion et al. 1948). This sentence
highlights how Zionism is envisioned and experienced above all as the enablement
of the Jews’ return to their home.
The ethos of ‘ingathering of the exiles’ so central to Zionist mobilisation lies
at the heart of the Zionist project’s internalised self-logic. It is the cornerstone of
the movement’s strategy of legitimisation of the colonial project. When they stress
legacy and historical rights to the land, Zionist protagonists are also creating discontinuity through a new space of national homeland and a new time of secular
nationalism (Beit-Hallahmi 1993a). Emphasis on ‘the return’ meant a rebirth or
re-articulation of what it meant to be a Jew from being part of a religio-ethnic community to taking on a national identity under the auspices of an emerging state. The
negatively loaded condition (nay, diagnosis) of the ‘ghetto Jew’, which fits under
the broader category of the exiled Jew, is coined in the term ‘diaspora mentality’.
This became a motivation for change, and Zionism made good use of the shame
that marked Jews of eastern Europe after World War II and the Holocaust.
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Even in the early years of Zionism, ideologues of cultural Zionism, such as the
seminal Zionist thinker Ahad Ha’am, made an explicit distinction between ‘the
new Jew’ pioneering in the ancient homeland and the diaspora Jew, who stayed
behind in the countries of dispersion (Ha’am 1897; Zipperstein 1993). Within
this perspective, the diaspora Jew came to be seen as weak (galuti) only to be resurrected through the settlement of the land of Zion. The Zionist self-perception of
the reborn or rejuvenated Jew, often presented as ‘the Sabra’, became the remedy
through which to heal the exiles’ condition. This categorisation signifies both a
skirmish with diasporic Jewish identity, where the image of the Jew as ‘the wanderer’ has been challenged and replaced by both the symbolic and real resurrection of
the Jew as the cultivator of the land. In addition, as Shohat argues, the non-Jew or
the Arab was in many Zionist narratives presented as a empty vessel to be shaped
by the ‘reifying spirit of Promethean Zionism’ (Shohat 2006).
Tales and legacies from the land has played a central role in espousing the Zionist narrative. The negation of the past in Zionist discourses has often been invoked
(through the construction of a Zionist or ethno-centrist nationalist archaeology)
to legitimise settlement. This served to demonstrate the Jews’ historic right to the
land of Palestine (Masalha 2007; Thompson 2009). The emphasis on Zionism as
a mix of Jewish legacy and the promotion of the idea that Jewish settlement is an
extension of the Western project of civilising in the east has contributed to the creation of Zionism’s progressive-nationalist ethos. This reflects what Shohat terms ‘the
polysomic notion of “return”’ (Shohat 2006). It entails a political project where the
state (quite literally) created the nation. In other words, it engineered populations
as part of the Zionist project of social engineering while drawing upon the commemoration of exile and pogroms as a context for demonstrating (Euro-)Israeli nationalism. This presented Zionist settlement in Palestine as the only possible logical
answer to the horrific events that had characterised the history of the Jews (Shohat
2006). Thus, while Zionism was very much an ideological utopia in its nascent
years, its ideas galvanised into realisable goals and material structures through their
encounters with European nationalism and imperialism. This culminated with the
genocide of the Holocaust (in Hebrew, the Shoah), which provided the urgency
and international backing of the establishment of Israel as a homeland for Jews.
The Jewish experience of ‘exile and return’ has played a double role in the formation of the Zionist project by shaping the desire of return based on a legacy of
ancient times combined with a desire to escape the menaces of the past. This has
served to motivate immigration to Israel/Palestine and to create the conditions
necessary to install the rapid process of industrialisation required for the envisioned modern state. As is the case of other revolutions, violence against existing
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structures and resistance has been a means to gain and retain power, which is why
violence has implicitly supported Israel’s mobilisation for nationhood.
To summarise: in the quest to nationalise Jewry under the Zionist movement,
Zionist pioneers both detached themselves from their lands of origin and defined
the Jewish nation as anathema to the natives in their new destination. Therefore,
it makes sense to open up the conceptual inquiry by making some remarks on the
construction of Zionism as a national idea. Zionism, like any other national vision,
came about through the envisioning of a community tied together by bonds of
national belonging. However, since the territory was located after the national
movement was conceived (unlike many other national projects), the mobilisation
process took force as a process of what began as de-territorialised nation building.
In this way, the Israeli way of thinking about the national has taken on a particularly central role in sustaining domination and practicing control and security, not
only to sustain a dominant position for the Zionist movement but also in order to
pave way for the realisation of a state in a loosely defined territory.
3.3 Israel as a racial state, ethno-classes, and ethnic capital
The racialisation of the Zionist project of national mobilisation has produced a
distinct logic of ethnic capital or ethnic logic of capital (Yiftachel 2006: 12), where
racial imagination becomes a structuring principle for economic and social organisation. Indeed, racial states also carry out targeted governance, where ‘race’
is constructed as a marker of a social unit or community. Wolfe argues that ‘race’
cannot be taken as a given, but is ‘made in the targeting’ of the native on the battlefield. According to Wolfe this means that the structural position of subjugation
and ethnic/racial attributes are co-constitutive in the state building project. As
he poignantly notes, ‘slavery constituted their blackness’ (Wolfe 2006: 388). The
racial state is not static; it needs to be viewed as a political force operating within
and shaping a given political, cultural, and economic context (Goldberg 2002).
The translation of racialisation into specific practices entails the use of political
economy and political sociology in order to examine the production of racialized
(in)security as an indispensable tool of modern control.
In the case of Palestine, Zionism came to define the native population’s ‘otherness’. This was also articulated in racial terms, even more so as racial differentiation
became an Israeli policy that was not only confined to the realm of symbolism.
Unfolding the genesis of nationalised kinship structure as a form of the racial state
provides us with a better understanding of the practical and technical manifestations of targeted governance (Amoore and De Goede 2008). This takes an intense
form under the auspices of a settler colonial project.
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As part of the Zionist project, the notion of a Jewish kinship structure and its
development into a national body has been the axis for the creation of Israel as
an ethnic or racial state. Indeed, state power is contingent on the production of
mental systems of unity and coercion.
Israeli nation building and state practice are deeply tied to racialisation.
Through the vector of ethno-nationalism, Zionism developed into an Israeli ethno­
cracy, a political movement struggling to achieve or preserve ethnic statehood by
combining the Westphalian principle of statehood and the principle of ethnic
self-determination (Yiftachel 2006). Israel was established by the means of constitutive violence with deep underlying racial/ethnic organising principles (Azoulay
2011). This has happened through the creation of a division/confrontation between Jews and Arabs with the aim of ensuring the dominance of citizens of Jewish
origin, which then paved the way for a regime of differential rule between Jews
and Arabs. As Azoulay explains, this has created ‘Arabs as a permanent menace’
exclusive of military expertise, which necessitates the state’s boundless support for
military power and the secret service. The effect has been a discourse of racialised
security where violence against Arabs has been rendered justifiable. This discourse
is ingrained into the racialised ethos of the state.
A range of scholars, including some from a more critical angle, have studied
Zionism’s engineering of the Jewish people as a racialised nation in order to examine the construction of the Jewish nation and its geopolitical strategies (Denes
2011b; Falk 1998, 2006; Goldberg 2006; Sand 2009, 2012; Shohat 2006; Weiss
2004). Other more radical elements (Zionist scientists and intellectuals) document the existence of a Jewish nation as also a ‘biological question’ by attributing
shared biological features to Jews (e.g. Nordau 1968, 1975; Ruppin 1913). In the
late 1880s, debates on how to define and demarcate the Jewish nation took shape
in Zionist circles outside Palestine that included the question of how to define a
strong reciprocal link between kinship and nationalism.
Israel is far from unique in its articulation of nationalism as a form of kinship
structure. Kinship management in general draws on American and European
thought and practice (Denes 2011a). What magnifies the Zionist case as an intense/extreme case is the tie between Zionist ideology and the goal of building a
new nation under conditions of intense heterogeneous immigration, whereby the
desire to ingather the exiles constructs the ethnic nation.
Thus, in Israel as in other national projects, ‘race’ marks and orders the nation
state. Indeed, the history of the modern state and racial definition are intimately
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related because the Israeli state in essence became racially conceived albeit to different degrees and through various compositions. In the Israeli quest for nationhood,
national aspirations were gradually fixed to a territory and realised through a range
of security practices to improve the conditions for the Jewish people in their new
land, both practically and ontologically.
Shohat argues that historically, the discursive and practical goal was to produce
a difference between Jews and Arabs. Judaism and Zionism were seen as synonyms
and Arabness as an antonym (Shohat 2006). For example, Israel’s initial moves
to introduce population management based on a politics of difference are made
manifest in the universal immigration policy of the Israeli Law of Return from
1950. (This policy is a set of rules that define a Jew as anyone with two or more
Jewish grandparents). The right of return law officially narrowed the gateway for
Jewish immigrants coming to Israel, but at the same time made access into a universal and timeless decree. The 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law was intended
to prevent Palestinian refugees from ‘re-entering Israel’. It allows the Ministry of
Defense to order deportation of an infiltrator before or after conviction. Besides
referring to non-Jews, the category of ‘infiltrator’ shares features with the ‘absentee’, a category developed to codify dispossession through legalised land grabbing,
whereby the normativity is regularised, normalised and intrinsic to the law. These
categories of absentee and infiltrator mark a boundary between those within the
‘borders of Zionism’ and those outside16. This filtering of access based on a particular construct of ‘race’ reifies the Zionist’s requirement for open borders for all
Jews that ensures right of return.
16
The question of immigration was still contested in 2014 when Israel’s borders were infiltrated
again from the outside. A massive influx of African (mainly Eritrean and Sudanese) refugees
chose Israel as their destination because of its proximity and relatively high standard of living.
To combat this, the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, passed an anti-infiltration law targeting Jewish
immigrants ‘arriving in Israel in an irregular manner’, which allows the government to detain
them for a year without legal process. This new law is similar to those governing the Palestinians
in the OPT, which is controlled by the Israeli military courts: the state itself has no constitution, only basic laws. Thus, by law, immigration for Jews entails the forced displacement and
expulsion of others.
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While Zionism works with a social definition of ‘race’ based on cultural (religious) kinship (in this case, Jewish nationhood), the nation becomes a tool for
conjoining Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi – three prominent culturally and
geographically distinct Jewish groups – into their own national entity in order to
support Zionist territorial claims17. Ethnic differentiation became part of establishing the Jewish nation – the Zionist ‘ingathering of the exiles’ linked human
existence to ideas of ethnic citizenship, and the Jewish body became the carrier
of Israeli citizenship.
While Zionism is a resource of secular nationalism mobilising Jews into an
ostensibly collective project, its structure has engaged debates around the challenges of hosting both a vision of horizontal ties of kinship and vertical ties of
ownership structure and capitalist orientations. To remedy this contradictory diagnosis, ­Sternhell categorises the nascent state as based on a configuration of Zionist
thinking into a form of ‘nationalist socialism’ (Sternhell 1998). This formula was
the central pillar in the organisation of social and economic life in nascent Israel,
and was formed as a Zionist alternative to both Marxism and Liberalism that constructed an ethnic, cultural, and religious nationalism and established the nation’s
primacy and the subjugation of the values of socialism to the service of the nation.
Put otherwise, socialism lost its universality and became a tool for nation building
(Sternhell 1998). According to Sternhell, this masked class warfare because the
credence given to labour Zionism pushed forward an agenda of benefitting the
collective whole as proposed by the natural Zionist elites, whose membership was
determined by ‘sentiment and dedication’. As Sternhell notes, the Zionist elite
never objected to private capital as such. Rather, it had to productively invest
in enterprises – ‘serving national objectives, the capitalists needed to serve the
community or else be disciplined and brought under control’ (Sternhell 1998: 9).
The anomaly here centres on the circumstance that working class Jewish citizens
of Israel would rather identify with a nationalist agenda than form a solidarity
movement with the Palestinians.
17
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Common classifications of Jewish communities: Ashkenazi is the ancient Hebrew word for
Germany. Ashkenazi Jews are the descendants of the Central European Jews. Sephardi Jews are
those expelled from Spain and Portugal in 1492 that settled in North Africa, the Near East, and
the Ottoman Empire. The Mizrahi are descendants from Jewish communities in the Middle
East (Falk 1998).
Other scholars argue that the ‘Israeli anomaly’18 reveals patterns of solidarity
bounded in kinship more than it expresses an economically determined class position (Shafir and Peled 2002; Shalev 1998; Yiftachel 2006). This warns us against
taking narratives of horizontal kinship for granted in our effort to understand
the dynamics of Israeli nation building. According to Anderson, racialised power
relations (or the ideology of racial difference) emanates from class rather than
from nationalist imaginations in and of themselves. Consequently, Anderson says,
racial differentiation manifests itself inside, not outside state boundaries in order
to justify repression and domination (Anderson 1983).
The ethnocratic vision of a Jewish state was initially defined as a (isolated)
national vision, but it became increasingly shaped by the experience of its relationship to the ‘other’ native population. Israel’s structures of violence take on
interlinked yet distinct ideological, institutional, and militarised economic forms.
In order to understand Zionism both as an ideology and materialised practices,
we need to look at the persistent built-in features of destruction within Zionism,
what Khalili (2014) has called the habits of destruction, i.e. systematic violence
integral to settler colonial rule.
In order to understand the ideological driver of Israel’s security logic and practices, it is useful to provide some perspective on how Israel became racially conceived. To unfold the genesis of Israel’s moral economy of difference, I introduce
here some basic ideas on the racial state (Goldberg 2002). I draw on the ideas of
the racial state to show how Israel’s racialised governing through subjugation and
securitisation of its native ‘other’ is an expression of the fundamental conditions
of the racial state. In the context of Zionism’s settler colonialism, racial and national constructs have been co-constituting and have taken various expressions
and forms that have impacted heavily on how Israel’s organised state violence has
been narrated and practiced as (masked) racialised violence.
To summarise: the racial state’s structures and effects open up a fundamental
discussion of how territorial control and population engineering and management
have been co-imbricated. Foucault’s and Mbembe’s (2003) perspectives on this
biopolitical battlefield are highly useful to unpacking how a politics of difference
becomes the driver of population management in a given territory. When Israel
deploys technologies of security as part of its racialised settler governmentality,
18
The paradox can be illustrated by the fact that Israeli voting patterns do not follow class
interests. Since the state’s establishment, poor Israelis have voted for nationalist rather than for
socialist/left wing parties (Hever 2010).
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technology is a complex synergised interface where logics of separation and transfer
are inscribed into the material. The spillover effect is the solidification of systems
of differentiation based on a variety of parameters into a given piece of technology.
3.4 Frontier violence and settler governmentality
Unquestionably, the birth of states entails acts of violence (Tilly 1990) and the
fabrication of a powerful military-economic order within and between states (Mills
1956). This was also the case in the course of Israeli state formation. In the general
course of settler colonialist activity, violence functions as a hyper proxy of both
ideology and violence that is unified through the practices of the sovereign. As
Khalili (2013) argues, expansionism has been the byword of the colonial settler
state that is realised through a mix of (counterinsurgency) practices, war making,
settlement construction, and architectures of occupation. Just as settler colonialism
is relational, so is settler colonial violence.
In the OPT, this logic makes up what Kimmerling calls the territorial frontier,
and amounts to a control system formalised by Israeli law where the orientation
towards the controlled population is purely instrumental (Kimmerling 1989). This
is made possible as boundaries and frontiers are part of a complex political geo­
graphy, and the composition of a legal framework advantageous to the sovereign.
In their thoughtful account of Israel’s structural violence vis-à-vis the Palestinians,
Azoulay and Ophir (2013) explain the relationship between potential and actual
use of force. They demonstrate how the continuity between potential and manifest violence is built into the Israeli state’s violence and makes up one structure
of control. Consequently, over time Israel’s settler governmentality towards the
Palestinians has taken many forms and shapes, but has consistently relied on deploying both crude and symbolic violence.
To capture this duality, Azoulay and Ophir construct the categories of ‘spectacular’ (harsh, physical) and ‘withheld’ (the threat of violence, the threat of death)
violence. ‘An act is also violent when the force is not eruptive and violence is
withheld’.... Withheld violence is the presence of a violent force whose outbreak
may be imminent but not yet manifest’ (Azoulay and Ophir 2013: 134). Weizman
argues that military violence is not just about bringing death and destruction; it
is also about communicating to those who remain, i.e. those who are not killed
(Weizman 2011). Killing is only part of the broader managment of the population,
both to sustain an atmosphere of fear and minimise resistance. As Weizman argues
in his account of Israel’s warfare in Gaza, this form of military communication
can function only if ‘gaps are maintained between the possible destruction that
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an army is able to inflict and the actual destruction that is does inflict’ (Weizman
2011:19). Through such a gap, the colonising element is the ability to communicate with the people (Gazans) it fights. In a state of war, the gap closes but most
of the time it is open, and the occupied people live under fear and the threat of
violence. The lethal and non-lethal nature of Israel’s war technology allows the
technology to both facilitate the closing and the opening of the gap. Israel’s Gaza
strategy is not simply about security in its narrow sense, i.e. preventing attacks and
unwanted infiltration. Rather, security for the Jewish nation constitutes strategic
moves towards realising a pure Jewish state conditioned by the minimising of
long-term Arab/Palestinian presence in that same space.
Because Zionism rests on an ordering principle that pervades the nature of its
enactment, it is pertinent to think of the creation of orders as a political project
that conjoins war and policing as processes working ideologically and practically
from the same ordering principles (Neocleous 2014). Neocleous argues that we
should refrain from using categories such as the military or the police that make us
think of specific institutions. Rather, we should view them as powerful forces shaping and enacting state power in much more fundamental ways (Neocleous 2014).
In the course of generating nationhood and expanding its territory, the sovereign’s position depends on a continuum of violence, which can be explained as a
constant dynamic between managing (and expanding) the frontier and managing
the ghetto (Ron 2003). (Frontiers and ghettos are specific types of institutional
settings, representing different points on the continuum of state violence and
power fluctuating in temporal flows.) As Ron demonstrates, frontiers are outlying
territories where central political authority is weak and formal rules don’t apply,
and where states maintain their power through despotic methods. By contrast,
ghettos are ethnic or national enclaves trapped within the dominant state (Ron
2003). Neuwirth describes a ghetto as ‘excluded from economic and social privileges, deprived of social esteem, and unable to influence the… rules which define
their participation within wider society’ (Neuwirth (1969) in Ron 2003: 17). For
Ron, the ghetto is incorporated into the dominant polity with ambivalence and
disdain, rarely liquidated outright but segregated and repressed (Ron 2003). The
urban ghetto is moreover often a space in which a certain – often high – percentage
of the population lives below the poverty level (Chambliss 1994).
Israeli frontier violence is institutionalised into a broader scheme of differentiated governance. The notion of ‘settler governmentality’ captures well a spectrum
of more or less institutionalised modes of violence and discrimination. In their
work on policing by the majority non-indigenous population in Canada, Crosby
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and Monaghan (2012) develop the term settler governmentality as a sub-variety of
Scott’s ‘colonial governmentality’ (Scott 1995). Scott demonstrates how British
colonial power in Sri Lanka operated to achieve modernity based on a particular
set of political rationalities tied to the particular locations in which these strategies were deployed (Scott 1995). In the case of Canada, the rationality guiding
policing involves a denial of the settler colonial realities and racial discrimination
of the majority settler population as a condition, not just an effect of the powerful
majority’s settler governmentality (Crosby and Monaghan 2012).
In the Israeli case, the stratification of ruling mechanisms has been evolving
steadily. The settler colonial structure has sustained a ‘governing through violence’
strategy operating along a continuum of state-led practices of ‘creeping apartheid’
(Yiftachel 2009) that promote the interests of the colonising body at the expense
of the colonised. Thus, in the course of the Zionist project the settler governmentality of the Israeli state has been sustained by exclusionary mechanisms to inform
the endeavour’s aspiration to settle, transfer, and separate people from people and
people from the land. This racialised class system, which presents social and racial
problems as blurred and inseparable, has been normalised into settler colonial
modes of governance. Thus, Crosby’s and Monaghan’s ‘settler colonial governmentality’ performs as a form of racialised governance, where social problems
are treated as racial problems and racial problems as social problems (Crosby and
Monaghan 2012).
Underlying these measures, or settler colonial efforts lies the third integrated
component: the question of ‘race’ and racialisation as an ideological driver of
control and population management in the Zionist project. Indeed, Zionism’s
correlations between power, nationalism, and racialisation and its associated institutionalised efforts of popular engineering amounts to what might be referred to
as racialised settler governmentality that gives the entire terrain of Israel-Palestine
the character of a biopolitical battlefield or a calculative field of action.
The inherent, differentiated control and violence of Zionism target both geo­
graphies and human beings under the banner and pretext of homeland security
as an ontological concept and a political strategy.
3.5 Israeli homeland security
Italians got architecture or clothes [design], we go for security, because that
is what we can do best. (Interview with Mr. Katz, Head of Marketing,
Magal Headquarter, Yehud, 21 September 2012).
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Security in Israel-Palestine, like everywhere else, takes on different meanings
for different people. In practice and in very general terms, security for Palestinians
is associated with fear, control, and repression. Writ large for Israel’s dominant
population, security is the absence or minimisation of immediate and more abstract threats. As stated above, security is a techno-conceptual category, a (national,
ontological) narrative, and a mode of (liberal) governance. In a settler colonial
context, security is a techno-national concept in which the notion of homeland
occupies a central position.
Zionism’s establishment of Israel-Palestine as a biopolitical battlefield has generated a particular notion of security that is now dominant in Israeli security
discourse and practice: the distinctively Israeli or Zionist notion of homeland
security (HLS).
This notion reflects both techno-conceptual shifts security apparatus and a conscious adoption of the global discourses of anti-terrorism. Israel’s surveillance industry is informed by flexible specialisation, a flexible production process dependent on
flexible systems and equipment, and a more skilled and flexible workforce. There
seems to be a shared understanding among security actors and politicians worldwide
that, like Israel, all nations have moved into the time and space of homeland security that have been so central to the larger Zionist perception of national security.
As Ofer Sachs, head of Israel Israel’s Export Institute, said recently:
Two years is a somewhat short perspective, but what we have seen very
clearly, and the industries have been voting with their feet – is that there
is less expenditure on defense and more on HLS. You can see that all of
the major corporations are present in the HLS worlds, too, including
Israel’s major defense industries, where specific HLS divisions have been
established (Sachs in Rapaport 2014).
HLS has become a taken-for-granted category of security in company and
security fair promotional material. In fact, as noted above, Israel’s own experience
is sold as an HLS experience par excellence. As Gordon says:
Israel’s homeland security industry, in other words, sells its products and
services by maintaining that Israel has experienced the horror [of terror]
– not virtually, but first hand –and consequently knows how to deal
with such horror and has developed the appropriate instruments to do so
(Gordon 2009: 3).
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The idea of a Jewish homeland that is so key to Zionism has evolved into a
particular concept of homeland security that unifies deeper insecurities with racialised, military/security practices into broader government logics. While settling
territory has been so key to the settler colonial process, the vision and feelings
of (in)security is not necessarily intimately linked to territory but to feelings of
insecurity. This (in)security exists in the deeper structures of the broader Jewish
experience of marginalisation, repression, and genocide and in the state’s claim to
be the provider of Jewish security. Thus, biopolitical control and warfare in the
name of Israeli security is not just about securing territorially bound citizens, but
also flows and networks of people (Jews) deemed at risk ‘everywhere’. Moreover,
according to Yiftachel, the oppressive impact of spatial policies is evident in ethni­
cally dominated ‘homeland-states’ embroiled in inter-ethnic conflicts (Yiftachel
2006). In such states, even when governed by formal democratic regimes, territory
becomes a key group resource for asserting ethnic control, collective identity, and
economic superiority.
The idea and ideals of living in a secure Jewish state is confronted with the
unfulfilled character of the project of ethnic isolation as envisioned in Zionist
national ideals. This creates a gap between ideal and reality. As Azoulay and Ophir
explain: ‘In the strive for ethnic purification, the coloniser cannot avoid to – in
one way or another – be affected by direct or indirect encounters with the native’
(Azoulay and Ophir 2005). The challenge of the natives can have a structural
character with broader ramifications. Both the pillars of economic organisation
and territorial measures have their origins in Zionism’s fundamental geopolitical
ambitions of the transfer of and separation between ethnic groups (Masalha 1992).
In turn, transfer and separation have become nodes in the materialisation of this
insecurity through the quest for ethnic homogeneity of space and place and ultimately the entire body of the state. This does not necessarily relate to conscious
proposals of full-scale population transfer, but more to an intangible sense of
insecurity in the encounter with the native ‘other’. It is in this binary between
insurgency and counterinsurgency, and occupier and occupied that the space for
producing security technology evolves as a scientific way of asserting the improvement scheme, and hence as a means to regulate the combat zone. The unfinished
materialisation of the ideal of Zionist statehood carries with a state of illegitimacy
or inadequacy that provides the security industry with its continued raison d’etre.
In the Jewish-Israeli context, insecurity has taken on a sort of hyper-ontological posture that posits the establishment and protection of a Jewish homeland is
a source of ‘ontological security’. Laing suggests that the notion of ‘ontological
insecurity’ can be described as the fundamental feeling of insecurity that is often
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structural and not necessarily linked to concrete, specific threats. He defines ontological insecurity as an individualised but collective feeling that ‘the full terror of
the experience of the world as liable at any moment to crash in and obliterate all
identity as a gas will rush in and obliterate a vacuum’ (Laing 1960: 45)19. Kinnvall
presents the counter-term of ontological security, where individuals ‘draw closer to
any collective that is able to reduce uncertainty and anxiety’ (Kinnvall 2002: 741;
see also Kinnvall 2004).This opens up a view of security as an ontological concern,
where security is a matter of the very survival of the community or nation.
This chapter explores the impact of Zionism’s association between Israeli security and broader streams of Jewish insecurities. While in the 1930s social security
was the main motif of public discourses on security, in the 1940s national security
became a prime cursor of security. Before 9/11, national security discourses and
their links to warfare overseas, the notion of homeland had previously been deployed sparingly in western security discourses. By contrast, in Israel, the notion
of a ‘homeland’ predates the country’s founding and carries special connotations
to Zionist visions of state building as the claim of a return to the homeland from
exile places the concept in a highly emotionally and politically charged field.
Tis is not to disregard the role of sentiment in the Zionist projects. In rought
terms Zionism, like other settler colonialist projects, should not be seen as a force
without face but as a ‘structure of feelings’ (Williams 1977) or experiences coupled with specific geopolitical strategies embedded in broader capitalist structures.
Alonso underlines how the persuasiveness of nationalism hinges on the power of
a structure of feelings that transforms space into ‘…home place and interpolates
individual and collective subjects as embodiers of national character…’ (Alonso
1994: 386).
Because Zionism has consistently been about building a nation and not just the
state, homeland carries particular connotations. The notion of Israeli homeland
security carries weight both in relation to geopolitical rationales and semantic
calibrations of the word. The Hebrew word moledet, meaning homeland (for the
Jewish people), appears four times in Israel’s 1947 Declaration of Independence
(Ben-Gurion 1948), and the notion dates back to the first Zionist Congress in
1897 where the goal for a ‘home for the Jewish people’ was conceived and supported subsequently by the 1918 Balfour Declaration’s pledge of a ‘national home’
for the Jewish people. By comparison, the US enacted its first homeland act, the
19
The notion of ontological security is no stranger to macro perspectives on politics. For example,
Laing’s concept of ontological insecurity has been deployed in IR analysis (See Mitzen 2006;
Steele 2008).
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‘Quadrennial Defense Review’, in 1977 (Tama 2013), which was rarely applied
to security strategies and public discourses on security and defence until 9/11.
Israel’s homeland security vision underscores the historical connect between
the land and the people coined in the framing of immigration as a return to ‘the
homeland’. Yiftachel argues that the multi-layered history of any territorial claims
for collective ownership of a homeland often forms the basis for protracted ethnic
conflicts (Yiftachel 2006). In the case of Israel’s security vision, this means that
to secure the homeland becomes more than a concrete effort to secure citizens, it
becomes a tool for constructing the nation. Homeland defines and reifies an ethnic
group’s constitution as a nation, or what Winichakul terms a ‘geobody’, i.e. the
expression of the unification of the land with its symbolic meaning (Winichakul
1994). In Israel, the term homeland and its coupling with security outlines the
premises for not just protecting the homeland but for its very raison d’etre through
a distillation of prescriptions for inclusion and exclusion. Thus, the notion of
Israeli homeland security is founded on and co-constituted by an ideologically
informed quest to transform the Jewish (diaspora) identity into a Zionist nationalistic and territorialised outcome.
Securing such a Jewish homeland has come to mean dealing with the challenges
of translating its racial/ethnic logics into practice. The firm, resolute idea of securing for Jews a specific territory was central to this process. The ‘Jewish condition’
once characterised a persecuted minority that called for measures of self-protection
in the diaspora. Along with the unfolding of the Zionist state building project, the
term was transformed into an ‘Israeli condition’ that displayed ontological security
that transcended even conflicting formulas for Zionist state building. Indeed, the
Israeli vision of homeland security promotes a potent connection between community and national security. The vision of Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people
in the form of a Jewish state gives weight to the notion of an ethnic community or
a nation that cannot be detached from the way security is thought of. In this way,
homeland security works as an ideologically charged mechanism through which
the ‘container’ of security is provided with meaning, purpose, and a promise of a
civilising mission for its citizens in need of protection.
While ‘homeland’ is seemingly defined through security, it also attests to a
broader aim of establishing and consolidating the racialised order of the Jewish
state. Homeland works to protect those who are deemed part of the nation. While
homeland security for the sovereign is a concept that carries positive connotations,
the metaphor of homeland security can also work ideologically as an enabler of
social and violent interventions. While the homeland benefits those deemed in
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need of protection, homeland security does not provide security for everyone.
While the positive assertion of homeland as a protective ‘home base’ works as a
civilised label, in reality it masks the effects of these practices on those excluded
from the homeland/nation. The pervasiveness of securitisation in the Zionist quest
for homeland provides a language that gives the geopolitical enterprise meaning
and hides the deep colonial structure from view. In Israel-Palestine, the distinction
between homeland and violence is a false division. As we have discussed earlier, the
very idea of homeland based on the ideological tenets of Zionism excludes large
portions of the territory’s inhabitants. These people are threats to the homeland.
To summarise: homeland security is a way of speaking of security that hinges
upon the broader aim of establishing and consolidating racialised order inside
the Jewish state. The concept of homeland security works both as an ideological
­metaphor and as a label under which most technologies can be promoted to
optimise sales and used tap into popular discourses. While the metaphor works
as an enabler of security, the question of a deeper qualitative shift fuelled by the
permeation of HLS as a sector and industry is perhaps of less significance. These
conditions rely in part on the state’s racialised national ideology.
Scholarly work on ‘race’ as a social construct, as a class, and as a nationalist
force often examines the diaspora’s support to the mother country or the kinship
state (Waterbury 2010). In the case of Israel, there is no one country of origin from
which Jews have dispersed into the diaspora, there is no one ‘mother country’. In
this way, the question of securing the kinship structure or collective takes on a
distinct role and influences how security is articulated. This has created a situation
where the quest for Jewish security has been framed and practiced as a Zionist/
Israeli concern that now stretches far beyond the borders of Israel-Palestine. The
Israeli security narrative includes both the impetus to protect (Jewish) minorities
abroad and its Jewish majority at home. Thus, while security is projected as a ­moral
impetus, it masks the settler colonial mode of rule, a rule that deeply defines,
shapes, and limits the lives of the colonised.
3.6 Conclusion
The Zionist vision of a state has been closely tied to the imaginings of the colonial
state. It is organised around a grammar of Jewish self-determination and a logic of
national-ethnic closure based on an idea of kinship exclusivity that seeks to establish an ideal correspondence between the national imaginary and the dominant
state structure and its institutions.
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The Israeli case of nation making is defined by its settler colonial features
combined with the pervasive ideological structure of ethnic/racial stratification.
The push for the Zionist nation has entailed a plethora of changing means of
racialised intervention. This includes ‘race’ as a construction or a relational idea
that depends on the inferior ‘other’ to mark its boundaries. In the case of Israel’s
racialised control, the logics of control as realities and emulations of state practice
lie in two realms: the ideational construction of Israel as an ethnically specific state
realised through practical installation of measures such as its laws of immigration
and the limitation on the access and movement of selected groups to the elite-state
and spaces of the coloniser.
This chapter has addressed the discursive, mental, and material features of
Zionism by examining the various manifestations of settler colonialism and the
distinctiveness that emerges from it. This schema suggests that Zionist mobilisation for Israeli nationhood is a variation of settler colonialism that deconstructs
native structures in order to erect new constructions for the settler population.
On the one hand, this has entailed the permanence of a state sustained through
structural violence. On the other, the genesis of the Zionist project opens up more
fundamental questions of nation making and the relationship between ideology
and materiality, which is the backbone of Israel’s homeland security (practices).
The remainder of the thesis expands on these conceptual architectures. The
research asks how Zionism has developed its security practices as part of settling
the land and managing groups of people through heavily interlinked processes of
securitisation, urbanisation, codification, separation, transfer, and the delivery of
social services. It does so by moving between time, themes, and sites. The next
chapter unfolds the second background chapter of the thesis: the social, economic,
and industrial development history of the Israeli security industry.
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115
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CHAPTER FOUR
4.0 BACKGROUND II: A HISTORY OF THE ISRAELI SECURITY
INDUSTRY
4.1 Introduction
This chapter is an historical account of the Israeli defence and security industry. It
performs as a socio-material history of the industry, its conditions for development,
and its production schemes. The chapter addresses how the mutually dependent
relationships and collaborative efforts between pre-state and agencies, military,
and private industry concurred in the making and advancement of the industry as
part of forming a national economy, an advanced military machine, and a private
sector carried forth by innovation and international outlook.
What is of particular interest is how the Israeli security economy as part of the
settler colonial project has developed as distinctively ethnic economy. Moreover, by
asking how diversified patterns of state involvement have been mixed with creeping neoliberal reconfiguration, it is possible to carve out more specific conditions
that enable liberalisation under tight state control. This chapter argues that the
evolution of the Israeli security economy has occurred through the combination of
intense militarism, tight state control, changing patterns of penetrating global capital, and neoliberal reform agendas. It traces the industry’s move from centralised
state practice to state-led neoliberal de-regulation, privatisation, and globalisation.
The chapter also examines the formation of state power through a network
of security and defence units, corporations, and actors, tying in the military and
economic sectors under the auspices of state-led capitalism. It paints a picture of
the relationship between settler colonialism, military production, and neoliberal
regulation sustained by the goal of building a national economy based on (not in
spite of ) Israel’s conditions of permanent warfare. In line with the social shaping
of technology (SST) approach, the chapter explains the direction, form, and outcomes of technological innovation in the Zionist project.
4.2 The Israeli security industry: A short introduction
Israel modernised quickly, but in a different space-time context than that of
­European industrialisation and modernisation (Breznitz 2007). To understand
the nexus and modus operandi of the Israeli security industry, the development
of the Israeli security economy needs to be understood against the backdrop of
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how Israeli industrialisation and financialisation have been co-constituted by the
expertise and practices of the Israeli military apparatus. The consolidation of the
Israeli state economy occurred as part of the transformation of a multifaceted
Jewish condition in the diaspora into an Israeli condition of state making and of
state-based security. This happened for the most part through the construction of a
mass ethnic army and a capitalist state structure. The Israeli network developmental state has secured its settler colonial aspirations through a strong nationalised
economy (Levi-Faur 1998; Maman and Rosenheck 2012; Ó Riain 2000, 2004 ).
Its security economy is not just illustrative of this development; it has been a key
driving force behind realising Israel’s military, settler colonial goals and creating
the current Israeli high-tech nation.
Today, Israeli security and military innovation and production are growth industries. More Israeli security companies are listed on the US stock exchange NASDAQ than all European security companies combined. Israel ranks third in the
world in venture capital availability and second in the world in the availability of
qualified scientists and engineers (Hiner n.d.). These rankings reflect Israel’s role as a
high-tech hothouse. At the peak of the high-tech boom in 2000, Israel had approximately 4,000 high-tech firms; new start-ups were emerging at a rate of 500 each
year (de Fontenay and Carmel 2001). According to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, more than 25 per cent of the industrial workforce is employed in high-tech
manufacturing. In 2008, the high-tech manufacturing industry employed 384,000
people in 11,000 industrial plants producing an output of more than 58 million
USD at an average growth rate of eight per cent in the high-tech sector. Eighty per
cent of all Israeli high-tech production is exported (The Israeli Ministry of Foreign
Affairs 2013). In 2011, according to the Israeli Bureau of Statistics, 47 per cent of
all Israeli export was high-tech, which amounted to 31.5 billion USD in export
income from clients in the US, EU and Asia (Israeli Bureau of Statistics 2012).
Two critical trends characterise the Israeli security industry. First, there is a growing shift from conventional military production to homeland security. Second, the
sector is marked by different modes of production – arms, defence and homeland
security – that operate in parallel and at times in tandem. Altogether, the industry
displays a broad portfolio of systems, technologies, and products. They include
aviation security, maritime security, cyber security, land forces, public security,
critical infrastructure protection, technological expertise in physical barriers and
fencing, sensor intrusion, detection image processing, tracking and motion control, observation, access control, biometrics, recognition technology, smart cards,
anti-forgery, commodity protection, surveillance, crowd control, command and
control rooms, and advanced software.
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The figures and numbers at hand that describe the nature and volume of the
security sector vary considerably even across government sources. This is perhaps
because of the unstable categories of what constitutes HLS and how it can be
detached from defence and the military. What is more, discrepancies can be explained because of the different levels of secrecy at play in the industry. According
to the Ministry of Economy, around 600 Israeli companies are active in the Israeli
security sector: 35 per cent are involved in developing technologies, 35 per cent
in production, 20 per cent in IT, and 10 per cent in services (Israeli Ministry of
Economy n.d.). Some 320 marketers around the world are registered with the
Ministry and sell wares supplied by Israeli defence firms (Sadeh 2014). Approximately 350 Israeli security companies export their products worldwide (Israeli
Ministry of Economy n.d.).
The Israeli defence and security industries provide jobs – directly and indirectly
– for approximately 150,000 people in Israel. About 1,000 firms are registered
with the Defense Ministry as arms suppliers, and 680 have export licenses (Sadeh
2014). A recent survey by Ethosia Human Resources shows that more than a third
of workers in Israeli high-tech companies (including non-security companies) had
served in a technology unit in the IDF, another one third had served in combat
units. Overall, 90 per cent of high-tech workers were found to have a military
background, 31 per cent having served in combat units (Hirshhauge 2013). In
addition, about 10 per cent come from the elite Unit 8200 that is responsible for
collecting signal intelligence and code decryption. This clearly demonstrates that
not only does the security sector supply the military with technology, but also that
the ‘the IDF remains Israel’s main path to high-tech’ (Hirshhauge 2013).
A large part of Israel’s homeland security and surveillance companies are small
to medium-sized ventures often specialising in one (patented) technology with a
relatively narrow niche based on expertise and market focus. Since Israel’s homeland security, defence and surveillance industries (what I refer to simply as the
security industry) are not considered a distinct sector by the country’s Central
Bureau of Statistics (which is tied to an international coding system), it is difficult
to obtain precise data about them (Gordon 2009: 98).
This is very different from the companies of the conventional military industry. Since 2000, when the second Palestinian Intifada broke out, every few years
Israel has had some form of military operation lasting a few weeks: Defensive
Shield (in the West Bank) in 2002, the Second Lebanon War in 2006, Cast Lead
in 2008–09, and Pillar of Defense in 2012. In each case, the IDF deployed new
military technologies and arms that raised the value of stocks of their producing
companies and had a positive effect on foreign sales. What is more, the Israeli
security industry is situated at the intersection of Israel’s (high)-tech economy
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and its enormous military sector. While this current research deals with security,
homeland security, and military products as a whole, there are important differences between the overlapping, yet distinct subsectors the military and homeland
security sectors.
As Gordon documents, six of Israel’s defence companies are responsible for over
95 per cent of Israel’s arms production. Four of these companies20 are state-owned
and are responsible for about 75 per cent of the arms sales, while the two private
companies (Elbit systems and Elisra) make up most of the rest of the sales (Gordon
2009: 14). This general list of arms production companies can be divided into 1)
large state-owned companies, 2) one large (Elbit) and several medium-sized private
companies, and 3) a range of smaller companies that produce a narrow line of
items. In 2013, the security giants all showed increases in sales: Elbit experienced
annual revenues of USD 3 billion; IAI USD 2.65 billion, and Rafael USD 2 billion. At 15 per cent, Rafael’s sales showed the highest growth rate. Over the past
three decades, Israel has expanded its arms exports significantly, reaching a value
of approximately USD 7.5 billion in export agreements in 2009 (SIPRI 2011: 32).
Government figures indicate that Israeli defence companies sold military hardware
worth USD 9.6 billion in 2010, USD 2.4 billion of it to Israel’s military (Israeli
Ministry of Economy n.d). Israel ranks first worldwide in the per capita value of
USD300 in exports for each resident. (The United States, by far the world’s largest
arms exporter, only has per capita weapons sales of USD90.)
Moreover, Israel’s exports are growing rapidly: data from the Stockholm Peace
Research Institute (SIPRI) show that Israeli weapons export more than doubled
between 2001 and 2012. Its arms exports comprise more than 70 and up to 80
per cent of all arms production. Because the country’s production capacities exceed
Israeli market demands, producers look to foreign markets. From 2005–2012, the
largest recipients of completed arms sales by volume were India and Turkey, and
the US provided by far the largest share of military aid to Israel. With a record
high export of 7.5 USD billion in 2012, Israel was in 2013 ranked as the world’s
sixth largest arms and security producer. In 2014 the rate has dropped to USD
5.66, according to the Ministry of Defense to reductions in defence budgets in
Europe and the US (Lappin and Anderson 2015).
The military industry hinges on a state-based institutional setup. The three
main actors of the military subsector are the Israeli Ministry of Defense, the
IDF, and the security industry. These entities collaborate in the process of R&D,
procurement, and deployment. The IDF General Staff creates a special projects
office (SPO) on a case-by-case basis to manage major R&D projects. As export
plays a central role in arms procurement policy, the Ministry of Defense (MOD)
20
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ELTA, Israeli Aerospace Industries (IAI), Israeli Miliary Indsutries (IMI), and Rafael.
and Foreign Assistance and Defense Export (SIBAT)21 and the Defense Exports
Control (API) directorates also work on dual-use products in cooperation with
other state bodies. And the Government of Israel (GOI) funds the Israel Export
and International Cooperation Institute in order to facilitate trade, joint ventures,
and strategic alliances across sectors and borders. The broader security industry is
more diffused into the broader tech- and high-tech economy.
There is also a difference in state regulation of the military versus the HLS
subsectors. The military subsector is restricted by a state demand that they remain
Israeli despite privatisation, while the security sector experiences more flexibility
and thus a stronger inflow of foreign investment. (This is why foreign investors
and companies also buy up some Israeli companies). While the military industry
(albeit increasingly less so over time) responds to demands from other militaries
and stable mass markets, the homeland security and surveillance companies tend
to target more differentiated and segmented markets such as militaries, police,
transportation sectors, municipalities, and private corporations. While a total of 21
per cent of high-tech companies offer HLS products (Gordon 2009), and at least
15 per cent offer ‘equipment of control and supervision’, it is difficult to estimate
the exact scope due to technological spill over to other sectors and the substantive
possibility of dual use of security technology for commercial purposes.
In certain fields, the state-owned military industry bears the brunt of paying for
R&D and thus subsidises the private sector. The high-cost surveillance products
tend to be manufactured by Israel’s military industry, while the large majority
of surveillance companies produce ‘add-ons’ to already existing platforms, offer
integration solutions for a variety of existing products, or provide services and
training. The role of intellectual capital is cross-cutting in the post-fordist and
more diversified industries, and in addition are the multifunctions of a piece of
technology presented at company websites and PR-material to broaden the client
base to the extent possible.
We need to unfold how the development and organisation of the Israeli defence and security industry is marked by national defining motifs integrating the
growing private industry with broader state strategies of control over territory and
populations. To do so, we need to trace the development of the security industry
back to before the establishment of the Israeli state.
21
SIBAT publishes biannual HLS and Defence Directories providing partners and potential clients with an overview of relevant companies and agencies. It is also possible to browse through
the different technological categories configured under the HLS umbrella.
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4.3 Background: How it all began
The ideology of economic independence and ethnic capital
During an interview at the Office of the Chief Scientist (OCS), the state agency
for the support of industrial development in Tel Aviv, a state official explained the
basic logics of Israel’s knowledge economy:
We don’t need another textile factory. We want to go beyond manufacturing facilities. We wanted to be in the more sophisticated market. We
sensed that there is a very big added value in products that are being sold
to foreign markets. We didn’t need a lot of hardware but knowledge, and
this is how we perceived this challenge: to have a significant footing in
sophisticated tech (Noam BarGal, Chief of Scientists Office, interview
Tel Aviv, 4 September 2012).
As BarGal’s statement suggests, from the outset of Jewish settlement in
­ alestine, the formation of the nascent capitalist state and its business sector were
P
shaped and nurtured by the Zionist movement and the state’s ideological vision of
an independent Jewish-Israeli economy. As BarGal notes, the link between colonial
advancement and advanced production has been a focal point and a cradle for the
development of Israel’s military-industrial complex from an early stage.
However, industrial development in Israel did not conform to a uniform pattern. The defence and security industries, and the military system and its deeply
militarised form of state capitalism have evolved as a strong economic force on an
ad hoc basis but according to Zionist principles of ethnically conditioned capital
accumulation. As such, the security industry relies on and reproduces structures
of ethnic capital.
Piterberg lists three fundamental, specific narratives that have shaped the Israeli
economy as an accumulation of ethnic capital: 1) the so-called uniqueness of the
Jewish nation, 2) the entitled consciousness of Zionist settlers at the expense of the
colonised, and 3) the denial of the fact that the Palestinian Arab population was
the single most significant factor that determined the shape of the settler nation
(Piterberg 2008). In the racialised state debate, the ethnocracy model asserts that
the closer a group is to the heart of the Judaisation project (in its ideology and
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practice), the higher its political and economic status (Yiftachel 2006) 22. Growing
out of these structures is the practice of what Yiftachel has termed ‘ethnic capital’.
This term refers to an ethnically structured economy where class relations and socio-economic status is determined or influenced by ethnic origins (Yiftachel 2006).
Dikötter explains how society produces a condition where the rights of an abstract
organic collectivity come to subordinate individuals’ rights (Dikötter 1998: 468).
This intersection of class making and racial differentiation corresponds well with
Yiftachel’s notion of ‘ethnoclasses’ in the Zionist project. Zionism’s ethnic logic
of control and its capitals logic at times reinforce each other because of territorial
expansionism and the ethno-social stratification within Zionism (Yiftachel 2006).
By default, the racial state intervenes to sustain the conditions for the reproduction
of capital, not least by ordering resources and attempting to ameliorate the external
and internal tensions that threaten the conditions for capitalist expansion. In this
way, under the auspices of the nation state ethnicity is reconstructed and used to
reinforce the interests of capital-centric elites.
What is more, taking the overwhelming role of military provisions and production into consideration, no account of Israel’s knowledge economy and settler
colonial pursuits can be considered complete unless examined inter alia, against
the dominant processes of the militarisation of the Israeli economy (Davis 1977).
A prominent segment of activity for the Zionist business elites was, and still is,
the military or security industry, whose emergence and consolidation as one of the
Israel’s most central economic sectors is/was deeply reliant on the state agencies
for investment, support, and purchases (Maman 1999: 323–325; Mintz 1985).
Over time, the state’s enormous financial and institutional support, a huge military sector, and elite-bound corporate structures have given rise to a powerful
military-industrial complex. This complex emerged as a fundamental constituent
of the economic structure created and nurtured by the founding elites and, once
it matured, the Israeli developmental state. Specifically, as Maman shows, the
formation of the capitalist state and its business groups was inevitable due to the
state’s ideological vision of an independent Jewish economy (Maman 1998: 753).
I return to more empirical analysis of the formation and development path of the
security industry later in this thesis.
22
Yiftachel explores Israel’s planning as a multi-sided process of Judaisation through territorial
pursuit to create Jewish sovereignty by the concerted efforts of armed forces, ethnic logic in
the flow of capital, and the location of ethnic hierarchies in development. He argues that
Judaisation continues to be the most dynamic and powerful factor shaping the space, wealth,
and political power in Israel/Palestine. As such, the entire military-industrial complex should
be analysed as one politico-geographical unit (Yiftachel 2006).
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4.4 Pre-state formations and the nascent security economy
Early stages of military production
When asked how Israel developed its technological capacities, Gillam Keinan,
Marketing Director for the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor said: ‘It all began
with land, the kibbutz and the people’ (Interview with Gillam Keinan, Jerusalem,
28 August 2012). Keinan’s statement is an often-mentioned explanation of the
Israeli economic miracle. Across the spectrum of my informants, the Zionist pioneers will to fight and their struggle to build a state were stated as the cornerstone
of the foundation for the building of the security economy.
Many accounts of the Israeli military-industrial complex in the academic literature attest to the events of 1948 and the formation of the Israeli state as the starting
point for the Israeli military complex (Levi-Faur 1999; Lissak 1984; Mintz 1983,
1989). These analyses suggest that the origins of the Israeli defence industries can
be traced back to the pre-state years, when the Jewish community expanded in
Mandatory Palestine. Both practically and symbolically, the idea of the pioneering
efforts of ideologies and warriors is a core narrative for the industry.
In more practical terms, two separate yet mutually enabling processes of economic consolidation marked the pre-state years: local settlement and initial industrialisation, and external backing (including financial) to support and sustain
Jewish immigration. While the initial means of expansion was financial, it came
to be military. Consequently, the desire for greater economic and military self-sufficiency was the key concern; as Maman notes, the state did not rely solely on
the market as an appropriate means for economic development (Maman 1998:
750). The developmental ideology of the role of the elite around building a state
structure had a unifying effect on the economic interests of those involved.
The economy of the pre-state Zionist (Jewish) community of the Yishuv was
largely agrarian, despite its reliance on international capital. However, the early push
for up-scaling production through technological advancement and the founding
of numerous scientific institutions paved the way to its gradual replacement by a
strong knowledge economy. Shafir and LeVine point to how the process of technological progress and modernisation during late Ottoman and Mandatory periods
provided the Yishuv with advantages over the Palestinians because of massive cash
inflows to the Jews and the British strategy of stifling of Arab modernisation as a
threat to the British colonial system (LeVine 2012). In fact, British rule allowed for
rapid development of a public and officially accountable Jewish political establishment as part of the Mandatory structure, and also acted in favour of the Zionists
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by curtailing Palestinian resistance (LeVine 2012: 81–82). Moreover, throughout
the pre-state organisation of the economy, kinship structures – pre-state Jewish
networks and extended family ties often rooted in diaspora – were consistently
used as a platform to productively invest in economic interests while also serving
national objectives such as land development and technological advancement.
From the outset, the Zionist elite’s ambitions to create economic independence
entailed strong ethnocratic features that produced ‘ethnic capital’ and also injected
an ethnocratic bias into the production system.
Also from the outset, a range of dilemmas marked the structuring of the economy, in particular, the question of how to organise a Zionist-Jewish labour market
and how to manoeuvre between retaining centralised political control and nurturing the interests of private capital elites. From a materialist perspective, Nitzan
and Bichler argue that centralised pre-state institutions emerged in the Yishuv’s
Jewish communities to tackle labour shortages and create the infrastructure necessary for profitmaking, and that nationalist-religious rhetoric was invoked in
order to create legitimacy and consolidate a capital-friendly social order (Nitzan
and Bichler 2002; Selby 2005).
According to Selby, this view is too instrumentalist and reduces the colonial
experience to a much too narrow strategy of capital accumulation (Selby 2005),
while Wolfe notes that the co-coordination of human and capital imports was
the true challenge (Wolfe 2012). According to Sternhell, labour Zionism was the
primary common denominator for the dominating political elite of the Yishuv,
which in Sternhell’s view provided no new social perspectives or direction ‘beyond
a nationalism based on the “historical rights to the whole land of Israel”’ (Sternhell
1998: 8). In fact, Sternhell points to how the elite:
…never objected to private capital as such – it had to productively invest
in enterprises serving national objectives the capitalists needed to serve
the community or else disciplined and brought under control (Sternhell
1998: 8–11).
In practice, the Histradut, Israel’s organisation of trade unions, became a central
part of the state’s economic planning and development (Maman 2002), which
allowed the state to control labour (Barnett 1996). The leadership of the labour faction of the Zionist movement, the Workers Party of Eretz Israel (the Mapai), and its
principal arm, the Histradut, controlled key elements of the Zionist project. These
forces were not supporters of private capital, but sought to create synergy between
colonisation, economic production and marketing, the labour force, and defence.
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However, the pure settler colonial aspirations met some challenges from the
native Palestinian population. In the pre-state and early statehood years, social
connections were based on a shared social background, an ideological or socio-political framework (such as membership in political parties), youth movements, and
military underground organisations (Eisenstadt 1967; Lissak 1984).
Ideationally, already in the pre-state period the notion of Hebrew labour mandating the exclusion of Arab labour and a ‘Jews-only’ employment strategy shaped
the ways in which capital was harnessed to the Zionist project. Since Zionist elites
hired cheap Palestinian labour from the outset of the Zionist settling in Palestine,
Zionist ideas of a Jewish economy clashed with a more messy reality. Indeed, as
Piterberg underlines, as the encounter with the native Palestinian ‘other’ was formative to the Zionist experience, the Zionist version of settler colonialism diverts
from other colonial structures as this form of colonialism to a lesser extent integrated native non-Jewish labour power into its productive sectors. While the use
of Palestinian labour has remained in flux over the years, an intensification of the
‘Hebrewisation’ of the labour market has taken place through the influx of cheap
Jewish labour. According to Shalev, the distinctive features of pre-state Zionist
society and the young Israeli state developed not only as functional ‘cocoons’ for
capital, but also through the sociologically specific character of the Zionist colonial
encounter in Palestine (Shalev 1998). In parallel, another trend spurred the early
push for economic independence that celebrated technological advancement as a
sign of salvation and emancipation.
From the outset regional Arab states and actors rejected Zionist settlement and
by extension, regional economic integration. In fact, initial boycott trends can be
traced back to 1891 in the form of pleas to the Ottoman rulers to inhibit Jewish
immigration; in 1922, the fifth Palestine Arab Congress called for the boycott of
all Jewish businesses (Sarna 1986). In 1943, a larger official boycott by the Arab
League’s 22 members was enacted and extended to both a secondary boycott (of
any company that bought or sold to Zionist forces/Israel) and a tertiary boycott
(of companies that traded with blacklisted companies)23.
The settler colonial project combined economic progression with territorial
expansion. As is still the case, territorial expansion was key to realising the aims
of modernising the Yishuv and de-modernising Palestine. The steady and messy
23
126
Still today Israel’s regional marginalisation prompted a need for a production of easy exportable
goods. In focusing on far away markets, the entrepreneurial elite focused on knowledge and
innovation technology such as telecommunications and smaller components.
replacement process enabled and fuelled economic development and industrialisation. The Zionist envisioning of an ethnic economy has had profound impact on
the development of Israel’s industrial sectors. The trajectory of Israeli security giant
Israeli Military Industries (IMI) demonstrates this line of development very well.
IMI: From clandestine underground factory to security giant
Today, on a green hilltop between the central Israeli cities of Rehovot and
Nes Tziona, just minutes from the sparkling new high-rises of the new high-tech
science park south of Tel Aviv, there is a small launderette. A few metres from the
launderette one can find a now- closed bakery with massive stone ovens and shelves
that once held piping hot loaves of freshly baked bread. A trap door is installed
under each of these facilities. Underneath the openings is an old underground
ammunition factory. It was in this facility 65 years ago that a group of rag-tag
pioneers worked day in and day out to produce the bullets that were used in
Israel’s War of Independence – Palestine’s Nakba. At its peak in the early 1940’s,
the clandestine workshop (and what was to become the factory of defence giant
Israeli Military Industries (IMI)) produced 40,000 bullets a day. The bullets were
engraved with the letters EA, ‘E’ for Eretz Israel and ‘A’ for Ayalon. Between 1945
and 1948, the factory produced more than two million 9 mm bullets, which were
crucial to the early success of Jewish fighters in fighting Palestinian natives as well
as British forces.
By the 1930s, members of the pre-state Zionist militia Haganah had set up
clandestine small arms factories. Shortly after independence, as the militias merged
under the IDF, Israel no longer had to conceal its operations and moved them
above ground. The Jewish resistance movements became institutionalised in the
state through the formation of the IDF, and all of the Haganah’s weapons manufacturing were centralised in the state-based industry of IMI. Meanwhile, the
pioneer group from the Ayalon Institute decided to stay together and established a
new kibbutz, Ma’agan Micha’el, by the sea near Zichron Ya’acov in 1949. During
the first two decades after the inception of the state, IMI produced many of the
basic weapons used by the IDF, including the world-reknown Uzi sub-machine
gun. The more costly aircraft and other advanced weapons were procured from
foreign suppliers, principally France. The Uzi became a long-term component
of Israel’s arms export to the Third World, where its producer Ta’as was involved
with clients in numerous countries worldwide. This burgeoning production in
the 1930s and early 1940s is one of the first material signs of Israel’s soon-to-be
established security industry.
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The succeeding course of Israel’s IMI, the oldest state-owned defence firm,
embodies the history of Israel’s capitalist economic organisation and its connection to the defence industry. The trajectory of IMI provides a good entry point
into understanding the path-dependence and trajectory of the Israeli security
industry. Today, as one of the last state-owned behemoths in the defence sector,
IMI produces precision rockets, mortars and artillery systems, white phosphorous,
and provides upgrading for land warfare systems. It is a global company exporting
worldwide and employing 3,200 people on several continents. IMI’s products have
been qualified with the IDF, the US Air Force, Army and Navy, and other NATO
member countries. Currently, the privatisation of the IMI is the subject of debate
in Israeli policy circles.
As a state-owned, steady supplier to the IDF, IMI’s first financial crisis began
when, according to the Chairman Avaner Raz, IMI was turned from an auxiliary
unit of the Defence Ministry into a government corporation in the 1990s24. Current
plans call for moving the IMI headquarters from expensive land in Sharon to the
Negev in the South, which will release thousands of valuable housing units. Plans
to privatise IMI were generated by a growing realisation that a modern security
corporation in Israel works better in cooperation with state agencies, not under their
ownership25. Because of IMI’s continuing strategic importance, any foreign company
or individual seeking to purchase the company would need senior Israeli partners in
order to meet the Government of Israel’s likely strict restrictions that effective control
of the company should remain within the country26.
While there have certainly been shifts in IMI’s structure and mode of production,
the defence giant has sustained its close ties with the IDF. Its evolution from clandestine to government-owned to potentially private company touches upon several key
points that relate to how Israel’s military industrial sector developed vis-à-vis broader
developments of Israeli military strategies, expansionism, and economic policies.
24
25
26
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According to advocates of privatisation, under the ownership of the state, IMI lacks the character and ambitions of an intense military industrial complex. Due to a history of ineffective
management and heavy debt from pensions owed to the state, IMI announced its privatisation
plan to the public in September 2013. This is to be availed to the Prime Minister in October
2013.
Israel’s other defence giants, such as Rafael and Israeli Aerospace Industries, have declared their
interest in merging with IMI. In 2005, IMI sold off parts of its production to conglomerate
Samy Katsav’s SK Group, renaming it Israeli Weapon Industries (IWI), to be integrated into
Katsav’s larger defence industrial group.
This could include for example, as a minimum, a requirement that IMI’s Board of Directors
should retain an Israeli majority. In such a circumstance, it would also not be at all unusual
for the government to retain what is known as a ‘golden share’, which can result in draconian
voting rights under defined extreme circumstances.
Over the last years, IMI has begun to develop more sophisticated products such
as the new super-smart MPR-500 multipurpose rigid bomb, first used in Israel’s
Operation Protective Edge in 2014. According to military sources, back orders for
the bomb today total 5.6 billion New Israeli Shekel (NIS). However, IMI’s modes
of production and technological advancement have been guided by the industry’s
close integration with armed forces dealing with a changing battlefield. In the
pre-state era, factory labourers worked around the clock turning out munitions.
In the summer of 2014, as the Israeli military advanced its onslaught of the Gaza
Strip, the 300 workers of IMI in its Nazareth facility were likewise working double
shifts to ensure a supply of bullets for the IDF.
IMI’s history reflects the broader developments of the security and defence
industry and the path of Israel’s nascent national economy rooted in settling the
land and reaching the end point in a militarised high-tech economy. Its attachment to the land, to a nationalised group of innovative (militarised) agents, and
a religio-ethnically defined community clearly reflects the construct of the nation
as a central factor in Israel’s national innovation
Israeli Military Industries (IMI)
The clandestine underground
­product portfolio display,
­bullet factory of the Haganah (to
be IMI), today the Ayalon M
­ useum. ­Euro­satory, Paris, France,
June 2012. Photo: Author.
Photo: Wikimedia.
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Pre-state militias and initial production
Israel’s defence industry was set in motion as part of the creeping colonisation
of the late 1880s. Experiencing resistance to the waves of colonisation faced by
increasingly hostile natives from the very outset, the Jewish community began
to manufacture homemade hand grenades and explosives. As the IMI case has
illustrated, the pre-state militias fighting in the Yishuv laid the first seeds for the
security industry. The predecessor of the Haganah was already in place under the
name of Hashomer in 1909, itself a successor to Bar-Glora, which was founded
in 1907 to guard settlers in their new homes – Israel’s first gated communities. At
this time, Hagannah (formerly called Hashomer) had only about 100 members,
but with the increase in settlers and growing Palestinian frustration and resistance,
the numbers went up and foreign arms were sought. The Hashomer and later the
Haganah unit transformed from being a militia to an underground army engaging
mostly youth and young adult males in its/their activities.
Throughout the 1930s, most weapons production by the pre-state militias was
centred on small-scale clandestine arms production units that produced and repaired rudimentary weapons. In the late 1930s, actual production slowly emerged
from the Haganah’s militia organisation. The secret industry was established to
support the underground paramilitary organisations opposing British rule in
­Palestine. In cooperation with Israel’s leading technical institution, the Technion,
it produced explosives in secret workshops (Popkin 1971).
At the time of the Arab revolt of 1936–1939, the Haganah fielded 10,000
men along with 40,000 reservists. In 1931, the network fragmented and Irgun (in
Hebrew, Etzel), the more militant group, emerged. In addition, Palmach emerged
as a special elite combat unit within the Haganah. In 1942, the Palmach became
self-funding by having its members work in the kibbutzim. Each kibbutz would
host a Palmach platoon and supply them with food, homes, and resources; in return, the Palmach members would provide security for the kibbutz. This mode of
organisation would be formalised under the IDF in 1948 as the Nahal programme,
combining military service and establishment of agricultural settlements.
The use of settlements for military purposes took its most complete expression
in the establishment of the security settlement the he’ahzut (Gorenberg 2006). The
British did not officially recognise the clandestine military network, but cooperated
with it by forming the Jewish Settlement Police and Special Nights Squads, which
were trained and led by Colonel Orde Wingate. The battle experience gained
during the training proved useful in the 1948 war, and paved the way for actual
state formation and expansion beyond the prescriptions of the 1947 UN Partition
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Plan. Just weeks after the partition plan provoked increased military confrontation
in Palestine in 1947, US President Harry Truman invoked the Neutrality Act,
which imposed a unilateral embargo on weapons on both Palestinians and Zionist
fighters. This embargo created a smuggling culture within the Zionist movement
even before state formation had taken place. From this the forces would benefit
in the decades to come.
Many elite members of the Yishuv, and later the state project, had central roles
in the Irgun or the Haganah. At this early stage, the clandestine militias received
most of their funds and artillery support from the outside, through illegal smugglings from wealthy Jews in the US to Jewish fighters in British Mandate Palestine
(known as the Sonnenberg Group) (Calhoun 2007). In fact, the group became
the fundraisers, facilitators, and behind-the-scenes masterminds of the Haganah’s
illegal armaments procurement effort in the United States. In fact, it operated
separately from the highest representative of the Jewish people, the Jewish Agency, which the Haganah shielded from direct involvement in unlawful activities.
Indeed, to circumvent the British hampering with the organisation’s activities, the
Haganah turned to Soviet and American sources for weaponry (Calhoun 2007).
The Yishuv’s land acquisition tactics were bound to provoke native hostility, and
violence increasingly became the chief method with which to gain new territory.
This expansionism intermeshed with the organisation of the nascent settler economy and the strengthening of a clandestine network of armed militias.
Settling the land and the dynamics of replacement
The Zionist pre-state economy was characterised by a combination of absentee
ownership, centralisation, and transnationalisation underwritten by the permanent
restructuring of existing relations in Palestine (Nitzan and Bichler 2002). Certainly
the Zionist movement’s assertive agricultural policies were key to realising the
goals of land-grabbing and land development. The collective agri­cultural settlement known as the Kibbutz, with financial and technical support from the largely
bourgeois-led Zionist Organization, could effectively absorb and activate new
immigrants into the machine of production and hence advance the settlement
of land (Lockman 2012). The Yishuv focused its energies on building communal
agricultural settlements in order to make the acclaimed return to the land practical as well as symbolic, which reflected Ben-Gurion’s broad security concept of
populating sparsely inhabited areas that demonstrated how national innovation
was bound to territory.
Between 1882 and 1947, almost 550,000 Jews, mainly young, socialist immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe, arrived in Palestine. This massive in-
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flux fuelled the need for increased production capacity and housing schemes.
­Numbering 12 in 1918, the collective settlements, or the kibbutz, grew to 19 in
1921 and to 25 in 1925. By 1945, there were 179 such settlements (Aaronsohn
1995). In the formative, pre-state years, from the early 1920s until 1947, the political enterprise of settling the land permeated every facet of life, so that the political
elite – primarily Zionist leaders who had enjoyed key positions in their diaspora
communities – dominated all other elites. Moreover, the low level of development
in economic, administrative, cultural, communications, and professional domains
helped to reinforce the pre-eminent position of the political elite, community
leaders, and wealthy investors (Lissak 1981).
As Shafir shows, the Kibbutz were modelled on the European colonial experiments elsewhere including the French colonisation of Algeria and Bismarck’s
Germanisation of East Prussia (Shafir 1996; see also Wolfe 2012). With the possible (and early) exception of Baron Rothschild, the capital that Zionists garnered
for investment in Palestine was not dependent on the return of financial profit
(Wolfe 2012)27. Accordingly, as Max Nordau, co-founder of the World Zionist
Organization has argued, the external pressure from the likes of Rothschild pushed
for a move from small-scale agriculture to large-scale capital-intensive modes of
production (Aaronsohn 1995). Even during a period of global recession in the
1930s, settler colonial expansion, especially in the construction industry in the
new Jewish city of Tel Aviv, enabled the sheltered Jewish economy to grow at
the same time as the predominantly agrarian native economy of Palestinians was
increasingly under strain (Wolfe 2012).
The legacy of a shift from agrarianism to tech-economy is often cited in the
industry’s narratives success. In the summer of 2012, I interviewed Dan Tishler,
CEO and owner of the electronic security company Control Bit. Born in Israel
and of Polish descent, Tishler’s career aspirations had followed the shift from an
agrarian to a knowledge-based economy. As he explained to me over coffee in a
mall in the lower floor of the extravagant futuristic Azrieli Towers in the central
part of Tel Aviv:
Only 25 years ago I based my company on the Jewish dream of being
farmers; to have land. But today agriculture is not a good source of income
27
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At the turn of the century, Baron de Rothschild transferred all his properties and interests in the
moshavot (rural settlements) to the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA), which was founded
in 1891 by Baron Maurice de Hirsch and had previously been active in South America,
­primarily in Argentina (Aaronsohn 1995).
so I had to shift to high-tech. And then the IDF started coming to us with
their problems and it all took off from there (Interview Dan Tishler,
Tel Aviv, 2 September 2012).
Tishler’s experience is quite indicative. During the period of state formation,
two-thirds of the land consisted effectively of desert and infertile hills. As Beit-­
Hallahmi argues, a major challenge was that the many new Jews in Palestine were
educated and trained as intellectuals and scientists and ill-equipped/untrained/
unprepared for physical labour (Beit-Hallahmi 1993a). This created a strong incentive to develop industries that could absorb a highly skilled labour force.
The kibbutz milieu, early militarisation, and the emerging capitalist state structure based on an ethnic stratification system, including the ownership structures
emanating from the cooperative, helped form the political and economic elite of
the Yishuv. The link between the kibbutzim, the Histradut (the core Zionist labour
union), and the establishing of major corporations was often one of a few central
families (Davis 1977). This alliance of public and private capital was moulded in
the kibbutz economy and came to play a key role in the formation of the security
industry. Essentially, through the combination of increased militarism and a considerable amount of intellectual capital in the Yishuv, a form of cultural militarism
grew and took shape as the armed forces became essential to the social experience
of settling the land (Ben-Eliezer 2012). While the early emphasis on agriculture
was the natural effect of the conditions of settling in a land with limited water
supply, agriculture and civilian industries required larger workforces in relation to
output. As capital flooded the technology and defence sectors, the kibbutz-based
agrarian economy steadily declined as an industry.
The intense efforts of establishing industrial production proved lucrative later
on, as Israel’s agricultural productivity and innovation allowed the country to
become largely self-sufficient in terms of food production. In the longer term, the
state refocused its innovative skills and other non-military avenues of advanced
technology. Collectively, the cooperative efforts and conditions of the kibbutz
movement’s strong organisation in networks, the support of capital elites, and the
entrepreneurship of pre-state militias were crucial in the preparation of the moral
and material economy of Zionism. The resources amassed in the pre-state era were
central to the actual process of state formation and the construction of the security industry, resulting in possibly overlapping interests between the formations
of an entrepreneurial security elite, the distinctive features of Zionist capitalism,
and territorial expansion. In the time to come, the ever-changing patterns of state
involvement would become central to the shaping of the industry.
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4.5 The state revolution
The creation of the state of Israel was not evolutionary; it was swift and left hardly
any time for transitional development. It came to provide its nascent structure
with tools for Zionist military and business elites to use to build their colonial state
through coercion, violence, and state intervention. Israeli state making became
an outlet for consolidation rather than a point of origin for the security industry.
From a military point of view, the transition from underground militias to a
fully-fledged army became a cornerstone in the state’s consolidation. During this
transition, it sought to concentrate the bulk of power in its domain (Ben-Eliezer
1995, 1998; Medding 1990).
When the British left Palestine on 14 May 1948, the Jewish militias consisted of 3,000 Palmach soldiers, 9,500 in the special Haganah field unit, and
about 35,000 Haganah people trained for local defence. There were 2,500 foreign
­volunteers, mainly airmen or naval personnel, a total of 10,000 rifles, about 900
machine guns, 800 small mortars, 19 antitank rifles and some grenades, explosives, and homemade Molotov cocktails (Popkin 1971). Thus, at the time of state
formation the militarised nature of the Zionist movement was in place. After the
1948 War and the declared independence, the Zionist movement was ready to
use Jewish sovereignty to build an effective military machine (Levi-Faur 1999).
As the institutionalisation of the clandestine militias into the IDF and clandestine militia groups was accomplished, the relative anarchy of both economic and
military life decreased (Barak and Sheffer 2006). Ben-Gurion and his aides sought
to push for a state army unencumbered by party politics as the means by which the
new state would construct an ethnic population as a nation in arms (Kimmerling
2001). The growth of a popular army was encouraged because of the perception
of military power as the major statist tool for the ‘Israelification’ of the new immigrants who embodied the Zionist melting pot ideology (Kimmerling 2001).
The declaration of the state of Israel radically changed the nature of Aliyah
(­ Hebrew for immigration of Jews to British Mandate Palestine and Israel-Palestine).
The intensified immigration accelerated industrialisation and created a political order in which the (security) elite could grow and take shape. In practice, while Jewish
immigration and the war efforts had exhausted the government’s budget, they also
provided platforms to launch large-scale industrial projects. In fact, huge inflows
of immigrants, the development of state policies, and massive foreign capital were
the basis of Israel’s economic boom in the 1950s (Aharoni 1991).
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From the late 1940s until the mid-1950s, the first stages of local military
production focused largely on the manufacture of small arms and ammunition
and the refurbishing of old weapons, (predominantly World War II surplus) for
use by the IDF. Probably the most notable institution resulting from the establishment of the IDF was the formation of the Authority for the Development of
Armaments, Israel’s national R&D laboratory for the development of weapons
and military technology organised within the Ministry of Defence. Under the
acronym HEMED, the IDF’s Science Corps and the precursor of security giant
Rafael, was founded in 1948. In 1952, HEMED was renamed the Research and
Design Directorate and split into two agencies; one purely scientific and one
focused on the development of weapons (EMET), which was renamed Rafael by
Ben-Gurion in 195428. As a national laboratory, Rafael was required to address the
critical demands of the IDF, including top-secret projects such as the development
of weapons of mass destruction.
Israel quickly attained status as a ‘strong state’ because of its high degree of
militarisation (Ben-Dor 1983; Migdal 1988). The state and its military regimes
came to be seen both as problem-solving institutions (to deal with military/security threats) and an actor in the country’s rapid modernisation process. As per the
triple helix model, the fact that the government invested in large R&D projects
and the production of knowledge strengthened the long-term institutionalisation
of the knowledge economy, which may have been more limited in an R&D environment located in the private sector. From early on, the construction of the
military sector expressed a deep entanglement of ideological and material forces.
Establishment of state organisations and the takeover of functions performed by
the British Mandate and Jewish community organisations fuelled the power of
political elites around the new state leadership and the core capital actors who
were also engaged in building the security sector.
State-controlled production
The centrality of the military in the early state years was ‘one of the main indications of the high degree of stateness of the Israeli polity in creation’ (­ Levi-Faur
1998, emphasis added). Consequently, the combined strategy of moulding a
­citizen’s army or a nation-in-arms espousing close civil-military relations often
28
The responsibility for R&D was transferred in 1958 from the Research and Planning Branch
of the Ministry of Defense and transformed into a separate unit, Rafael, which was still part of
the Defense Ministry. With 2012 sales of 1.775 billion USD, an order backlog of 4.2 billion
USD, and a net profit of 148 million USD, Rafael is currently Israel’s second largest government-owned producer of defence technology and hardware (Rafael Advanced Defense Systems
2013).
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with fluid borders (Ben-Eliezer 1995), and the strengthening national military
production made clear the centrality of militarism to the new polity.
In the first decades of the nascent state, the labour movement increasingly
cooperated with a range of larger conglomerates or holding companies29. This
movement retained control of industrialisation in areas (including the defence
industry) deemed critical to the development of the state. These key developments
were evident from the 1950s onward: the state selected and decided which industries to develop, their location, and which subsidies to provide to which individual
entrepreneurs. The defence industry was a high priority in this process. The state
also provided a platform or skeleton set with institutions from which the security
industry was structured. In addition to the IDF and the state-owned security companies, a range of state agencies were steadily established that came to be involved
in supporting the security industry. Among these major actors are: the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defense (and SIBAT – Ministry’s International
Defense Cooperation Directorate), the Ministry of Science, Trade and Labor, the
Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and smaller agencies
such as Chief of Scientists Office (1974) and The Israel Export and International
Cooperation Institute (1958). Other private and state-owned research centres and
universities also supported the security industry, including Hebrew University
(1918), The Technion (1912), The Weizman Institute of Science (1934), Tel Aviv
University (1956) and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (1969).
The state’s policy of intense militarism was pursued under tight state control
and spurred the strategic organisation of military production where the selection
of production came to hinge on more centralised power structures. The state also
strengthened and institutionalised the dominance of powerful Zionist families
(who were often from wealthy diaspora families) at the centre of new industrial
endeavours in Israel, where elite structures became integral to the foundation of
the security industry, a pattern that was also evident in other sectors such as banking and pharmaceuticals (Davis 1977). Because building the knowledge economy
around military innovation was an important part of the army’s modernising role
as a key agent of development and integration in Israel (Johnson 1962; Lissak
1976), capital and military interests merged with the innovative- and production-based spheres.
29
136
Such as Bank Leumi (1902), Bank Hapoalim (1921), Koor (1944) and Clal (1956).
Since the network structure of the security industry was born out of these conditions, it makes little sense to speak of separate, stable subsystems of private-public configurations. It is better instead to investigate the state-bound mechanisms
of interdependence and the penetration of the state into corporate militarism. The
argument can be made that Israel’s creeping corporate militarism reflects Jessop’s
argument of how the state is compensated by capital’s increased networking and
other forms of public-private partnership in order to ensure the reproduction of
the state’s dominant structures (Jessop 1996, 2004). Following this logic, the Israeli
state organised the dominant classes according to its own productive capacity and
long-term military interests. The state’s character – its having been born out of a
war and in a permanent condition of war or armed peace – allowed the new state
structure to mobilise both the private and public sectors for its own uses. The birth
of Israel’s defence and security giants was vital to this process.
The birth of the giants
From Israel’s early state formation years, the emergence of the largest defence
and security companies has been decisive in determining Israel’s path in the inevitable direction of economic success. As in the case of the IMI, the development
of these companies’ products and ownership structures has paralleled that of the
Israeli state. The composition, path of development, and production circles of
these giants reflect the core features of the industry’s key structures and of the
­socio-economic history of Zionism in general. The individual foundation and
trajectory of each of these security giants in material terms and as a sort of technological folklore echoes the path of the Israeli security industry vis-à-vis the broader
scheme of state building. As part of the building project, the giants – publicly
traded Elbit Systems, IAI, Rafael Armament Development Authority and IMI –
were formed in close synergy with both state industry and military needs.
Today, IAI, Rafael, and IMI remain state-owned and are deeply entangled with
the very structure of the state. In 2007, it was estimated that over 95 per cent of
defence material produced in Israel is manufactured by six companies, whereas
90 per cent of all export is produced by four of the giants (Sandler 2007)30. From
their establishment, the defence companies were almost all owned by the state
or under the direct control of the Defense Ministry as an ancillary unit. These
include Rafael and IMI, and those under less strict control such as Israeli Aircraft
Industries and its subsidiaries such as Elta. Fewer, but some companies, such as
Tadiran and Soltam, were under the control of the Histradut.
30
IAI, Rafael, Koor Industries, Tadiran, and Elbit Systems appear on the list of the 100 biggest
defence companies in the world (Peled 2001).
137
At the time of their inception, few of the security giants were in private hands;
if they were, they were often in some kind of partnership with the Histradut. The
giants’ ownership structures are emblematic of what Jessop (2004) describes in
the strategic-relational approach to the study of state practice. He argues that it
has become clear how the state is compensated by capital’s resort to networking
and other forms of public-private partnerships to ensure its reproduction and
requirements (Jessop 2004). Israel’s industrial companies, including the security giants, reflect this strategic duality of private-public alliance building. These
configurations have accelerated the development of new, improved systems and
products, and played a substantial role in the industrial, technological, and economic progress of the country and its national security.
Zionist pioneers, elite networks and defence legends:
The case of IAI and Elbit
From early on, the state controlled the allocation of key economic resources
such as land and other natural resources (Levi-Faur 1998). The Defense Ministry’s
initial strategy was to place most defence production under its control (Barnett
1990). From the outset, Israel sought to retain defence production under the
auspices of the state by providing MoD contacts only to state enterprises. State
agencies were extensively involved in promoting economic change and growth,
acting as central agents of development and modernisation (Levi-Faur 1998;
Maman 2002). The development of the industrial infrastructure of the Israeli
developmental state was determined by the broader and political logic of building
and consolidating the state and its economy according to Zionist or ‘ethnic’ principles and interests (Shalev 1992). Reluctance to rely on the free market led the
state elites in the 1950s and 1960s to set up different organisational measures that
together with import substitution and the state’s re-distribution of capital enabled
the emergence of business groups that focused on developing the security sector.
These (security and defence) business groups enjoyed protection from competition
with multinational corporations31 because the state-led economy did not pursue
deep internationalisation at this stage, preferring to develop strong national industries instead (Barnett 1996).
By 1950, the workforce in the defence facilities had reached 5,000. The aircraft
maintenance facility Bedek was established in 1953 as a department within the
31
138
According to a study of 66 countries, Israel, despite its laws and regulations designed to attract
foreign investment, ranked second lowest in the proportion of wholly foreign-owned firms
(Mardon 1990).
Ministry of Defense, specialising in maintaining and repairing military aircraft.
Israel’s aviation industry and another giant, IAI,32 started to develop outside Israel.
IAI was founded in 1953 by the legendary Al Schwimmer, who was a Jewish,
US-born, a Lockheed Martin technician, and a former WWII aviation fighter.
During the 1948 war, Schwimmer decided to use his connections in the US
aviation industry to assist the pre-state Jewish militias in smuggling American
military materiel through Europe to Israel. In the coming years, he ran an aircraft
maintenance company in California while intensifying his dialogue with Shimon
Peres, then chief arms buyer for Israel general director of the Ministry of Defence
((The Jewish Daily)) The Forward 2011).
In 1951 Ben-Gurion invited the Schwimmer to Israel, an overture that led to
the establishment of Bedek as the precursor of IAI and Israel’s main hub for military
aviation industry. As the cooperation bore fruit, the company was founded in 1953
under the name Bedek. In close cooperation with the technical university Technion
in Haifa, Schwimmer’s enterprise paved the way for a whole new engineering field
in Israel. Thus, without third party investment dollars, Peres and Ben-Gurion had
managed to recruit an American Jew to provide one of the biggest long-term jolts
to Israel’s economy. Schwimmer became CEO of Israel’s aviation industry and
remained in that position until 1978. In many of the accounts of Israeli military
history, he stands out as a key person of the Marhal, the pioneering volunteers.
By 1960, Bedek (the precursor of IAI) was producing a modified version of the
French Fouga fighter plane33.
While IAI’s trajectory illustrates how the force of ingathering the exiled played
into techno-national development, the path of security giant Elbit’s success rests
on a different trajectory. While IAI was a key vector in state-based military production, Elbit, now Israel’s largest private defence and security company, grew
out of an alliance between Israel’s financial and military industrial forces. Prior
to founding Elron, the holding company of defence giant Elbit, Uzia Galil, a
pioneer Israeli entrepreneur, had been the head of the Electronic Department of
the Faculty of Physics at Technion (1957–1962), Head of Electronic Research in
32
33
On 6 November 2006, IAI changed its corporate name from ‘Israel Aircraft Industries Ltd.’
to ‘Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd.’ to more accurately reflect the current scope of the firm’s
business activities, which includes not just aircraft, but also systems, satellites, and launchers, as
well as maritime and ground systems (Israeli Aerospace Industries 2012).
IAI has for more than 60 years supplied advanced systems for the MoD and the IDF. With a
current export rate of 80 per cent of its products to more than 50 countries and 30 subsidiaries
worldwide, the wholly state-owned IAI has grown into a leading developer and producer of advanced defence and aerospace systems and stands as the flagship of the Israeli security industry.
139
the Israeli Navy (1954–1957), and had once worked in R&D for Motorola in
Chicago (1953–54). Galil explained in an interview conducted in December 2007
that in the late 1950s he concluded that there was a need to confront the common
idea that agriculture was the future of the Israeli economy. As he explained in the
interview he felt instead that there was a potential for transforming IDF military
research goals into a knowledge-based economy (Galil in Baal-Schem 2007).
Through generous support from the Rockefeller Venture Fund in 1962, Galil
founded the first high-tech multinational holding company based in Israel: ­Elron
Electronics. After its inception, the Elron Group was involved in setting up more
than thirty companies. Elbit grew out of the Elron Group and was tied to the
Discount Bank founded in the Yishuv in 1935 by Leon Recanati, a Greek billionaire and head of the Greek Jewish community. Elbit soon merged with the
Histradut-owned Bank Hapoalim. In 1966, Galil teamed up with Dan Tolokowsky
from the Discount Bank Corporation34 and Michael Doron, the Israeli financial
representative in the US, to found the Elbit Computers. In the same year, then
Deputy Foreign Minister Peres convinced Galil to produce minicomputers for
defence applications, which culminated in a joint venture between Israel’s Ministry
of Defence and Elbit. (The Ministry of Defence and Elbit owned half of Elbit’s
shares; the other half was in the hands of Elron.) The MoD transferred staff with
military and technological expertise to the company, invested considerable start-up
funds, and gave Elbit the initial contract. Elbit Systems was formally established
in 1977 in Haifa in northern Israel. Today, the company is a major business group
producing arms and sophisticated security technology, and is largely considered
one of the founding pillars of Israel’s high-tech sector35.
To summarise: the early Israeli developmental state model was characterised by
its extensive and deep control of capital mobilisation and resource allocation. As
these cases illustrate, the industrial development policies of the 1950s and 1960s
were implemented by the state through a close alliance between capital elites, key
entrepreneurs, and the state’s military agencies.
34
35
140
Today, Tolkowsky is known as ‘the father of venture capital funds’ in Israel. The financier
co-founded the Athena Fund, which was the one of the first funds in Israel to make a large
number of investments in high-tech start-ups.
Today, Elbit employs 11,000 people worldwide, has subdivisions in more than 15 countries,
and exports more than 70 per cent of its production.
Expansive military production
During the period of the establishment of the security giants’ industrial configurations, the IDF increasingly strengthened its role of determining standards for
the industry and acting as the prime customer of security products. The emergence
of a strong military machine consumed a large part of the GDP of the nascent
state – approximately 5.7 per cent in 1953, 16 per cent from 1956-1975, and
30 per cent of GDP two years after the 1973 Yom Kippur War (Bassok 2014).
However, while such an expense might seem to be a burden, it also made fundraising from the diaspora easier. Public support and volunteer projects supported
the military with funds such as the Defenders Fund – Keren Hamagen – in the
1950s. Concurrently, while receiving support from external sources, particularly
imperialist powerss in the 1950s, large firms began to accumulate huge amounts
of capital from state developmental budgets that constitute a major instrument
in executing state developmental policy. Throughout the 1960s in particular, this
materialised in the subsidising of loans to approved investments, many of which
were granted to the military/security industry (especially metal and electronics).
These subsidies were not only key to the growth of the sector, but also accelerated
the consolidation of business groups (Maman 2002: 747–748).
The Sinai War in 1956 brought to Israel a rapid inflow of tanks, jet fighters,
helicopters, and new communication systems that led to the rapid growth of
maintenance facilities. The long-term preparation and public mobilisation for
the military campaign, and the nature of the battlefield itself, consolidated the
character of the IDF as a mass army whose practices that blurred the distinction
between military and civil industry (Ben-Eliezer 1995). The latter necessitated
both large foreign currency expenditures to purchase weapons and diversion of
the productive labour force, which resulted in a loss of national production. These
factors also stimulated the economy, as production was galvanised to meet both
defence and consumer needs.
During this same period, Israel relied on external military aid in the form of a
unique international conjuncture of support from the US and the USSR and from
the 1950s, a strong military alliance with France, which was fighting its own war in
the colonial frontier of Algeria (Lockman 2012)36. During this same period, France
sold advanced aircraft, armoured vehicles, naval craft, and other weapons to Israel.
36
Lockmann (2012a) argues that it is worth recalling that Ben-Gurion and his colleagues
refrained from trying to conquer the remainder of Mandatory Palestine in 1948–49. This was
not because they preferred a smaller Israel, but because they wanted a demographically more
concise Jewish state, and much less of a principled commitment to share any land with its Arab
inhabitants (Lockman 2012).
141
Shalev demonstrates that during the period from 1948 until mid-1960s, Israel’s
economy was marked by rapid growth. To a large extent, this was due to large war
reparations from Germany and the influx of resources from newly arrived, wealthy
immigrants (Shalev 1998). Between 1949 and 1985, Israel received more than 33
billion USD, most of it after 1973 (Maman 2002: 747). Between 1953 and 1964,
Israel received about 800 million USD in German reparations; between 1948 and
1990, it received 7 billion USD in donations from world Jewry. Most of the US
support was in military loans and grants (20 billion USD), and a smaller part
consisted of economic loans and grants (10 billion USD). In addition, the French
provided the Dimona nuclear reactor and technological knowledge for the Israeli
ballistic missile program. The French also agreed to provide Israel with technological assistance for the licensed production of combat fighters and trainers. All this
generated a major transition in the development of local arms capabilities. This
support structure of reparations and military support made Israel a unique case
in the Middle East as it continued to build an economy financed by imperialism
without being economically exploited by it (Eisenstadt 1967; Lockwood 1972).
To summarise: the first two decades of industrial development in the nascent
Israeli state created an institutional environment marked by both the involvement
of foreign investors and heavy state allocation of resources to the military sector
through a protected developmental economy in close alliance with strong, private capital forces. This configured into a governing system based on strong state
mobilisation of capital around alliances with the military-industrial elites of the
defence giants.
4.6 Post-1967: a new impetus and restructuring
The 1967 Six-day War rejuvenated an opening of the colonial frontier in new terms
and ways (Shafir and Peled 2002). A total of 300,000 Palestinians left the West Bank
or were deported during or immediately after the war (Masalha 1992; Ron 2003;
Segev 2007). Israel conquered and occupied the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem,
the Golan Heights (from Syria), and the Sinai (from Egypt), and installed military
administrations in the conquered territories without incorporating the residents of
the areas into Israel (Gordon 2008). The geopolitical ramifications of the post-1967
reality set in motion new incentives for the Israeli security industry.
Adjustment to the new reality meant that the state-based industrial entrepreneurs reinvigorated the ambitious strategy of making Israel more self-sufficient
in defence supply. Shalev speaks of a ‘1967 system’ as a new axis for the state: the
Israeli military-industrial complex became based increasingly on local military
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procurement, and on US funding of Israel’s foreign purchases of arms as the occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza spurred economic military
growth along new lines (Shalev 1998). This shift was of part of what Barnett
(1990) has referred to as a two-faced strategy: intensifying preparations for confrontations with an external enemy and increased engagement in a regional arms
race (Mintz 1989) while mobilising societal resources (Barnett 1990). A third
dimension can be added to Barnett’s list: equipping IDF’s operations in the OPT
with technology suited to changing needs.
The acceleration of military production was driven by the IDF’s military needs
and reconfigurations in the overall structure of the Israeli economy. At the same
time, production was furthered by the enhanced goal of developing an independent security economy intensified by an explicit doctrine of military self-sufficiency.
The latter was clearly strengthened throughout the 1960s and took on an air of
necessity because of the French decision to place an arms embargo on Israel in
1967 (Barnett 1990; Mintz 1985)37. The goals of necessity and autarky led Israel
to pursue an economic policy of non-reliance on foreign elements for security material and equipment (Sheffer and Barak 2010) and consequently, a restructuring
of defence production.
To begin with, the French embargo triggered a massive governmental program
to support the domestic security industry and reduce dependency on foreign technology. This happened both through an increased support to state industries such
as IMI and Koor and by abandoning the reluctance to support a private industry. Israel initiated programs for the indigenous production of advanced aircraft,
tanks, naval craft, as well as tactical and strategic missiles, electronics, and other
subsystems. These schemes led to more resources becoming available for the defence industries. In this way, economic progress (entailing economic liberalisation,
decentralisation, and exposure to competition) and security coalesced in the eyes
of Israel’s leadership, which embarked on long-term investment in private defence
companies and the encouragement of private-public defence ventures.
From 1960 to 1967, Israeli imports totalled approximately 58 per cent of
domestic military consumption (Derouen 2000). After the 1967 Six-day War
and perhaps more so after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when military production
cemented its central role in the Israeli economy, the need for a national and
self-sufficient defence industry increased. After its 1967 victory, Israel began to
37
De Gaulle’s France cut off its support following the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory
and its raid on Lebanon in 1968.
143
produce sophisticated weapons systems, including fighter jets, tanks, and missiles,
both for its domestic market and increasingly for exports. At the time, Israel was
devoting about 85 per cent of its military budget to domestic enterprises (Mintz,
Ward, and Bichler 1990).
Israel’s military sector began to intensify its production of light arms and communications equipment. Israel’s defence spending, the share of the gross national
product (GNP), doubled from 10.4 per cent in 1967 to 20.2 per cent in 1969. In
1970, it reached 25.7 per cent, as the government poured massive resources into
R&D. Employment in the defence industry grew from 14,000 in 1966 to 34,000
in 1972. Altogether, the interwar years of 1967 to 1973 saw a huge increase in
Israeli defence spending because of new security requirements, and the push to
optimise national production because of the huge impact of defence production
on the national economy combined with a shift to more expensive US technology.
In the two-year span between 1972 and 1974, Israeli defence spending jumped
approximately 20 per cent as a result of the 1973 War (Derouen 2000).
Clearly, by this point in time, the security industry was functioning as an
essential engine of economic growth. As Barnett explains, in a capitalist context,
interests in expanding the security sector had to extend beyond the capitalist state
to ensure an environment conducive to a militarised economy (Barnett 1990).
Employment in the sector and an emphasis on the external threat were key and
were made possible by the fact that the state still retained a high degree of autonomy to construct its financial policy. The result, in terms of industrial endeavour,
was recognised immediately.
The post-1967 decision to accelerate weapons production altered the sector’s
structure. It was a major turning point for Israel’s military industry and the formation of the sector’s business groups. Firms in the industry enjoyed protection and
preferential treatment by the state. According to Hever, the state used an emergency security status to rapidly push through a neo-liberal reform agenda to diversify
the output of the security production by facilitating the build-up of a market for
private companies to tap into and benefit from (Hever 2010). The recession of
the mid-1960s led to the collapse of smaller security companies, which were then
purchased by larger groups, thus reinforcing the security industry’s hierarchical
pyramid structure (Aharoni 1976; Maman 2002), in which business groups and
holding companies connected to state elites were favoured. Surely, the war made
the developmental role of the government more attractive and attainable. Concurrent with this renewed centralisation of production, Israel became a main hub
of security technology and high-tech for other countries to buy from. One of the
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most significant changes in Israel’s economy following the 1967 war took place in
the country’s government-financed security industry. The defence sector became
instrumental in transforming the Israeli civilian sector into a high-tech sector.
After the War of 1973, the defence industry continued its expansion alongside
the IDF’s accelerated process of weapons acquisition and personnel expansion. The
1973 War sent Israel’s defence budget soaring even higher as Arab countries, flush
with newly acquired petrodollars or aid from oil-exporting states, could now purchase the most advanced weaponry. When the Middle East arms race, exacerbated
by cold war rivalries, took off, Israel’s defence costs reached an annual average of
approximately 32 per cent of GNP for the period of 1973–1976 (Sharaby 2002).
Yet despite this heavy acceleration, Israel’s defence establishment still lacked the
industrial infrastructure and capacities needed to produce advanced weaponry,
which is where the role of the US intensified.
External reliance: Pax Americana and the role of foreign capital
The steady inflow of foreign capital was one of Zionism’s principal sources
of pre-state capital accumulation (Wolfe 2012). Nitzan and Bichler argue that
while the inception of Israel was indeed a product of foreign support, the country
subsequently developed a strong national economy (Nitzan and Bichler, 2002).
However, the inflow of foreign capital was still needed to compensate for the
‘ethnicity over efficiency’ policy and pure market rationality that still haunted the
Israeli economy (Shafir 1996).
Israel’s ostensible strategy of self-reliance was made possible by support from
the US. Its post-1967 political economy was marked by a sharp increase in military
expenditure and a sharp increase in the transfusion of foreign capital, primarily
from the US. Despite the drop in direct foreign military support after 1967, Israel
saw an increase in foreign capital loans. Whereas the pre-1967 inputs of such loans
amounted to 22 per cent of foreign investment in Israel, after 1967, 47 per cent
of investments were loans that intensified Israel’s dependence on external interests.
Israel’s external liabilities as a percentage of its budget rose from 15.4 per cent in
1967 to 26.5 in 1977 (Sella and Yishai 1986). This support helped subsidise Israel’s
expanding defence needs: the Israeli-US alliance was seen as a bulwark against
Soviet expansionism.
According to Davis, this foreign injection of capital was based on massive multi­
national investments concentrating mainly on boosting the military industrial sector (Davis 1977). Thus instead of direct military aid, foreign powers supported
Israel through capital injections that allowed the national system of technological
145
innovation to continue its course. In larger terms, US aid to Israel has been shown
to stimulate investment and tax cuts in the private sector thereby boosting capital
production (McGuire 1987). This US support allowed Israel to slowly but surely
fill out certain niches or areas of expertise, which spurred the blurring of the lines
between the civilian and the defence sector and became a central factor in the
institutionalisation of national arms production (Brzoska 1989; Derouen 2000).
Between 1972 and 1979, US military aid amounted to about one-quarter of
Israel’s total defence consumption. During this period, total defence employment
(including sub-contractors) doubled to 63,000, or more than four procent of the
total work force, most of which was organised in strong unions within the stateowned sector38. At the same time, arms export sales increased 25 times (Cohen,
Eisenstadt, and Bacevich 1998; Klieman 1985; Sadeh 2001).
After the Yom Kippur War, Israel began to realise that the era of war had
ended. The alternative became the adoption of a doctrine that would facilitate
hitting enemy targets without direct battlefield engagement, and a shift towards a
small, smart army. The post-1967 US loans and gifts to Israel were not only about
short-term procurement but also functioned to support the development of the
military-industrial complex by national hands. Needless to say, given the population ratio between Israel and the surrounding Arab states, this initiative was also
a quest for regional technological superiority. The steady external military support
during this period gives credence to Hamish’s argument that until the 1980s and
1990s, most of Israel’s economic relations was an expression of its political relations rather than pure business (Hanieh 2003). The non-economic character of
the transfers – the fact that the money came explicitly for development purposes
rather than for profit – afforded successive Israeli governments considerable leeway
to direct development and subsidise a high standard of living (Sharaby 2002)39. As
Koshav argues, security threats and military escalations in Israel resulted in higher
levels of foreign transfers of financial support, which reflects the general tendency
of contributions from world Jewry to Israel to increase during wartime (Koshav
quoted in Sanbar 1990: 37).
Altogether, the domestication of defence production intensified the character of
the Israeli security industry as a unified yet versatile cluster, where contacts in and
38
39
146
In 1987, IAI had 20,000 workers, IMI 14,000, and Rafael 6,000. The rest (Elbit, El-Op, and
other companies organised under Tadiran) had 12,000 employees combined (Sadeh 2001).
Israel’s privileged access to US and European technology, funding, joint research. Joint projects
have been crucial to the expansion, extent, and depth of the sector.
linkages to Israeli society were cultivated throughout the industry. The national
efforts to secure economic development nurtured stable and reliable relations
between Israeli policy makers, academics, and industrialists that brought about
the formation of successful R&D networks. In 1969, Israel’s military expenditures
amounted to 25 per cent of the country’s GDP and military expenditure tripled
from 1967 to 1971 (Davis 1977). In the 1970s, the MOD absorbed seven per
cent of the nation’s industrial output and a staggering ten per cent of the civilian
labour force directly involved in the production of military goods. These efforts
to upscale also entailed a reorganisation of the Israeli aircraft industry: Israel’s new
capacities turned it into a nearby service centre for US jets already in the region,
and added clients such as Greece, Iran, and Turkey. By 1970, Israel exported
military hardware amounting to 75 million USD to foreign clients. While the
military production in large terms happened with reference to existential security
threats, already in the 1960s the size of the sector reflected a supply channel that
went beyond demands of the home front. As Lockwood describes it:
The rapid expansion of Israel’s arms industry since 1967 offers one of the
most striking refutations of the notion of a “defenceless Israel” (Lockwood
1972: 73).
To summarise: following the wars in 1967 and 1973 and in the context of
geopolitical changes and Israel’s expansive territorial policies, the security industry
saw a rapid increase in spending. This was made possible because of large-scale
modernisation programmes undertaken by the IDF and strategic investments
from the state. Moreover, transnational sources of capital have in a number of
ways amassed into the subsectors of the military and security industry and the
broader high-tech economy of Israel. Over the next ten years the security industry
consolidated further along this pattern.
The ‘economic peace’ of the Oslo Accords
The sigtning of Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt in 1978, the
two Palestinian Intifadas and the Oslo Accords between Israeli and the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO) had a profound influence on the Israeli state’s control regime and the security industry. Israel’s cold peace with Egypt scaled down
militray provisions at its southers borders. In 1987 the First Intifada erupted and
ended with the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, while the Second Intifada
erupted in 2001 among those disappointed with the outcomes of Oslo. Both
revolts rested on public mobilisation against the Israeli occupation constituted by
violent and armed and non-violent and non-armed resistance. However, while the
First Intifada is generally considered to have been more grassroots- oriented and
147
less militarised, the Second Intifada was co-opted by elite political movements,
such as Fatah, the growing Islamist movement, and the Hamas party, and altered
through the deployment of arms. It was also in the course of the Second Intifada
that Palestinian militants upscaled their suicide terrorist attacks against civilian
Israeli targets.
These developments transformed the nature of the battle between the IDF and
Palestinians. Ben Eliezer has termed Israel’s current modes of confrontation, which
arose in the Intifadas as ‘new wars’. These are technologised and asymmetrical
battles between state and non-state actors, but perhaps just as important, much
like guerrilla warfare, they show no clear boundaries between times of war and
peace (Ben-Eliezer 2012).
The Middle East peace process to end the First Intifada began with the Madrid
Conference in 1991 and continued through to the 1993 Oslo Declaration and
the 1994 peace treaty with Jordan. The Oslo Accords were produced under the
auspices of the international community and signed as an interim agreement to
institutionalise quasi-autonomous Palestinian self-rule in the OPT (East Jerusalem
excluded). Defenders of Oslo often describe the set-up as a failed attempt to push
for progress through confidence building measures and the granting of gradual
autonomy to the PLO. Critics have argued that the Accords served to undermine
Palestinian rights and provide legitimacy to the Israeli occupation by accepting de
facto the continuing occupation (while ‘building confidence’) and implementing
measures that would rupture and fragment Palestinian territory through zoning
systems. In practical terms, the Accords included the installation of measures of
Palestinian self-policing ingrained in the security agreement between the parties as
well as the consolidation of a Palestinian dependency economy regulated by Israel.
In short, the Oslo Accords enacted a vocabulary of peace building, while in
practice imposing a range of new opportunities for governing the Palestinians under
occupation (notably the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA)
and massive international donor funding scheme). At the same time, it helped liberalise the Israeli economy through privatisation efforts and state investments and
also helped Israel become one of if not the most technologically advanced country
in the region. This provided ample opportunities for the Israeli government to
take advantage of its new place on the international scene and the correspondingly
accelerated international flows of capital into the country. These major events have
in turn shaped and formed the path of the security industry.
Despite the effects of the First Intifada in the late 1980s, Israel saw enormous
economic growth spurred by mass immigration and foreign investment. The in-
148
tensification of attacks on Israeli civilians during this First Intifada did not curb
Israel’s industrial activity40. Because the majority of the international diplomatic
community embraced the peace process, the Accords provided the opportunity for
Israel to advance its participation in the global economy and intensify its foreign
trade (Bouillon 2004; Shafir and Yoav 2000; Shafir 2005). During the 1990s,
Israel became one of the world’s largest per capita importer-exporters, in part as
a result of the Oslo Accords. In this way one of the spin-off effects of the Middle
East peace process was a rapid increase in the flow of foreign direct investment
(FDI) to Israel, expansion of its industrial zones, and further development of its
infrastructure and communications (Frenkel 2001).
What is more, throughout the 1990s Israel experienced substantial economic
growth powered by massive immigration from the former Soviet Union41 and a
dynamic high-tech sector, both of which operated under the relatively favourable
geopolitical climate of the Oslo Accords. On the ground in Israel-Palestine, the
Oslo process created peace dividends for the elites, including those in the Israeli
private sector (Bouillon 2004). In fact, the liberal peace paradigm of the 1990s
(Richmond 2011) embraced by the Oslo Accords led elites to push for ‘peace dividends’42 through a kind of conflict management scheme that enabled production
to circulate into global markets despite the absence of a political solution (Bouillon
2004). As Richmond argues, the liberal peace paradigm in this post-conflict period
led to the ‘resecuritisation’ of conflicts because of the paradigm’s goal of managing rather than addressing political and social ‘root causes’ or the core structural
impediments to peace. In effect, this reproduced Israel’s normative and political
hierarchies (Richmond 2011). In fact, the continuing Israeli state’s colonisation
and occupation did not have much direct influence on the development of its
economy. Moreover, Israel’s physical infrastructure was largely insulated from the
fighting, and its ‘intellectual’ infrastructure did not provide a ready target for
attack (Sharaby 2002).
40
41
42
According to Sharaby (2002), the nature of terrorism and the fact that it aims at psychological
rather than physical destruction.
Since the early 1990’s, around one million Russian-speaking Jews have moved to Israel,
­increasing the country’s Jewish population by 20 per cent.
The term ‘peace dividend’ was deployed by regional key actors and external core powers that
were engaged in conflict resolution (Ben-Porat 2006). Ben-Porat suggests that globalisation
affected both national conflicts and subsequent peace studies, which began to focus on the
potential for economic incentives to promote peace.
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Paradoxically, the dead-ended diplomatic track of the Accords renewed and
enhanced Israel’s diplomatic relations. Rather than solving the conflict, it seems
that the diplomatic overtures of the Oslo period facilitated the upholding of Israel’s
ongoing territorial expansion43.
In the wake of the Oslo peace process, the IDF pursued efforts to create a ‘leaner and smarter’ force, with changes in structure, missions, conscription policy, and
budgeting (Cohen, 1995: 1). The then IDF Chief of Staff Ehud Barak envisioned
the creation of an IDF with less foot soldiers and more advanced technology.
Barak’s well-known vision was not unique to the IDF, but it does underline the
immediate centrality of the goal of scientific innovation to ensure Israel’s military
superiority. In part, the shift from boots on the ground to smarter, learner practices
was made possible by the political structure that resulted from the Oslo Accords.
This structure effectively transferred the human and economic resources from
Palestinian political activism and resistance to the collaborative Israeli-Palestinian
project of stability and security measures aimed at keeping the Oslo opponents at
bay while securing Israeli interests.
This development made the outbreak of conventional war less likely, and required a broadening of defence production to include more subtle security technology and increased focus on export. Thus, the Israeli production apparatus had
to strike a fine balance between upholding stability and managing the occupation.
With the new political geography brought about by Oslo, new systems, such
as border crossings and zoning data registration (more hereof in the remaining
chapters), shifted much of the centre of gravity for Israeli military production to
homeland security, software, border security, and surveillance. The security sector’s
changing needs on the domestic front led Israel into the market of homeland
security, risk management through surveillance, digital techniques of population
management and technology, and systems for asymmetrical warfare such as unmanned aerial vehicles. Thus it was that war and peace amalgamated in this era
of liberal peace. As the empirical chapters unfold later in this thesis, more warfare
and policing provided the Israeli military forces with new features and logics that
had a tremendous effect on the qualitative nature of security production and its
organisational structure.
43
150
Crocker and Hampsons characterise the basic criteria of success of ‘liberal peace’ as support to
structures that discourage the parties from taking up arms again (Crocker and Hampson 1996).
In the heyday of the Oslo Accords, managers and owners of newer private security companies took advantage of favourable economic environments created by
the Israeli state. With the scaling down of Israel’s defence budget in the post-Oslo
period, thousands of skilled workers left the army to form the base of start-ups,
which found a receptive business environment that had been consolidated as
a result of sustained government deregulation, privatisation, and liberalisation
since 1985 (Ben-Porat 2006; Hanieh 2003; Shalev 1998). The burgeoning sector
of start-ups of the 1990s attracted intense flows of foreign capital, which in turn
spurred the emergence of new business groups in the security sector. By 1997,
150 of the largest industrial corporations in Israel (based on sales) included ten
firms in the defence sector, two of which were among the largest five (Dan and
Bradstreet in Peled 2001: 4). Thus, the relative optimism of the Oslo years provided a cover-up for corporate peace dividends, while the move towards a high-tech
economy provided a way to redistribute income and wealth.
By the mid-2000s, around half of the 100 largest companies listed on the Tel
Aviv Stock Exchange and almost all of the 25 largest companies were controlled by
large business groups (Kosenko 2007). This suggests that the normalising features
of the Oslo Accords remilitarised the economy into a security economy based on
both low- and high-tech strategies that strengthened deeper ties to the civilian
high-tech sector. The state successfully pushed groups, particularly within the
security industry, to engage in joint ventures, which minimised the risks for those
involved and enabled a smoother reallocation of capital. In turn, this shifted the
balance of power so that the state has increasingly come to depend on their organisation and production.
In the 1990s and 2000s, the growth of the high-tech economy was considered
the locomotive of the entire Israeli economy. Its share of the GDP grew from eight
per cent in 1995 to 14 per cent in 2007, and the share of high-tech manufacturing
exports grew (Maman and Rosenhek 2012). The level of foreign direct investment
exploded and became a pronounced component of the economy, totalling more
than 7 billion USD between 1993 and 1997, and hitting a record high in 2000 of
almost 5 billion USD for that year alone. At the same time, Israel’s high-tech industry went global, providing the third highest number of initial purchase offerings
(IPOs) on the NASDAQ in New York, after the United States and Canada, and
the second highest number on London’s Alternative Investment Market, behind
Britain. In the 1990s, a number of annual Middle East-North Africa (MENA)
economic summits brought Israelis together with representatives from Arab governments and businesses. This high level participation of Israel in international
summits lent the country a sense of legitimacy as an economic partner and may
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have helped assuage fears about its precarious position in the region. It also may
have helped to increase incoming foreign direct invetsment flows (Bouillon 2004;
Hanieh 2008). Peled argues that Israel, as an effect of the state’s neoliberalisation
reforms in late 1980s experienced a sizable consolidation of defence combined
with a much greater reliance on outsourcing and subcontracting of both production and R&D among defence contractors (Peled 2001). This in turn spurred
an increased use of commercial technologies in military applications, mostly IT,
which today plays a central strategic and tactical role in modern armed forces.
Within this context, steadily larger shares of R&D and applications of advanced
technologies came to be performed and funded by the private sector (Peled 2001).
Around 2004, the peace dividend discourse was replaced by a new discourse –
that the effect of Israel’s occupation and the unresolved situation with the Palestinians had only an insignificant effect on the Israeli economy (Sharaby 2002). This
confirmed the argument of the Israeli political and economic elite that neo-liberal
policies can lead to prosperity despite conflicts (Landau 2008: 98). Israel’s private
security entrepreneurs thrived in a neoliberal environment of overlapping networks produced by small communities, common army service, and geographic
proximity. The Israeli stock market increasingly conflated with the international
stock markets. In 2006, 46 per cent of Israel’s net industrial exports (excluding
diamonds) were classified as high-tech exports (ICBS 2008B). Clearly, while the
changing international context of Israel-Palestine affected Israel’s political economy, national production was still based on the demands from the field, i.e. the
steady yet constant need for innovation and production of new refined technologies. Rather than globalising the innovation process, the internationalisation of
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict provided new opportunities for the Israeli security
industry, and the financialisation of the economy became key.
From third world villainy to Silicon Wadi
Within the realm of defence and security, Israel’s international involvement
was not a new phenomenon. For the past 50 years, Israel has been engaged with
and selling arms to repressive third world regimes, thus asserting its role in warfare
abroad (Beit-Hallahmi 1987). Throughout the 60s, state officials, private ventures,
and the Histradut’s Afro-Asian Institute sought to direct cooperation with and
military aid to countries such as South Africa, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Bolivia, Ecuador,
Costa Rica, and Singapore. In this way, through non-diplomatic economic ties,
Israel re-established relationships with oil- and mineral-rich countries that had
been tarnished in the wake of the 1967 war. This internationalisation strategy
espoused pragmatism and opportunism with little or no guiding policy hand
(Africa Research Group 1970). These are only a few examples, but they serve to
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highlight how changes in Israel production schemes and the political economy
of the security-technology sector have moved from being characterised by more
conventional trade and aid policies to a more consolidated way of building transnational business ties through financialisation, capital investment, and R&D.
Since the 1990s, Israel has emerged not only as a favourite destination for
high-tech investors, money managers, and the illegal flight of capital, but also as
the source of much capital outflow, with locally based capitalists acquiring assets
outside their countries (Nitzan and Bichler 2002). In 1997, then Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu described the synergy between military and private activity:
Israel is now enjoying a ‘swords into silicon chips’ trend as its military
industrial sector casts spinoffs and externalities into the private sector
(Netanyahu 1997, quoted in DeRouen 2000: 70; Netanyahu 2007).
In the Israeli economic ecosystem, the combination of transnationalised capital,
the national-security state, and the military industrial complex constitute a successful marriage with the business model ingrained in the financial operations and
marketing mechanisms of neoliberal governance44. Neoliberalism can be explained
briefly as a strategy of accumulation, a political project of restoring capitalist state
power by liberating capital from its constraints through a programme of marketisation and privatisation (de Graaff and van Apeldoorn 2010). It is a form of
deregulation that works both as an ideology and a governance practice bound up
in processes of globalisation whose enabling feature is financialisation. The neoliberalisation of the Israeli economy has reconfigured the Israeli security industry
by linking ownership structures and offshore exports to the interests and growth
strategies of the most globalised transnational corporations and armed forces, in
particular those representing global financial capital. The Israeli state’s embrace of
neoliberalism has resulted specifically in its raising investment funds from abroad
for its high-tech ventures (de Fontenay and Carmel 2001).
Frenkel demonstrates how Israel’s clustering of high- and medium-tech companies in its metropolitan zones because the spatial concentration impact on the
high-level of innovation has strengthened Israel’s competitive edge (Frenkel 2001).
The availability of information resources, the vicinity to research institutions and
44
The path to high-tech has coincided with Israel’s steady privatising and outsourcing of security
that began in the 1980s. Hever points to three cases of outsourcing or privatisation of the South
Lebanese Army (founded in 1979 and collapsed in 2000), the Palestinian National Authority
(1993) and increasingly, the private HLS industry (Hever 2010).
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other areas radiating an air of success, and the government’s policies of making
regions attractive to high-tech firms were all factors that led to the success of hightech clusters (Felsenstein 1996; Frenkel, Shefer, and Roper 2001; Frenkel 2001).
Within the last decade, the overlay of foreign investments, clustering of high-tech
ventures, and financialisation of the Israeli economy have spurred what is referred
to as ‘Silicon Wadi’, Israeli moniker for its technology cluster. (Wadi means canyon
or gorge in Hebrew and Arabic.) This cluster of high- and medium-tech companies is essentially a clone of California’s Silicon Valley and is structured around: 1)
public and private R&D support and incubators, 2) investments – the injection
of foreign capital and venture capital and international collaboration projects
such as with Motorola, Lockheed Martin, Apple and Hewlett Packard or with
research institutions such as Brown and Yale universities and foreign militaries.
Currently, Cisco, Microsoft, Google, Apple, IBM, Oracle, Motorola, Facebook,
and EBay have research centres located in Israel, 3) a strong military sector production scheme.
The notion of the wadi refers to geographical areas around Tel Aviv in particular, and smaller clusters such as Ra’anana, Petah Tikva, Herzliya, Netanya, and
Israel’s first private city, ‘Airport City’ (located next to Ben-Gurion Airport) that
have a high concentration of high-tech industries. Wadi also refers to the functions
and roots of the cluster of companies and actors with close ties to elite echelons of
the state and the military. Over the last 20 years, California’s technology industry
has channelled billions of dollars into Israeli high-tech (especially venture capital)
firms. For example, in 1996, Israeli firms raised over 1 billion USD from Wall
Street (Album 1997), while more than 70 Israeli technical firms trade on US stock
exchanges (Rapaport 1998). Today, venture capital firms such as California-based
Accel and Sequoia are grand players in the Israeli economy (Bond-Graham 2014).
In 2007, venture capital firms invested USD 1.76 billion in Israel according
to the OECD, in 2012, Israel received 1.846 billion USD in direct investment
from US investors (Bond-Graham 2014; OECD 2013)45. This flow of capital is
principally digital and transmitted as stocks, currency, and intellectual property.
International capital has also and perhaps especially penetrated the security sector
through investments and the export of techniques and technologies, a pattern that
will be discussed in greater detail later. However, the implications of Israel’s global
reach go well beyond quantitative measures.
45
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This is approximately two thirds of the total military aid to Israel that the US government
provided Israel in the same year.
4.7 Conclusion
To paraphrase Foucault, the history of the Israeli security industry is a colonial genealogy of modernity. While periods of relative peace are not conducive to growth
in the Israeli security industry, this is not concrete evidence that Israeli goes to
war in the pursuit of profit. Rather, this chapter has shown that the trajectory of
the Israeli security industry is a history of technological nationalism informed and
directed by a wide range of conditions, ideas, and events. Fundamentally, Israel’s
efforts to realise its national dream of a Jewish state operates through a settler
colonial structure that makes innovation a key vector for the normative choices
that shape the country’s endeavours. A key node in this course is the national
movement’s dual goal of transforming national community into state practice and
to settle and develop acquired land.
Three basic conditions have been decisive for the development of the industry: First, Israeli security economy has concomitantly been both a shaper of, and
shaped by broader developments in the Israeli economy; its network structure,
globalised features, and geopolitical reconfigurations are central to its settler colonial project. Second, the ideological impetus of Zionism has been informed by,
and has informed vectors of economic organisation. Third, the cluster structure
of the industry has – as a variant of a triple helix system – benefitted from the
close institutional and informal personal links between state, military, and the
private sector.
The Israeli security economy has grown from Zionism’s conclusion that permanent war was a necessary modality for national survival. Practices of kinship
relations – horizontal networks of comrade relations –­ shape the platform from
which national and economic interests are articulated. The deep-rooted militarisation of the Israeli economy has sustained a security innovation network where
knowledge from the field and scientific laboratories are mutually beneficiary and
work as a synergetic two-way street. The bias of the Israeli security is to be found in
the co-imbrication of Zionism’s national vision and the concrete efforts of merging
national community and state interests and practice.
Altogether, Israel’s security establishment, including its private sector, has consistently upheld a comparative advantage anchored in its colonial experiences while
saturating the IDF with sophisticated technology. The collaborative effort between
companies, state institutions, and the IDF is the spine of the Israeli national
system of innovation that is tied to territory and the ideational aspirations of the
settler colonial movement. The system’s political bias constructs the industry as
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a distinct economy based on ethnic capital. Techno-conceptual shifts rely on the
negotiation between material and ideational forces in the colonial settler project.
With reference to the theoretical framework calling for social explanations of technology, which the next section further unfolds, it has become clear that the idea of
the nation lies at the heart of innovation, science, and technological production.
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157
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CHAPTER FIVE
5.0 SECURITISED NATIONALISM, TECHNO-SCIENCE, AND WAR
5.1 Introduction
‘If you will it, it is no fable’ (Herzl 1998 (1902).
These are famous words from Herzl’s nearly Orwellian vision of a Jewish state
in Palestine. In his utopian novel Altneuland, published in 1902, Zionism’s founding father Theodor Herzl pictured the future Jewish state as a pluralist, advanced
society (Herzl 1992 (1902)), a sort of a ‘light into nations’ (Efron 2011). The
Zionist ideologue envisioned a new society that was to rise in the ‘Land of Israel’
to advance science and technology as part of developing the land and building
the state’s institutions. Herzl’s fable has become a symbol of the Zionist vision of
how to create, in his words, a ‘western yet Jewish capitalist miniature state’ (Herzl
1987(1902))
This chapter shows how Herzl’s vision of a modernising state through scien­
tific progress has informed the both settler colonial and hypermodern features of
­Zionism. It examines the ways in which science, innovation, and entrepreneurship
have been and continue to be cornerstones of the Israeli knowledge economy and
how they express a settler colonial techno-nationalism. This includes a discussion
of the formation and role of frontier institutions and how the scientific echelons
of Israeli society play a central role in nurturing the Israeli security industry and
in the overall framing of the settler colonial project. The chapter substantiates the
argument that scientific innovation and the production of technology have been
at the core of the Israel’s colonial enterprise and have helped shape the progression
of a ubiquitous security-war-technology nexus. It also examines how the push for
scientific progress and wealth accumulation has laid the groundwork and provided
the resources for the security economy. The chapter argues that science and innovation has enabled the development of technologies and has also rationalised the
colonial process, thus helping frame the political project of Zionist state building
as a progressive endeavour.
5.2 Science, settler colonialism and Zionism
Even before the inception of the state of Israel, science was the centrepiece of
pre-state military innovation. It was central to the Zionist security ethos and
has consistently figured at the heart of the nation’s self-image as a key force in
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Zionism’s broader colonial pursuit of territory. During this period, science took
a leading role as an ideological force in creating an entitlement to the land. As
Efron adeptly shows, in order to ‘shape the progressiveness’ of the Zionist state
building project, Zionist pioneers would ‘capture the land through science and
technology’ as a matter of principle and practice (Efron 2011: 417). By invoking
the ethos of a scientific nationalism, Israel (like other nations) established the idea
that nationalism is an unproblematic, even progressive force.
While visions and narratives of rationalised scientific progress are common
features of modern nationalisms, a central element of the Zionist project has
been centred on a premise of nation building as a ‘civilizing mission’ (see Elias
1995). In a settler colonial context, knowledge of the population and its territory
is particular information organised to achieve power driven by interests. It is also
a tool to legitimise the ideology of settler colonies that enables the transformation
from ‘perceived’ to ‘conceived’ colonial space. In fact, Samman argues, in the case
of the transformation of Palestine’s colonial urban space, ‘it is the upper political
level of the political structure of the colonial state, which decides what knowledge
is needed’ (Samman 2013: 27). Moreover, science was also used by Zionists elites
to shape the justificatory discourses that underpin the political intent behind the
colonial undertaking.
Zionism has traditionally emphasised the value of the scientific as an expression of self-reliance. Israel’s ‘modernity’ and ‘post-exilic’ identity has ensured that
the Israeli state has ‘historically invested in institutions and positions of technical
expertise’ (Efron 2007: 224). In the case of Israeli state making, the relationship
between science and social formation has served to shape and form the settler colonial rule as a dominant logic marked by discourses of and calls for modernisation.
The relationship between science and Zionism has also been marked by the
particular circumstances of Israeli state making. In the course of an interview
conducted for this thesis’ research, Gillam Keinan, Director of International Marketing at the Israeli Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor, emphasised the early
challenges of uniting science and military production:
In this country, in the beginning of the 50s, one could identify a very
advanced research and development in the military, and a very advanced
research and development in the universities, but the security industry
had nothing to do with that. The major problem was that the people that
worked in the industry at that time, did not know to communicate with
the people in the military R&D, or with the people in the universities.
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Everybody was trying to tell me that our future was in agriculture. I did
not believe it. I believed that in the long run what was happening in the
States, where people from the universities, were also setting up start-ups
and business would also happen in Israel. And finally it did (Interview
with Gillam Keinan, Jerusalem, 28 August 2012).
Keinan’s words reflect the much-celebrated entrepreneurial foundation of Israeli
economic prosperity.
The lack of shared national tradition and experience posed a number of challenges for the Zionist pioneers as they settled in Palestine. However, these were
largely compensated by the resources harvested from the experiences and capacities in the various milieus of the Jewish diaspora. According to Beit-Hallahmi,
this multifaceted cradle of resources formed the foundation of the success of the
military in the nascent state of Israel through the help of modern science and
technology (Beit-Hallahmi 1993a). Two primary conditions enabled this: first,
Jews in this new setting experienced less discrimination than in more traditional
societal structures. But once the new immigrants had begun to arrive in Palestine,
the settler population began to enjoy some advantages. Since they were for the
most part urban, literate, and experienced commercial middlemen, these Jewish
immigrants were predisposed to set a knowledge economy in motion (Beit-Hallahmi 1993a). In the same vein, Feivel notes that Jewish marginality in the diaspora
also played a major role in making Jews what they are in the modern world. Their
past experience as a minority, victims of subjugation, and and also as agents of
adaptation provided the Zionist pioneers with critical tools of entrepreneurship.
As Feivel argued, before the inception of the Israeli state, ‘Jews have been the best
interpreters of civilisations and cultures, always as outsiders looking in’ (Feivel
[1938] in Beit-Hallahmi 1993a).
Stressing these Jewish advantages do not mean that they are an essentialising
point or feature; rather, this emphasis is meant to highlight a set of particular,
socio-historical circumstances that led many Jewish communities to be flexible
and to adjust to new settings46. In addition, the relatively high level of education
of the settler community, combined with the establishment of a state structure,
opened up the possibility of the entrenchment of liberal capitalism. Taken together, these conditions help explain the reasons behind the rapid scientific and
business-related progress in the Yishuv. The second Aliyah (the second wave of
Jewish immigration to Palestine) contained the embryo of the logic of ‘western
46
A similar case can be made in the context of elite strata of other diaspora communities.
161
progress’ that was enshrined in Palestine. The sense of Zionism as a civilising
mission shaped both the self-perception and the strategies of legitimisation of the
Zionist pioneers (Davis 1977).
Ein Breira science and avenues of warfare
Moral justification of war and security as existential necessities takes a central role
in celebratory explanations of the special role of science in Zionism ­(Beit-Hallahmi
1993a: 13). The coupling of national survival and scientific progress is expressed
in the notion of ein breira technology (in Hebrew, out of necessity), a term often
used by Zionist protagonists (see Popkin 1971). Certainly, from the earliest times,
the co-imbrication of knowledge and power in intelligence and military operations
has been central to warfare (Crampton 2007; Khalili 2013; Zureik et al. 2011).
In his remarkable account of the interrelationship between modern warfare
and science, Bousquet (2008) presents the notion of a scientific way of warfare
that seeks to explore the role of science in warfare and in perfecting technology.
This perspective helps us see how technology has been systematically recruited
and selected to inform thinking about the very nature of combat and the forms
of military organisation best suited to prevail (Bousquet 2008). As Bousquet argues, ‘the scientific way of warfare’…refers to an array of scientific rationalities,
techniques, frameworks for interpretation, and intellectual dispositions which
have characterised the approach to the application of socially organised violence
in the modern era’ (Bousquet 2008: 4). This way of war has its origins in war
that is understood, shaped, and delimited by what is scientifically possible and
by how the state has shaped its policies of science. More fundamentally, security
technology is attached to broader national and moral claims. As Denes notes, the
Israeli security and defence industry is a ‘hub of techno-scientific practice but also
a site where national meanings are given substance, and reflect several tropes from
readings of Zionism’ (Denes 2011b: 178–179).
Collins discusses the symbolic value of the tie between Zionism and science;
he describes how ‘Zionism’s self-fashioned mythology of unity and revivification’
offers a sort of ‘botanical twist’, whereby the erection of structures is celebrated as
a ‘sign of new life’ (Collins 2011: 88). This envisioned ‘new life’ not only attests
to the return and resurrection of the Jew in a new land, but was rooted in the
bifurcation of science and the practice of settling the land supported by the state’s
strategies of accumulation. As Collins further argues, the forces of colonisation
were set in motion: ‘…by the revolutionary fusion of militarism, acceleration,
science, and technology’ (Collins 2011: 88–89). In the course of colonising Palestine, the scientification of security and control entered into the political discourse
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and the security industry itself, and has both legitimised and masked violence and
domination. Both practically and discursively, scientists and Israel’s institutions
of science have been central to the perpetration of Israel’s military advantages.
5.3 Scientific frontier institutions
‘Just as some people live by the sword we will live with science’
(Weizmann 1949)47
In the case of Israel, scientific institutions have historically been at the heart
of the nation’s quest to build a strong state. During its nation building phase,
these institutions took shape and became links between the pre-state build-up
of both ideological and material resources and the post-1948 consolidation of
scientific-academic institutions and networks. In a broader perspective, Turner
uses the example of the development of institutions in the US settler colony in
the 19th century, when settlers were compelled to settle the nation’s frontier and
adapt themselves:
…to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness,
and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and
political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life (Turner 1921: 6).
Both before and after 1948, Israel’s academic institutions and research centres
have been key ‘frontier institutions’, both in terms of their geographical location
and in terms of setting scientific standards for cutting-edge technology. These
institutions have steadily functioned as smaller engines of state building, both by
educating the public and connecting industry, state, academia, and the military
through collaborative knowledge production. This has included the production
of new, patented knowledge for the security industry. The vitality of scientific
institutions to Israel’s settler colonial project has given Israel’s academia a central
role in the security industry. For example, these universities are responsible for
training academic reserves and screening junior candidates for specialised IDF
units, where graduates form the backbone of the knowledge base of both security
and the broader high-tech economy.
47
Chaim Weizman, Israel’s first President, in a speech at the UN in Geneva, Switzerland, 27
November 1949.
163
In 2012, my fieldwork took me to Israel’s renowned Weizmann Institute in
Rehovot, some 20 kilometres south of Tel Aviv. The institute is a world leading academic institution named after Israel’s founder and first President, Chaim
Weizmann. As a world-renowned scientist and Zionist ideologue, Weizmann was
devoted to establishing science and industry in the nascent Jewish state. At the
Institute’s futuristic-like campus area, an emblematic quote from Weizmann is
literally paved into the stony gateway:
I feel sure that science will bring to this land both peace and a renewal
of its youth, creating here the springs of a new spiritual and material life.
I speak of science for its own sake and applied science (Weizmann (1946)
in Calder 1958: 75).
In the pre-state era, Weizmann was a key player in the development of the
Israeli knowledge economy and remains a symbol of Zionism’s civilising legacy. In
1907, he visited British Mandatory Palestine to see if industry and development
could be brought to the land and met the Jewish immigrants and members of the
elite who were among the first Zionist pioneers. This visit cemented Weizmann’s
commitment to establishing a Jewish national homeland. His efforts paved the way
for concrete innovations. In 1947, Albert Einstein and a group of other scientists
recommended that the University build an electronic computer and sustain it as
a public commitment to the people of Israel (Ariav and Goodman 1994; Breznitz
2007), which resulted in one of the world’s first computers. In 1948, Weizmann
directly linked Zionist aspirations and scientific activities:
The great value of the university in [the] building up of our ‘National
Home’… to … vanquish the ‘plagues of Palestine’ via scientific research
and its application (Weizmann cited in Efron 2011: 288).
Weizmann’s profound engagement in the development of scientific institutions in Israel is clearly reflected in the connecting of the practice of science to
the realisation of the broader national vision. Israel’s settler colonial structure has
provided scientific imperatives with a sense of purpose and a mission. The nation’s
mobilisation to create a hypermodern Israel is a consistent theme in the self-narration of the scientist: he or she has a special national duty to perform. In general,
today and over time, Israel’s scientists engaged in the field of (homeland) security
and have viewed science as the tool for realising the homeland, which has carved
the individual scientist’s efforts into the larger national project.
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Main gate entry into the Weizman
Institute of Science. Rehovot,
Israel. Photo: Author.
Main research facility, Weizman
Institute of Science, Rehovot,
Israel. Photo: Weizman Institute
of Science.
165
Policies of science: R&D and security
In their seminal account of the relationship between (hot) science and the Cold
War in Europe, Bud and Gummett (1999) argue that the relationship between
pure science and applied science becomes more intense in wartime, when many
military and industrial military research laboratories resemble ‘large university
campuses and even industrial zones with many building employing thousands of
people’ (Bud and Gummett, 1999).
Israel’s settler colonialism entails not just the quest for territorial supremacy,
but a preparation for war marked by sophisticated R&D and scientific advancement 48. This is what Virilio calls the ‘technological race’, which is linked to the
‘infinite preparation for war’ (Virilio 2006). The technological race has become the
backbone of the link between science and warfare in Zionism. Today, the Israeli
state’s innovation strategy encourages scientific initiatives and state co-ordination
of such initiatives to promote efficiency and to ensure that research complies with
national militarily and financial objectives.
Comprehensive science and technology policies have also been developed to
create economic and military competitiveness. This is done in part to stimulate
firms to develop, commercialise, and/or adopt new technologies and to influence
universities to continue their basic research and facilities with commercialisation
activities – policy tools, macroeconomic regulatory instruments, tax incentives and
network initiation. More concretely, the Israeli government devotes 3.6 per cent
of the GDP to R&D, which ranks it at the top of the list of countries (Central
Bureau of Statistics Israel 2002).
The demands of the military impose special conditions on security innovation.
Israel’s defence and security sector has consistently been provided with both the
resources and the opportunity to develop new technologies for military applications that also have wide civilian applications, e.g. satellite communications
and microwave technologies. (In Israel and abroad, the technical capabilities and
know-how accumulated through military R&D are valuable resources for technologically related civilian high-tech applications (Peled 2001)). In times of military
escalation, the conduct of research for immediate use intensifies, while in times of
relative peace, it is generally conducted as long-term strategic projects. Both are
salient features of the R&D of the Israeli security industry.
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As was, for example, the case of Great Britain’s science and technology endeavours during the
Cold War (Agar and Balmer 1998; Bud and Gummett 1999).
The commercialisation of science and the Chief Scientist’s Office
The inherent reliance in scientific institutions on human or intellectual capital
gives the scientist a prominent role in security and defence innovation. As shown
in the historiography of the security industry (in Part Three), Israel’s institutionalisation of the relationship between science and violence (and economic growth)
has resulted in the advancement of a very prosperous academic-military-industrial
complex. In recent years, this has been fortified by a liberalisation of research to
include a stronger institutionalisation of technology transfer, commercialisation of
research results, and structures designed to enrich individual researchers through
individual bonuses and grants.
Neocleous demonstrates that the saturation of the political and social landscape
with the logic of security is generally accompanies by the emergence of an academic industry that churns out ideas about how to defend and improve technologies
(Neocleous 2008). The Israeli state’s strategic alliance with security companies and
their cooperation with research institutions pushes defence innovation forward.
The commercialisation of technologies and transfer of knowledge from institutions
take place in many cases through strategically allocated grants. In Israel, scientific
practices, for example, in nanotechnology or advanced communcations technology, that contribute to the national project are nurtured through an incentive
structure, where the commercialisation of scientific results are linked to the use
of technological devices by the military or other state agents. Scientific results are
commercialised through patent systems based on individual reward systems for the
researchers. The most notable transfer centres in Israel are Technion Technology
Transfer (at Technion’s Centre T3), Yissum Technology Transfer (at Hebrew University), Ramot, the technology transfer arm of Tel Aviv University, Yeda Research
and Development Company (at the Weizman Institute), and BGN Technologies
(at Ben-Gurion University).
Today, under the philosophical and policy umbrella of neoliberal knowledge-production, most research and science institutions in Israel are deeply involved in collaboration with the IDF. Perhaps the most tangible expression of this
is the range of multidisciplinary centres for defence and security research, which
are organised in collaborative efforts between the IDF, state agencies (funding and
investment), and private security companies as well as foreign institutions. For
example, Ben-Gurion University and Technion work with the Israeli Ministry
of Science and the national security giants Elbit, IAI, and Rafael on joint R&D
ventures. Partaking in much of the R&D of the security industry, the institutions
themselves constitute hothouses for the scientification of war in Israel. Innovation
happens through a fertile overlap between commercial and military interests.
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State funding of research and start-up capital has been key in supporting the
national security industry in Israel. In 1985, the state enacted the Law for the
Encouragement of Industrial R&D, which also aimed to develop science-based,
export-oriented industries to fully utilise national resources and human capital
(Trajtenberg 2000). The state’s Office of the Chief Scientist (OCS) in the Ministry
of Economy facilitates and regulates the cooperation between scientific institutions and the security industry. The agency was established in the late 1960s and
works toward the dual goal of directing research in the interests of the state and
overseeing industrialisation development based on science.
Through a diverse set of funding schemes, the OSC takes it upon itself to carry
the risks involved in long-term strategic research and technological development.
Currently, it is responsible for overseeing government-sponsored R&D in the
industrial sector, and managing an annual budget of more than 1.2 billion USD
(Office of the Chief of Scientist 2012). Under the auspices of the OCS through
various national, bi- and multilateral programmes such as the Magnet and Magneton, the Israeli government funds the development of ideas and requires no return
on that investment. These schemes are similar to the major BIRD programme with
the US, which is a joint venture funding over 800 high-tech projects with up to
50 per cent of R&D costs for companies involved since 197749.
For example, Motorola’s cooperation with the IDF to provide a portal of smart
platforms is a BIRD product. At the second biannual HLS expo in Tel Aviv in
2012, Avi Hasson, Chief of Scientist, explained the reasons for Israel’s competitive
advantage in security technology. He stressed the inbuilt features of innovation,
which he considers critical to the Israeli nation project: ‘Innovation is not a hobby,
this is who we are’ (Speech of Avi Hasson, HLS Israel, Tel Aviv, November, 2012).
Hasson oversees the allocation of state funds to both public and private scientific
projects. He enjoys considerable influence over the design and implementation
of research projects and the state’s areas of intervention in R&D to ensure that
they express the long-term visions and strategies of the state. In the course of
summarising the government’s role in Israel’s ecosystem of security, Hasson used
the words of Leonardo Da Vinci:
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BIRD is an acronym for Israel-US bi-national Industrial Research and Development. The
BIRD Foundation’s mission is to stimulate, promote, and support industrial R&D that benefits
both the US and Israel in what is seen as a synergetic venture.
I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough;
we must apply. Being willing is not enough. We must do (Avi Hasson
speech, HLS Israel, Tel Aviv, November, 2012).
According to Hasson, his work is part of a special mission aligned with the
broader goals of Zionism as an urgent nationalist impulse. In the realm of Israeli
defence and security innovation, there is little difference between basic and applied
research and the circulation of knowledge is ensured. Seen in this light, Hasson’s
words underscore that, in Israel, there is no difference between knowing and doing
in the field of security innovation.
When I visited OSC’s offices in the World Trade Center in Tel Aviv overlooking
the Mediterranean, Noam BarGal, head of International Collaboration, explained
to me how their programmes supporting the Israeli high-tech industry with R&D
capital were set in motion in the 1970s to help create ‘an infrastructure of innovation’ in Israel that would exceed the already renown infrastructure of education
and the army, ‘to get a footing in sophisticated tech’ (Interview with Noam BarGal,
Office of the Chief of Scientists, Tel Aviv 6 September 2012).
In 2013, the OCS, in cooperation with Ben-Gurion University’s Technology
Transfer Company and the Israeli venture capital fund Jerusalem Venture Partners
(JVP)50, established a so called homeland security incubator specialising in cyberspace security (Siegel-Itzkovich 2013). It also recently launched a programme
to encourage multi-national companies to organise a portion of their research
according to a zoning system that ensures the spread the knowledge economy
across geographical locations.
Basically, while the state agency ‘Invest in Israel’ was tasked with attracting
investments, the military with outlining demands and deploying the technology
and the security companies with actual production, the mission of the OCS was
and is to boost the industry and encourage new paths for innovation. As BarGal
emphasised:
50
JVP was established in 1993, and manages eight venture capital funds totalling over 900 million
USD. It has created and supported over 90 companies over the past 19 years. JVP has long
focused many of its investments in the area of cybersecurity and enterprise software, the most
prominent being Cyber-Ark, which has over 1,100 customers worldwide and is installed in
eight of the world’s top 10 banks.
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We do everything in collaboration. We have an excellent ecosystem. We did
manage to create and help quite a lot of companies such as IAI, Teva,
and Checkpoint (Interview with Noam BarGal, Office of the Chief of
Scientists, Tel Aviv, 6 September 2012) 51.
Along with other agencies and collaborative efforts, including cross-border
inter-academic cooperation, the OSC’s practice is to connect Israeli expertise and
companies/research institutes to economic powerhouses. This also contributes to
the global economy while keeping knowledge nationalised in Israel.
The broader internationalisation of Israeli science has been in flux in recent
years. For example, several major enterprises, such as Google, Hewlett Packard,
Motorola, and Intel, have established research centres in Israel. These companies
have received funds from the OCS under a funding programme designed as a
multiplier: the state invests funds in the form of grants and expects nothing in
return except for taxes and the broader benefits harvested from general economic
growth. A central aspect of this funding scheme is to make sure the high-tech
base economy remains ‘blue and white’, meaning in Israeli hands 52 (Office of the
Chief of Scientist 2010).
To summarise: Even before the state’s inception, Israel’s research and scientific
institutions operated ‘at the frontier’ by providing necessary knowledge to the
­pioneers of the battlespace and geographically as frontier institutions expanded
into peripheral lands. This, as the following two cases will show, has become
manifest in the erection of modes of production such as science parks and interdisciplinary scientific security centres established to boost both the security
and the broader high-tech economy and to promote qualitative technological
advancement (while expanding territory). The development of the Negev at the
expense of the native residents is a case in point and attests to the broader tendency
of military-academic-industrial syntheses to format in clusters, or what the next
section examines as a form of militarised technopolis.
51
52
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IAI is one of Israel’s largest military enterprises, Teva is the largest pharmaceutical, and
­Checkpoint is Israel’s fastest-growing software security giant.
The slogan ‘blue and white’ is commonly invoked to promote Israeli products and as strategy
of state officials and private companies to keep (within the restraints of a free market economy)
most of companies in Israeli hands.
The technopolis
To demonstrate the concrete correlation between science and war, I discuss a
case where a collaborative push for land development and innovation has fortified
this relationship: the new Advanced Science Park in the Negev.
In general, science parks represent an effort to assemble the military, industry,
and higher education and research in one dynamic cluster. Such parks have been
increasing world-wide for some time as an urban planning scheme, a strategy of
accumulation, and as a consequence of the acknowledgement that cross-sector synthesis can best be achieved in this way. Wakeman uses the term ‘technopolis’ to describe the phenomenon (Wakeman, 2014). She describes how governments build
science parks to strengthen technological transfers and cross-sector innovation in
order to optimise the synergy between public and private training institutions and
research laboratories linked directly to private companies through professional
contacts, research contracts, and service activities (Wakeman 2014). Thus, the
technopolis works as a sort of hybrid agent of innovation and represents a trend
whereby science and business are clustered into urban centres for the growth and
production of scientific synergy growth and production. Wakeman describes the
technopolis as distinctive because of:
…its uniform composition, its rational analysis and arrangement of space,
and its symbolic architectural forms located scientific practices within the
cultural and territorial orbit of provincial utopia. The technopolis offered
the scientific community as the ideal of modern life and the scientist as
the archetypical ‘modern man’ (Wakeman 2014: 255).
In Israel and elsewhere, the building of techno-cities around scientific initiatives often combines metropolitan expansion at peripheral frontiers with an
explicit strategy of enhancing the state led scientific-militarism53. The plan to
develop a new technopolis in the Negev is a case in point.
53
The strategy to combine the development of industrial parks and academic/research institutions
has proliferated in Israel. For example, there are collaborations between the Kiryat Weizman
Industrial Park and the Weizman Institute in Rehovot, between the MATAM High-Tech Park
and the Technion, and between Jerusalem’s Har Hotzim and Malkah Technological Park, and
between Hebrew Universities and the settlement of Ariel (the latter enjoys close cooperation
with ventures in the Ariel Industrial Zone).
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The Negev technopolis
In 1951, then Prime Minister Ben-Gurion specified that the new national space
should be transformed through cultivation and innovation on the newly cleared
frontier. According to Ben-Gurion, the task entailed:
Transforming human dust into a crystallised and firmly-established national unit
and work to populate the frontier districts and spacious desolate areas (Ben-Gurion
1951: 14–15).
Decades after Ben-Gurion’s statement, the Negev’s urban centre Be’er Sheva,
one of Israel’s fastest growing cities, has a population of 200,000, and has been
an area of priority in recent years in the development plans of the Israeli government54. In 2012, at the second biannual Homeland Security conference in Tel
Aviv, plans for the establishment of a new cyber eco-system or science park in
Be’er Sheva were presented as part of establishing Be’er Sheva as a hub for security.
This ambitious plan was presented as a component of the state-led strategy of
supporting tech-clusters and as part of a long-term policy to promote and improve life in the country’s periphery. In some ways, the new construction of the
Advanced Technology Park (ATP) in the Negev is an archetypical technopolis that
operates as part of advancing the settler colonial project and to ensure continuous
capital accumulation. The Israeli government and ‘master developer’ KUD LLC
International are in charge of executing the development of the ATP in partnership
with Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the Municipality of Be’er-Sheva.
In this sense, the Park is a hybrid agent that coordinates the innovation in an industrial penumbra, i.e. performing the role of regional/local innovation organiser
(da Rosa Pires and de Castro 1997).
In recent years, Be’er-Sheva has become a hub for security research, as Israel’s
military is moving its headquarters to the southern city. At an official event in
2013 to mark the construction of ATP’s first building, Prime Minister Netanyahu
declared:
Today we are launching the economic anchor that will turn Be’er Sheva
into a national and international centre for cybernetics and cyber security.
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About 170,000 semi-nomadic Arab Bedouin roam the Negev outside Be’er Sheva. From the
time of early statehood, Israeli authorities have pursued a strategy of controlled transfer of
Bedouins out of the Negev and the ghettoisation of the Bedouins inside the Negev. This has
been part of the intensification of Israel’s demographic war for the past ten years (Adalah, 2011;
Hussein and McKay, 2003; Swirski, 2006).
This is a day that will change the history of the State of Israel and we
are doing it here in Be’er Sheva (Benjamin Netanyahu at the opening
of the Advanced Technology Park’s Building #1, 3 September 2013,
quoted in Hiner n.d.).
The ATP technopolis is designed to advance research and technology growth
in Israel and to develop the desolate desert region; the Park is clearly part of the
broader national goal to develop the Negev. This strategy falls in line with the
­Israeli aphorism that the development of the Negev is a reflection of the vigour
and depth of Israel’s development of the land. In other words, such a park expresses
the parameter by which Israel’s overall success in realising the Zionist vision of
successful settlement should be measured. As Ben-Gurion has famously stated:
‘It is in the Negev that the Youth will be tested, its pioneer strength and creative
and conquering initiative’ (David Ben-Gurion 1955).
As far back as 1963, IDF Chief Moshe Dayan expressed the political goal attached to reconstructing the Negev. He told the newspaper Haaretz: ‘The reality
known as Bedouins will disappear’ (Dayan quoted in Shamir 1996).
In 2013, Robert Ilatov, chair of the Knesset Israeli High-Tech Caucus (officially the Subcommittee for the Advancement of Science Intensive Industries) of
the Knesset explained the establishment of Israeli technopolis as a way to rethink
and ensure the state’s cooperation with the industry (Ilatov, Knesset Lobbies, November 2013). According to the state agency Invest in Israel, the ATP will be the
backbone of a larger plan to develop the region through high-tech based business
initiatives coupled with broader strategies of strengthening education and quality
of life for newcomers. It is also intended to ensure long term self-sufficiency of
the new ATP as a sort of techno-military eco-system, including a renewal of the
Negev’s production capacities (Invest in Israel 2012). A key node in the ATP plan
is to link the scientific activities of the adjacent Ben-Gurion University of the
Negev to the commercialised science park and the IDF’s new Negev headquarters.
The transfer of the IDF’s headquarters from the heart of Tel Aviv to the Negev
(together with a 2 million square foot high-tech telecommunications R&D centre), is a massive undertaking. Its size and scope bear testimony to the importance
granted to the project, which has been deemed a move to turn the south into a
‘cyber valley’ to strengthen the synergy between military, innovation, and science.
To summarise: the ATP is a noteworthy example of how state-led planning
strategies enforce and reconfigure the academic-military-industrial complex while
serving the interests of Israel’s internal colonisation. It is a culmination of Israel’s
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efforts to direct a maximum number of Israeli Jews and resources to the Negev,
where a simultaneous forced transfer of native Bedouins has been a prerequisite
of the erection of new Israeli metro-technological frontiers. The targeting and
potential ethnic cleansing of the Bedouins and their structures and livelihood is
an integral yet silent component of the ATP technopolis that demonstrates the
interrelationship between the settler colonial project and the modernisation efforts
at the nation’s frontier.
Masterplan of the Advanced
­Technology Park (ATP) in
Be’er-Sheva, Israel.
Photo: Ben-Gurion University.
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Examining the practices of Israel’s scientific institutions can shed further light
on the role of academia in the security industry and its broader implications for
the nature of Israel’s warfare and security practices. The next section offers a micro
perspective of one of Israel’s research centres for homeland security.
Blumberg’s Homeland Security Institute
One of the centres expected to benefit from the synergies of the ATP is the
recently established Ben-Gurion University (BGU) Homeland Security Institute
in the Negev. In the summer of 2012, I visited the Institute in this desolate part of
the country to interview Professor Dan Blumberg, the head of the centre. ­Blumberg
specialises in robotics and remote sensing in the university’s department of geography. He explained how he expects the ATP and especially the IDF’s move to the
Negev to boost the Institute and promote the South as the new hub for innovation
in Israel (Interview with Dan Blumberg, Ben-Gurion University, Beer Sheva, 29
August, 2012).
Blumberg explained how the centre’s proximity to Gaza creates an extra incentive for the project to succeed. He drew a direct line of causality between the
patriotic duty of safeguarding Israel’s citizens and the function and results of the
institute. This is not only crucial in the abstract but also practically, he said, as the
centre’s work is based on the experiences of being under rocket attack launched
from the Gaza Strip, a geographic condition that unifies the institute’s staff around
the project.
The BGU Homeland Security Institute is a multidisciplinary research centre
composed of representatives from almost of all of the University’s faculties, including more than 80 members of the scientific staff. It employs a collaborative
approach to maximise the synergy of multidisciplinary approaches to security research that range from natural science to psychology and even the arts. This enables
the Institute to work on homeland security-related matters spanning from nanotechnology to cultural intelligence (Interview with Dan Blumberg, ­Ben-Gurion
University, Beer Sheva, 29 August 2012).
The Institute is virtual and does not house massive production facilities. It
operates on a project-based, ad hoc basis: scientists and researchers collaborate
depending on the specific project. The composition of research fields and the
shifts from large-to small-scale research tasks of solving more technical problems
reflect in many ways the nature of the production schemes of Israeli security technology. The Institute focuses primarily on applied sciences allocated through the
aforementioned R&D incubators Magnet and Magneton. Blumberg described the
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scope and depth of the centre’s ambitions during the interview: while the Institute
focuses now on applied research, it is interested in moving into avenues of more
basic science and research:
Because this is where the real breakthroughs in innovative homeland security take place. For example, in nanotechnology which can then be applied
to remote sensing and drone technology (Interview with Dan Blumberg,
Ben-Gurion University, Beer Sheva, 29 August 2012).
Bloomberg’s emphasis on the potential to link research in defence and security
with long-term basic research echoes that of the Office of Chief of Scientist, and
attests to the centrality of science not only as means to solve technical problem but
also as a fundamental pillar in the state’s accumulation and development strategy.
A major focus area for the centre has been its work to make security platforms
autonomous. It has been involved in refining the technology of UAVs deployed
by the IDF, including advances in artificial intelligence and robotics. Blumberg
addressed the challenges attached to this work:
We need to find a way to give the robot human skills, like when it picks
up a tomato, we need to teach it not to crush it. The same goes for combat
(Interview with Dan Blumberg, Ben-Gurion University, Beer Sheva,
August 29 2012).
A range of the Institute’s cutting-edge projects is presented in its viral promotional video for external communications. The video also shows a description of
another project, where video Professor Hugo Guterman explains how the Institute
has developed a miniature drone (UAV) based on the idea of having to behave
like a human being. Guterman discusses his project’s focus on transferring drone
thinking into fields such as healthcare, medicine, industry, and, of course, HLS in
general (Promotional video, Ben-Gurion University Homeland Security Institute,
Beer Sheva, 2013).
Another example of the centre’s work featured in the video is from the field of
cyber security. Professor Bracha Shapira and his team of researchers have developed
a sophisticated algorithm to detect data leakage, anomalies of infrastructure and
critical networks in order to address threats on both individual and national levels.
In addition, ProfessorYair Neuman, who specialises in semiotics, information technology, and psychoanalysis, heads a project on security and cultural intelligence.
Here the focus is on how to adjust the role of cultural and political rhetoric in
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order to conduct precise and advanced intelligence analyses, i.e. a software programme for translating culturally specific language and slang. This research focuses
on understanding ‘different minds’. As Neuman explains it (while pictures of Arab
newspaper clips are displayed on the screen), ‘We have to understand the different
language this mind speaks’ (Promotional video, Ben-Gurion University Homeland
Security Institute, Beer Sheva, 2013).
Neumann refers to the mind of the potential criminal, for example, and the
culturally coded language used by criminals that could be extrapolated into culturally coded language used by potential enemies. An example of this cultural
intelligence is the development of a software programme that teaches the computer
to differentiate between simple and literal language, and helps to understand the
meanings or the connotations of metaphors. Or as Neuman said, ‘the deep cultural meanings’ to be able to differentiate between saying ‘sweet baby’ or ‘sweet
candy in Arabic’ (Promotional video, Ben-Gurion University Homeland Security
Institute, Beer Sheva, 2013).
Blumberg himself is dedicated to remote sensing in the specific field of HLS.
Referring to the centre’s work to improve the use infrared glasses (night goggles)
Blumberg said, ‘Homeland security is about being in on guard all the time, also
if it means turning night into day’ (Interview with Dan Blumberg, Ben-Gurion
University, Beer Sheva, 29 August 2012).
The Institute illustrates how Israel’s scientific advancement has been enabled
primarily by private-public-military partnerships moving between the laboratories
of the battlespace and the laboratories of scientific institutions and state agencies. It
is the link between science, innovation, and warfare that is most blatantly demonstrated in Israel’s use of the OPT as a laboratory and a conceptual showroom of
war and control.
5.4 Laboratories of war
Scientific advancement and military domination within the Israeli security industry
are routinely seen and talked about as two sides of the same coin. Because Israel’s
war is a permanent continuous reality, Azoulav argues, it is dependent on the
state’s structural control and the techniques at hand to uphold its dominant position (Azoulay 2011). This structural control, which is embedded in Israel’s settler
colonial governmentality and modes of warfare, has been contingent upon techno-scientific progress among the military and scientific sectors of Israeli society. As
Virilio argues, when the state was developed, it developed war as an organisation,
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a territorial economy, an economy of capitalisation of technology’ (Virilio 2006:
11). As a consequence, ‘the military space is first and foremost technical space, a
space of time, a space of the rapidity of attack and reaction’ (Virilio 2006: 76).
For the Israeli security industry, the multiple operational theatres in the OPT
are platforms for experimenting with new methods and techniques of warfare and
revitalising older ones. The cumulative effects of the Israeli systems of dominance
have produced and over time reconfigured powerful patterns seeking to optimise
ethnic isolation, enacting a regime of what Khalili terms a kind of ‘tribal management’ of subduing, eliminating or ‘improving’ the native (Khalili 2013). The
field experience is a rudimentary source of inspiration and practice for the security
companies. Sagi Laron, a representative of El Far Security, a mid-size homeland
security company, explained it during an interview:
Every product must be field-proven. Especially when dealing with outdoor
environment, it’s necessary. You always need proven tech in times of war
and in times of peace. Even being field-proven in Israel is not enough – you
need to prove on the site that you’re good enough to make it anywhere.
He continued:
Israelis are used to working in the fields. At home they spend quite a big
deal of time in the field level operations. Their personal experiences are
based on life in an austere country. …This kind of experience pays off
when you’re doing a job on someone else’s territory. If you’re from a country
with first-rate equipment, you’re lost in a development country…but if
you come from a country that knows what good equipment is, but also
knows how to make it without it, you’re ahead of the game (Interview
with Sagi Laron, Tel Aviv, 23 September 2012).
Judging from Laron’s words ‘working in the field’ includes both the seeding
and harvesting of crops in the kibbutz and the development of new technology
in the battlespace. It’s all a laboratory for national development. With reference
to the latter, as in a conventional lab, as Gordon notes, proof by actual trial and
practical demonstration is the default method whereby technology is put to test
(Gordon 2009).
Dan Tishler, CEO and owner of Control Bit, a niche security company, explained the path of his engagement with the IDF in the process of innovation:
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The IDF came to us with a problem. Slowly we shaped it into a programme; a technology. The IDF could then go to the field and make the
improvements. We were not aware of the market – they had the idea
and we had the capabilities (Interview with Dan Tishler, Tel Aviv,
2 ­September 2012).
The innovative process of collaboration with military actors is a feature that
cuts across the security industry. Often, innovation and ideas in the industry
stem from a negative experience in the field combined with a technical education
translated into a technical solution to avoid this situation from reoccurring. In
fact, the permanency of Israel’s war conditions has shaped the institutionalisation
of the relationship between science and violence (and economic growth).
So far, this analysis has argued that correlation and mutually dependent science
and warfare in the settler colonial project of Zionism are used as a unifying, civilising narrative and instrumentally, as a strategy to unfold its racialised interventions.
This extends into the practical level of the battlespace, where the OPT at this time
performs the function of a space for innovation and testing in collaborative efforts
between the military and security companies. To illustrate and unfold the latter in
more detail, the next section of presents a case of how the laboratory model plays
out in practice, demonstrating the very micro perspectives of these dynamics.
The juxtaposition of real and fake war: ‘Seeing is striking’
A core task of military experts and arms and security salespeople is to elevate
security technologies and make their products attractive to a broad spectrum of
buyers. At the Eurosatory, one of Europe’s largest biannual security fairs, held in
Paris in 2012, a young female Israeli Aerospace Industry (IAI)55 representative
demonstrated the capabilities of an integrated system titled ‘Seeing is Striking’.
The hostess explained to more than a hundred potential buyers and competitors
in the audience how the ability to attain battlespace domination through scientific
innovation has been key to the development of the cutting-edge system. ‘Seeing
is Striking’, the company’s new operational logic and integrated system, is a sophisticated system of surveillance, sensors, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, i.e.
drones), intelligence analysis, and shooting capabilities.
According to the IAI representative, the ‘targeted space’ is charged with a
multisensory system that registers any kind of movement, while the IAI Panther
UAV collects data from the air. In the interactive demonstration, the landscape is
55
State-owned IAI is one of Israel’s largest and most successful exporters of drones and security
systems and markets itself as a global leader of security and warfare technology.
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presented as a generic desert or countryside. The battlespace scenario shows how
data and coordinates are collated and transmitted through a network of fibre-optics and then incorporated into detailed situation awareness reports. Based on the
reports, the system provides recommendations for the commander to shoot at
the push of a button. The system inserts ammunition appropriate to the type of
target and provides a ‘virtual trigger’. According to the IAI hostess, this enables the
IDF commander and his team to carry out a mission in the following sequence:
‘Identify, request, designate, and fire…allowing the commander in the battlespace
to be the first to know, to understand and to act’ (IAI demonstration, Eurosatory,
Paris, June 2012).
The shooter is a distant observer in the control room, whose act of ‘seeing’
invests the strike capacity with high precision. In this way, the entire system is an
integrated ‘system of systems’, which is emblematic of Israel’s brand of expertise in
warfare – as IAI’s slogan goes, ‘when results matter’ (IAI demonstration, Eurosatory, Paris, June 2012). While the presentation espoused a deracinated battlespace,
the system has been used by the IDF in Israel’s battlezones56. According to the
IAI representative, this system has resulted in a steep drop in attacks from the
peninsula, and has prevented the penetration of terrorists and immigrants. At the
same fair, a public relations representative of IAI explained that these integrated
systems were deployed, tested, and refined during their start-up phase at the Israeli
home front. These deployments included coastal surveillance in the south along
the Gaza coastline and in the north around the naval border with Lebanon. IAI
has also assisted in the construction of a similar system – an electrified fence/wall
at the US-Mexico border. It has provided: ‘the eyes and the ears of the system’
(Interview with IAI representative, Eurosatory, Paris, June 2012).
The ‘Seeing is Striking’ system is just one of many developed to obtain battle­
space domination at the home front; as such, they are based on the IDF’s intimate
knowledge of the landscape. As noted, the enemy’s landscape was portrayed in the
security fair demonstration as dry, Mediterranean, and seemingly Middle Eastern
settings such as the West Bank or South Lebanon. At the same time, the landscape
was displayed in a sterile, context-neutral fashion to appeal to consumers and users
whose enemy landscapes are different. In the process of elevating the combat field to
a universal level, the battlespace (village, desert, military bases) is turned into what
Graham, in the case of Gaza, calls ‘zones of danger’. Here, the land and its people
are made into a piece of lethal geography (Graham, 2010a: 255).
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A similar radar system has also been deployed in the Sinai in combination with a 270 kilo­metrelong electronic system, or fence, along the Egyptian-Israeli border.
Israeli Aerospace Industries
­exhibition platform for ‘Seeing
is Striking’ presentation.
Eurosatory, Paris, France June
2012. Photo: Author.
Visit by the Prime Minister of I­ndia
at IAI showroom at ­Aeroindia
2015. Photo: IAI Gallery
IAI demonstration at Aeroindia
2015. Photo: IAI Gallery
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Israel’s battlespace domination, which has been achieved through decades of
control over Palestinian territory, has been transformed into a plethora of technological innovations. As the IAI case demonstrates, in order to sustain battlespace
domination, Israel has consistently conducted innovation in the field as part of a
sort of technological race. In fact, in IAI’s presentation, as in other promotional
efforts and marketing strategies, a language of science is deployed that masks the
logic of the technology in order to generate an association between devices and
evolving scientific truths.
Clearly, Israel’s security technologies are not produced in a vacuum. They are
grounded the unifying ethos of moral necessity and a conceptualisation of war that
is narrated in Zionism as a matter of national survival. The concrete battlespace
experiences themselves helped to drive the industry forward. To expand on the
importance of ethos and narratives in the Israeli security industry, the following
discussion examines how the industry and its rationale and mission are given
meaning by its own members: Israel’s entrepreneurs of science and security.
5.5 The entrepreneurs of science and security: between pragmatism and
ideology
The spirit of entrepreneurship
The Israeli security industry hinges upon a spirit of entrepreneurship rooted
in Zionist tropes of modernisation57. This spirit is expressed as a mix of national
mentalities, techno-military moralities, and the quest for profit. These factors are
in various ways and to varying degrees embodied in Israeli security entrepreneurs,
who operate in a national innovation system and constitute a more or less hetero­
geneous group. The system in which they operate is driven by cultural and material factors shaped by high degrees of militarisation combined with the political
economy of Israel’s intellectual/human capital.
According to the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor, Israel has 140 scientists and 135 engineers per 10,000 employees, a higher concentration than in
any developed country (Office of the Chief of Scientist 2007). A high percentage
of these work in the military and security industry; taken together, this pool of
talent has fuelled a surge in technologically driven economic growth. The system
57
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An entrepreneur is a person who refines or creates a business idea that ultimately leads to the
production and commercialisation of certain products. In the Israeli security industry, he, or she
(albeit rarely), is the businessperson, the engineer, and the scientist who range from middle-income workers to wealthy industrial magnates.
in which they operate is driven by cultural and material factors shaped by high
degrees of militarisation and the intensity of the knowledge economy.
The security sector is first and foremost driven by this intellectual capital, its
specialised human knowledge, a high degree of militarism, and an overarching
commitment to nationalised security. This commitment is an important component of the industry’s locus and identity.
An extraordinary mission
In the late summer of 2012, I interviewed Gillam Keinan, Director of International Marketing at the Israeli Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor. Keinan,
who actively engaged in branding Israeli technology abroad, explained the state’s
rapid modernisation of the land and its production schemes and emphasised the
historically close relationship between the army and scientists:
A typical career for an Israeli (man) starts with 4 years in the military,
usually followed by several years at Israel’s leading technical university, the
Technion, and after which he returns to the army to serve the country with
a mix of intellectual capital and hands- on combat experience (Interview
with Gillam Keinan, Jerusalem, August 28, 2012).
Keinan’s narrative draws a direct line between the effect of conscription and
the risk willingness espoused by Israeli security entrepreneurs and scientists. In a
larger perspective, the self-conception among members of the sector represents
the link between creativity (defiance i.e. not capitulating to rules, conventions and
censorship and thinking ‘out of the box’), and risk taking is often highlighted as
one of the most important features of the state’s economic success.
Similarly, during an interview Dr Boris Hersovici, an employee in the R&D
division at Israel’s prestigious University the Technion in Haifa, underscored the
power of intellectual capital:
It’s in the head. It’s not muscles. Through our natural skills, we survived
2000 years of life in the diaspora. We have to take risks and make decisions, and we’re good at it (Interview with Dr. Boris Hersovici, the
Technion, Haifa, 12 September 2012).
A scientific rationale for the production of security technologies helps to hide the
normative content of the technology under the cover of technical specifications and
challenges to be overcome. This fortifies the industry’s narrative: that with the right
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solution, any threat can be overcome. This sort of scientific discourse is supported
by the problem-solving engineer, who applies innovation to real-world scenarios.
In a larger perspective, it became clear during my fieldwork that in the industry’s own discourse, man’s mastering of the machine is commonly referred to as
the ‘human factor’, a term explicitly used by several of my informants to underline
the limits of technology and the need for skilled manpower in both development
and field operations. This terminology corresponds well with the likewise often
emphasised ‘man-made science’; a sentiment that was often expressed at fairs and
by my informants was that behind every piece of technology is an innovative idea.
This focus on man and science as a sort of binary accentuates the link between
human intent and mastering of the scientific process and its effects in the battle­
space. In addition, my informants from the academic-military-industrial sector
also expressed repeatedly an almost inherent national logic to explain Israelis’
progressive spirit.
In general, representatives of the Israeli security industry assert Israel’s capabilities as a sort of mobilised ethos containing a variety of qualities. According
to Gillam Keinan, a major asset of Israeli entrepreneurship is the capacity ‘to get
things done. To get them done the Israeli way’ (Interview with Gillam Keinan,
Jerusalem, 28 August 2012).
Among the industry actors interviewed, this logic of exceptionalism equals
a drive for efficiency combined with a narrative of moral duty and existential
necessity. I concluded in the course of my interviews that Israeli security is both
defined by the local and regional enemy landscape and by the larger Jewish struggle for emancipation. Several of the entrepreneurs interviewed pointed to Israel’s
comparative advantages in security innovation as the result of the combination
of Jewish legacy and the promotion of Zionism’s project of ‘civilising the East’.
In general, these security professionals see Israel’s capabilities as a mobilised
ethos and entrepreneurial spirit that bypasses orders and conventions. While military actors often stress the notion of battlespace experience based on a historical
necessity, scientific and academic actors tend to ascribe Israel’s technological superiority to a special (sometimes inherent) Jewish quality and certainly a consequence
of a historical predicament.
Necessity is the mother of invention…. We don’t want to be like the other
(European) innovative countries. We are something special, we need to
stand out (Interview with Gillam Keinan, Jerusalem, 28 August 2012).
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When I asked the aforementioned Noam BarGal of the OCS why Israel has
become a hub of high-tech and security technology, he said, ‘Israel succeeded because it was innovative’ (Interview with Noam BarGal, Chief of Scientists ­Office,
Tel Aviv, 4 September 2012). However, he stressed that this is not the whole story
– the ‘secret’ also lays in a special Israeli mentality, perhaps even a special Jewish
inheritance.
Security companies often create slogans that refer to a particular ‘Israeli way’;
IAI’s slogan is ‘Total solutions - it is in our DNA’ (IAI promotional material), and
Nice’s slogan is ‘The right people, at the right time’ (Nice Systems promotional
material). On various PR platforms, many companies also refer to the ‘Jewish
people’s experiences’ in developing their capacities into qualified responses to permeating global threats.
Naturally, these experiences are also tied to the concrete experiences of security in Israel-Palestine. At the biannual security fair ‘HLS Israel’ held in 2012
in Tel Aviv, Yonatan Danino, Chief of the Israel National Police, explained how
the threat landscape has expanded to comprise both ‘thieves and terrorists’. He
underlined how routine shifts from emergency to normal life are ‘almost a part
of the Israeli DNA…. The only certain thing in the work of the Israeli police is
uncertainty’ (Yonahan Danino, Speech at HLS, Tel Aviv, November 2012).
While this may be simply a rhetorical device, such references to an innate skill
or destiny are activated as a driver and an explanation for military superiority.
While military actors often stress the notion of battlespace experience based on a
historical necessity, scientific and academic references display an even more potent
tendency to prescribe the Israeli technological forefront to a special (sometimes
inherent) Israeli quality and first and foremost, the consequence of a historical
predicament. This is a widespread self-conception in the Israeli security industry.
Among its actors, Israel’s comparative advantages in innovation are mediated as
a sort of pure and apolitical techno-national ethos, expressing a very narrow (almost non-existing) gap between idea and practice that sets Israel apart from other
advanced nations. While they can be seen as ‘mere’ metaphors, these rhetorical
gestures serve the purpose of boosting the ethos of a shared capacity and shared
roots and destiny among actors in the industry.
In September 2012, I interviewed Shmuel Sternklar, Professor of Electronic
Engineering and head of the HLS Center of the University of Judea and Samaria,
a controversial frontier institution located in the occupied West Bank. Sternklar
spoke explicitly about his ‘Zionist commitment’ to the establishment and consolidation of the university. In his view, the relationship between Zionism and science
is a natural part of the Zionist trajectory: it is a moral imperative to pursue scien-
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tific progress that is ingrained in Jewish culture and history. Sternklar said that this
mindset expresses a ‘grassroots character deeply embedded in the Jewish people:
There has among Jews always been a desire to think out the box. It’s not a
surprise. We came here and wanted to develop a modern state and we succeeded
because the Jewish people wanted to be at the forefront and give to humanity
as a whole (Interview with Shmuel Sternklar, Ariel University, West Bank, 13
September 2012).
Sternklar also explained that there is a direct connection between surviving and
practicing science. ‘There are different ways of surviving, you can live in a refugee
camp or you can do what we did, as a collective: innovate’. Noting that after
1948, the immigrants had ‘to struggle just to get a phone line’, he explained later
that ‘things took off exponentially in an unforeseen way’ (Interview with Shmuel
Sternklar, Ariel University West Bank, 13 September 2012).
This ‘grassroots mentality’, which is expressed across the spectrum of Israeli
academia, has helped forge close links between the military and the idea of the
scientist as an ideologue and a national pioneer. While Sternklar describes himself
as a true pioneer who is dedicated to the Zionist mission, he, like many industry
sector’s representatives, is also driven and motivated by a private agenda of profitmaking.
University of Ariel or University of
Judea and Samaria, West Bank,
OPT. Photo: Powerbase
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Borrowing from Senor and Singer (2011), the term ‘profitable patriot’ is an
apt description of actors in Israel’s security industry. Profitable patriots are actors
involved in developing, deploying, and exporting security material inside and
outside of Israel. They do so by combining high-tech knowledge, entrepreneurship, and capital with military experience, experimentation, and current/future
domestic strategies. However, these patriots can neither be reduced to pure profit
makers nor to purely committed ideologues. Rather, they have found ways of
combining these aspects in techno-professional innovation, the power of which
remains rooted deeply in the Israel’s building project, and is embedded within the
organising structures of society. Based on the utopian vision of maximum security,
Israel’s security sector has become a profitable platform and a way to make a living
for a number of profitable patriots. Their success hinges on a range of ‘national
mentalities’ and experiences that constitute the foundation of the national security
ethos and work as explanatory variables for the Israeli success.
Chik-chak, bitzu’ism, chutzpah, and rosh gadol
The link between Zionism and science across the security industry is given
meaning by actors involved in producing new knowledge and generating ideas.
In his celebratory account of these links, Zionist historian Popkin says that ‘Israeli
alertness to practical application often leads the nation’s scientists far beyond their
original ideas’ (Popkin 1971: 31), and the Israeli ethos of a nationalised entrepreneurism draws on past experiences.
Clearly, nationalist aspirations have endowed the Israeli economy with a sense
of purpose. Among Israeli entrepreneurs, this is broadly referred to as a lesson of
survival through success. As Senor and Singer argue, the creative energy of the
Israeli business elite grew from the nation’s particular circumstances. In my interview with Dan Tishler, CEO and founder of the security company Control Bit,
he talked about the importance of ‘the Israeli mind’ to the industry. According to
Tishler, this ‘mind’ or mentality is a mix of Jewish and Israeli identities that helps
explain the drive and success of the Israeli knowledge economy. The cradle of the
industry is, Tishler said, the Israeli education system and mandatory army service.
Serving in the army means that young Israelis ‘mature faster and are exposed to
tough life much sooner than in many other places’ (Interview with Dan Tishler, Tel
Aviv, 2 September, 2012). A range of particular Israeli concepts and words surface
in interviews with security industry representatives and in historical narratives
about Israel’s economic prosperity. These are used in the sector’s self-narrations to
capture and explain particular Israeli conditions and help build a common ethos
that sustains Israel’s comparative advancement in the technological race.
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A headline in Senor and Singers’s business-entrepreneurial bestseller ‘Start-up
Nation’ characterises Israel as ‘a country with a motive’, which is a much-used
phrase (Senor and Singer 2011: Part IV). According to the authors, not only has
strategic investment and education been essential to the success of Israel’s security
industry, the industry would not have been able to blossom without the cultural
commitment of an entire people to realise the Jewish nation as ‘a cultural core built
on a rich stew of aggressiveness and team orientation’ (Senor and Singer 2011).
The economic miracle of Israel relates to the very ‘ecosystem that creates radically
new business ideas’ (Senor and Singer 2011).
The Hebrew word for ‘very fast’ – chik-chak – is often used as a way to describe progress of the state project (and the pace of its development). During my
interview with Keinan he used chik-chak repeatedly to describe Israel’s peculiar
entrepreneurial spirit (Interview with Gillam Keinan, Jerusalem, 28 August 2012).
Another often-used term is bitzu’ism. According to Senor and Singer, butzu’ism
is ‘a thread that runs from those who braved marauders and drained the swamps to
the entrepreneurs who believe they can defy the odds and barrel through to make
their dreams happen’ (Senor and Singer 2011). As the implementing agent of the
initial visions of the national project, Ben-Gurion performed a classic bitzu’ism.
In promotional material and in celebratory academic and non-academic accounts,
this concept is often highlighted as one of the underlying reasons for Israel’s economic miracle.
The more popular term chutzpah is used as a source of innovation and dynamism. It means ‘audacity’, or ‘nerve’. The term can be described as a cultural trade
and a military strategy marked by the Israeli mindset of defiance and dissatisfaction. If chutzpah is used in a right manner, it can benefit the conduct of business
and testing of new ideas. This concept provides both a celebratory approach to the
entrepreneurial spirit and a willingness to defy. According to several informants,
defying and challenging conventional wisdom is deeply rooted in both Israeli militarism and in the ethos of Zionist pioneering. Technion’s Ron Yekutiel explained
the effects of chutzpah at the company’s centennial anniversary when describing
the difference between doing business in the US and in Israel:
We need to teach the Americans how to ask. And we need to teach the
Israelis how to listen. The Americans do not understand the Israeli dissatisfaction, their culture of chutzpah (Ron Yekutiel, the Technion’s
­Centennial Anniversary, Jerusalem, 11 September 2012).
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At the same event, Ronen Nir, a partner of Venture Capital Fund Carmel,
stated in celebratory terms:
Nobody, not even the Americans, understand the depth and the resources
hidden in the Israeli sense of dissatisfaction. We innovate because it is all
we have learned (Ronen Nir, Jerusalem, Technion Centennial Conference, Jerusalem, 11 September 2012).
Chutzpah and the culture that it defines provide a fertile environment for experimentation and seems to work on a meta-level as the glue that binds together
the actors of the industry.
Rosh gadol is another vivid term often used to characterise Israel’s success.
It literally means ‘big head’ in English, and implies that the person in question
is able to get things done, to go beyond the job description, or beyond the call
of duty. It is invoked to describe the success and intensity of the Israeli spirit of
entrepreneurship. The notion of ‘rosh gadol thinking’ is often used by members
of the security industry and in its promotional material (Senor and Singer 2011).
The expression is used in the army and is now used the labour market in Israel
to describe and promote Israeli efficiency in general. (Its antonym, rosh kattan,
means ‘a small head that sticks to the plan’). At a security fair in Israel, a retired
general explained to me how the combination of undisciplined rosh gadol and
the rosh kattan has provided the Israeli military sector with an advantageous mix
of secure performance and risk takers who challenge conventional knowledge
and dared to challenge the orders of their commander during IDF enrollment.
What Israeli companies excel at is ‘being more cocky and showing less shame’, as
one security entrepreneur and manager of a smaller homeland security company
interviewed briskly defined it (Interview with Raz Yatskan, Latrun, 6 September
2012). According to Yatskan, this mentality leads to both innovation through
risky experiments and provides Israeli entrepreneurs with the guts to explore new
markets abroad and stand out from the crowd.
These narratives attest to a common tendency for security entrepreneurs to
elevate the Israeli security experience to a universal level, ascribe their success a
particular Israeli, or even Jewish quality, and generalise from the particular Jewish
experience to the scientific progressiveness evident in the industrial success of Israel. While they are clearly rooted in strategies of self-promotion, the narratives also
go beyond instrumentalist strategies. While it is difficult to verify and quantify the
effect of these unifying narratives, they are clearly important to the self-narration
of the industry.
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5.6 Conclusion
The Israel experience moves in sync with its own expansive colonialism (Sa’di
2010) at the home front. As part of bringing security to the Jewish body/nation,
scientific experiments attached to the battlespace have deep roots in Zionism’s own
modes of population engineering and territorial expansion. Building on a strong
ethos and investment in science, Israel’s exercise of violence has been covered up
and wrapped in an ethos of civilising scientific progress. In practice and more
conceptually, scientific progress has been a marker of the Jewish escape from exile
and diaspora life. Science has practically and discursively helped to create a new
life within the framework of a bounded, sovereign knowledge economy.
Scientific progress has been key to sustaining Israel’s battlespace domination.
This chapter has shown how Israel’s permanent war is a source of innovation and
testing for scientific institutions, but also how these institutions feeds into the
cycle of violence. It has done so by laying out the different facets of Zionism’s
techno-war, and demonstrated how the binary between insurgency and counterinsurgency, and occupier and occupied provides a locus for thinking and innovating
technologies of war, control, and security. It has established how the production
of security technologies evolves as a scientific way of regulating the combat zone
as a way to assert the improvement scheme for those the state wishes to protect
through isolation and restrictions of ‘the other’. Deep-rooted scientific narratives
have materialised as innovations that sustain control, which provide the security
industry with a techno-scientific ethos of progress. Moreover, the scientific ethos
of Zionism serves to reinforce the notion of a barbaric, uncivilised enemy on the
other side of the moral divide. The intersection of science and war reflects the
culmination of scientification of Zionism into a high-tech economy married to
specific modes of repression organised along geo-economic strategies.
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191
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CHAPTER SIX
6.0 ALGORITHMS OF CONTROL: DIGITAL ENVELOPES AND
THE MANAGING OF THE EMOTIONAL LANDSCAPE
6.1 Introduction
In the fall of 2014, dozens of reserve soldiers from Israel’s elite electronic surveillance department Unit 820058, the Israeli counterpart to the National Security
Agency in the US, announced publically their refusal to spy on Palestinians living
under occupation – a practice as old as the Zionist/Israeli control over Palestinians. For the signatories of this public statement, the IDF’s surveillance measures
had taken the Palestinian occupation to an unprecedented level, involving intrusive gathering of Palestinians’ private information, and monitoring and invading
their lives59. An Israeli dissident stated anonymously in the British newspaper The
Guardian:
The intelligence gathering on the Palestinians is not clean…they don’t
have political rights, laws like we have. The nature of this regime of ruling
over people, especially when you do it for many years, it forces you to take
control, infiltrate every aspect of their life (Beaumont 2014).
Despite the revelations about and criticism of the control regime detailed in
this newspaper article, there was little response from the official security establishment.
Digitalised technologies of control have altered the ways in which Israel practices security and structures its battlespace. This chapter examines Israel’s digitalised
security practices that have been developed and deployed in the OPT and the
impact of this creeping digitalisation and ‘softwarisation’ on the Israeli security
industry. To explore how this digitalisation plays out between and among the
IDF, the state, and the security industry, this analysis discusses the roots of these
logics and its effects. It also discusses the processes of commercialisation attached
58
59
This unit is well known as the ‘ears of the state’. It is said to produce most advanced high-tech
companies and the most security start-up entrepreneurs on a global scale (Senor and Singer
2011).
The IDF’s Intelligence Division has become not only Israel’s main information gathering
­agency, but also the main body analysing Israel’s strategic position and the centre of strategic
and political thinking in Israel’s policy making process (Peri 2005).
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to companies’ extraction of digital, algorithmic, and biometric ideas from the
military field and their transplant into other settings. The key claim I make is that
these processes provide the Israeli security industry with an ethos of being able to
control both present and the future. The chapter unfolds key questions relating
to digitalised risk management, cyber security, and the role of calculated technologies in Israel’s settler colonial control scheme. This includes an examination of
Israel’s cyber and digital security sector in general, and the steady entrenchment
of digital/software-based systems and programmes in the OPT as a technologised
control regime.
Israel’s cyber and digital security economy
Cyber attacks and ongoing insecurity about organised online political mobilisation for collective revolts or organised crime has become a central concern and
a theme in Israeli’s security discourse. As an Israeli security software developer
explained to me at a security fair:
Israel needs not only physical firewalls – protection of its city gates and borders.
It needs virtual firewalls that can provide Israelis with sufficient protections against
cyber attacks (Interview with CEO of software security company, anonymous, Tel
Aviv, 8 September 2012).
At the same time, the IDF’s desire to advance in the field of cyber and software-based security in order to protect and expand the homefront has never been
greater. Over the course of the last 60 years, Israel has been strategically engaged
in a form of network-centric warfare. This has been spurred by a deep-rooted push
for virtual and digital control by the intelligence and private tech sectors. This
push for control has materialised in the form of cyber security research institutions
and the strengthening of huge network-centric capacities and advanced levels in
the IDF. This has occurred along with the broader technologisation of the Israeli
industrial scene. Miky Admon, a high-tech director of the Israel Export Institute,
said during an interview:
There is a lot of synergy within high-tech – of course, military – very strong
digital units in the military and thousands of IT graduates. We have 200
companies in security. It’s great for our export business (Interview with
Miky Admon, Tel Aviv, 23 August 2012).
Israel’s cyber sector includes cyber security, data storage, mobile communication, and analytical algorithms and many others niche sectors. Israeli software
inventions often originate in military technologies that include instant messaging,
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the USB memory stick, the firewall, and secure data links that enable most of the
world’s banking transactions and TV signal decoders. Israeli cyber security now
accounts for seven per cent of the annual 60 billion USD global cyber-security
market, and as much as thirteen per cent of new R&D in the sector (Cohen 2014).
(These percentages do not include the spillover to commercial enterprises.
The Israeli state has been a key player in promoting this sector. Technical/
intelligence echelons of Israel’s military (predominantly Unit 8200 and MAMRAM, IDF’s IT support unit) are key innovators in the production of both Israel’s
digital envelope and the human resources with the appropriate technical skills.
In 2010, the Israeli government launched the National Cyber Bureau to support
military, university, and business cooperation around cyber-security issues, to advise political echelons on matters of cyber warfare, and to create a national plan
of action embedded in the goal of Israel being among the top five countries leading the field ( Office of the Prime Minister 2013). In 2011, under the slogan ‘A
Vital Player in a Digital World’, the Israel Export and International Cooperation
Institute published data revealing that Israel’s cyber security industry had leaped
almost 400 per cent in a decade: Israeli software exports rose from 1.5 billion
USD in 1998 to 6.2 billion USD in 2009 (The Israel Export Institute 2011). In
addition, the value of recent mergers and acquisitions in Israel’s cyber sector has
exceeded 2 billion USD and involved 18 multinational corporations. While this
sector functions in a global context of cyber war, initially much investment and
emphasis in data systems grew out local security needs. The innovation of ideas
and applied research in this field has been dictated by the demands of the IDF
and broader state strategies to retain battlespace dominance while also attending
to the build-up of a prosperous (high)-tech sector.
Prime Minister of Israel Benyamin
Netanyahu at the Israel Defense
Cyber Security Symposium,
Tel Aviv, 2014.
Photo: Motti Kimschi
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6.2 Digital enveloping and calculating technologies
Surveillance and the digital enveloping of Palestine
The reciprocal co-constitution between ruler and ruled in the OPT is increasingly mediated through technology. This technology enables ‘rule from afar’ (Li 2008),
combined with the installation of more preventive/pre-emptive measures.
Long-term surveillance and knowledge gathering of events and people in the
OPT is the centrepiece of Israel’s security practices. In turn, the settler colonial rule
entails ideologically informed surveillance procedures. Clarke (1994) identifies this
form of proactive surveillance of what the sovereign deems as ‘suspect populations’
as dataveillance. In the context of Israel’s control of the Palestinians, digital control
and dataveillance strategies are presented as modes of logical reasoning. The rationalisation of routines of targeted surveillance conceals the ruling system’s settler
colonial features while distancing the ruler from the ruled. As a former IDF soldier
told me during an interview, ‘In many ways, it is becoming a remote-controlled
conflict’ (Interview with former IDF soldier, anonymous, Tel Aviv, June 2013).
Historically, the development of calculated technologies has been a consistent feature of Israeli security governance. Since the first waves of immigration
occurred, Israeli intelligence agencies have improved their skills in collecting, dissecting, and storing data about risky groups – the Palestinian population as well
as the olims (newly arrived Jewish immigrants). From the outset, Israeli agencies
have developed digitalised systems to infiltrate Palestinian social and political
network: Palestinians have been continuously subjected to a multi-layered system
of surveillance and electronic data registration. This full matrix of surveillance has
included intervention during the British Mandate and Egyptian and Jordanian rule
over Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem (1948–1967) by Zionist pre-state
or Israeli state agencies. Today, the colonised people’s experience of being watched
is a defining feature of the way the occupation functions. Over time, this surveillance has resulted in an increasingly refined system of (digitalised) recordkeeping.
Tracking through data collection and computation is, as Fischbach notes, both
a policy and a discursive condition:
Data such as population censuses, tax lists, land records, survey maps and
so forth do not merely dispassionately represent, in this case a population
that the state governs – that is ‘out there’ in the pristine, positivistic sense.
The processes of sorting, categorizing and describing help create the very
population that is being observed and recorded (Fischback 2011: 298).
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While presented as risk management, processing data on Palestinians becomes
a tool of control and of social shaping. In recent years in Israel-Palestine, this
sort of tracking has morphed into a digitised cyber-bureaucracy connecting the
physical field to the virtual battlespace, creating a sort of virtual panopticon of
the battlespace.
Many of Israel’s successful digital inventions are born out these long-term
experiences of control and conflict (Leichman 2014). Ideas and practices have
grown out of the pervasive digital envelope which as a unified platform for data
and screening technologies (Tawil-Souri 2011b, 2012) produces new enclosures
that increasingly organises the Palestinians under a new techno-colonial grid.
­Tawil-Souri describes this process of enveloping as ‘a multifaceted process that
combines the territorial and economic dynamics of land and digital enclosures’ …for
example, a ’territorially sealed Gaza and a virtually boundless one’ (Tawil-Souri
2011b: 3). This envelope contains technological devices designed to sustain the
sovereign’s knowing power.
The proliferation of this sort of virtual war, where the battlespace is the place
where knowledge is gathered, is increasing. While virtual space is the site of the
battle, it has also become securitised as a vulnerable site for states, industry, and
economies. In the battlespace of Israel-Palestine, this digital and virtual war has
expanded the space that the settler colonial sovereign can control. The expansion
of the battlespace to include online cyber activity includes tactics focusing on
anticipation/pre-emption and algorithmic calculations that can help outsource
decision-making and operational control to machines.
Recalling Foucault’s notion of ‘calculated technologies of power’, the realisation
of power (to accumulate) hinges on the capacity to retain and advance domination. To understand the effect of this digitalisation, it is essential to understand
how methods and techniques have been developed as tools for the production of
‘statistical reasoning’ and consequently, a digital enveloping of the combat zone.
As Desrosiéres has eloquently described it, statistical reasoning is shaped by ‘a
space of common mental representations’ that are ‘technologically and historically
structured and limited’ (Desrosiéres 1998).
The linking of knowledge and representations of reality to a certain course of
action is key, and represents what Hackings calls the powerful connection between
‘there is’ and ‘we must’, i.e. the link between knowing and choosing a course of
action (Hacking 1975). The act of linking analysis with a path of intervention
is part the broader idea of developing security strategies where calculation and
mitigation of risk are vital tools. As De Goede and Amoore define it, risk-based
governing is ‘a means of making an uncertain and unknowable future amenable
to intervention and management’ (Amoore and De Goede 2008: 9). The wish to
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develop future-oriented security technologies while owning the moment is at the
heart of Israel’s digitalised security strategy.
Controlling the emotional landscape
The determination to keep track of developments in the emotional landscape is
a key motivation for these forms of control60. A concrete example of the effects of
Israel’s efforts to control the emotional landscape of the targeted population surfaced when I interviewed long-time Palestinian (non-violent) activist Muhammad
Othman, who is from Qalqilya, a village in the northern part of the West Bank.
Othman explained how the Israeli occupation – under which he was born and
has lived his whole life – is made up of two systems, one based on technological
and online presence, and the other on physical presence or the threat of sudden
physical presence. In practice, these are two mutually dependent systems. According to Othman, Israel’s intelligence units have monitored his online activities; he
described how he lives under both a virtual and physical siege:
If you get angry at the occupation and start complaining on Facebook they
[the Israeli authorities] will use your communications and network as evidence
during next interrogation. They even make up identities online and extort you
during interrogation. If there is a massive demonstration in the West Bank they
know everything in advance, and fly their drone balloons over the whole thing,
so they don’t need to go into the cities. But sometimes they come to arrest us
(Interview with Mohammed Othman, Qalqiliya, 19 September 2012).
Even though Othmann’s suspicions are not verifiable, the point here is to identify the plethora of control systems that operate to control the emotional landscape
of the colonised. Like Othman, Palestinians under occupation are controlled by
their own knowledge and their previous experience of Israeli security installations.
While the techniques deployed by Israel have changed over time, there has been
a consistent trend of ‘Arab-in-group surveillance’ (Abujidi 2011; Cohen 2011).
Palestinian are collectively abnormalised and transformed into legitimate objects
of suspicion. The collective is in turn organised under further subcategories and
population registering through different systems and filters of population management. The power of these systems lies in its capacity to not only identify a suspect
and prevent actions but to discipline broader patterns of behaviour through the
threat of violence (Azoulay 2009). These practices mesh well with the idea that
60
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By emotional landscape, I refer to the effects and control of ‘the mind’, future behaviour, and
the intentions of those subjected to control. In the view of Israel’s intelligence and security
practitioners, social media and virtual interactions (and other potential risks and threats) from
a command centre for terrorism and organised crime.
maximum security is obtained by improving the ability to predict the future so
as to control it.
6.3 Risk management and digitalised control
Predictive software: the case of Athena
The Israeli security company Athena specialises in this field. It is a security
and intelligence solutions provider founded and now chaired by Shabtay Shavit,
who was the former head of the Mossad (Israel’s external security service). In the
aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Shavit was invited to New York City by
then mayor Michael Bloomberg to be an active member of the New York Fire
Department Preparedness Task Force61. At the Israeli Pavilion at the Eurosatory
defence and security fair in Paris in 2012, under the auspices of the Israeli Ministry
of Defense, Athena hosted a booth exhibiting a broad array of ‘predictive software’
or ‘advanced proprietary software-based solutions’ (Athena promotional material).
The booth’s displays were designed for a global audience, intelligence communities
and security forces in particular.
While I was talking with the company’s representative at the booth, he spoke
of ‘anticipation as a weapon’ as one of the most important tools ‘to counter threats’
(Conversation with Athena representative, anonymous, Eurosatory, Paris, June
2012). He also explained how the roots of Israel’s comparative advantages are
based on collecting intelligence through various sophisticated channels: ‘We had
social network infiltration before anyone else; we had the Mossad even before
the state was established’ (Conversation with anonymous Athena representative,
Eurosatory, Paris, June 2012).
According to the company’s own description, Athena’s technology relies on
proper expert knowledge and experience from the field. One of the company’s
best-selling concepts is the Centric Knowledge 2 Insights (CK21). As part of a
larger human intelligence system, CK2 works as an‘information exploitation platform’ that functions as a resource for data mining and analysis. As an intelligence
collecting system that helps convert raw data to ‘actionable intelligence’ (Athena
website), the programme is designed to provide the capability of threats before
they materialise. Athena describes the system as ‘a one-stop solution’ for deep web
analysis and silent downloads with built-in systems for identity management and
‘camouflage capacities’. According to the representative: ‘Most western states demand
61
In the same time span, Shabtay Shavit also served as an advisor to the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs
and Defense Committee.
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this sort of expertise of predicting the future by knowing the present’ (Interview with
anonymous Athena representative, Eurosatory, Paris, June 2012).
However, the representative also explained that legal barriers in Western
­Europe, such as privacy laws and the generally higher demands of transparency
(which are increasingly challenged by a wide set of anti-terror provisions), create
impediments to transplanting methods and software to other apparatus. However,
as the Athena staff member made clear to me: ‘there are ways to work around this’,
for example, by adjusting the technology or by allying with more clandestine actors
(Interview with anonymous Athena representative, Eurosatory, Paris, June 2012).
During our conversation, the representative also told me that the Danish National Police (DNP) were at the fair, and was one of the company’s customers.
DNP investigative units have learned from Athena’s expertise to infiltrate paedophile online chat rooms through identity construction and tracking of online
patterns of behaviour. In more general terms, Athena’s philosophy, or strategy is
that the mere prevention of attack is not enough: the goal is to eliminate the very
fear and threat of (potential) attacks and keep them secret from the public. Indeed,
at the intersection of security and capital accumulation lies the need to ensure/
restore public confidence in the state and its institutions. This works as a stabilising
force, and Athena’s sales message clearly markets the company by promising that:
Our experience in confronting some of the world’s nastiest, best motivated,
and most sophisticated terrorists has taught us that safety isn’t enough. To
be successful, a security program must maintain and restore public confidence, at minimal added cost and inconvenience (Athena Promotion/
Israel Trade Commission 2010).
Athena is just one example of Israel’s technology to ‘track enemies’, which is
well developed and has moved steadily into the field of commercial prediction
software. Israel’s excellent reputation for (military) algorithmic applications is another case in point.
Algorithms of control: from combat to Waze and Any.do
Israel expertise in and long-term tracking of behavioural patterns has provided
the IDF with special expertise in the field of algorithms of control. Algorithms
can be described briefly as ‘a set of rules that precisely defines a sequence of operations’
(Stone 1973: 4). Intercepted signals and vivid data amps and coordinates enable
the identification of rules, trends, and patterns of behaviour. Often these are
mapped based on long-term data registration and observations. The system’s data
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mining requires technologies that can be used to map a particular mind-set and
selected behavioural patterns.
I suggest that long-term, intimate knowledge of the OPT – its people and the
landscape – combined with the highly sophisticated intelligence units of the IDF
has led Israel to excel in algorithmic control. In a military rule like the IDF’s, routine practices of accumulating data and its processing into general rules are used
to predict the behaviour of risky groups and enemies. The generated knowledge
provides the operator with a set of instructions on which decisions to make, i.e.
how to respond/act. Algorithmic calculations offer a platform for the production
of ‘an accepted field of rationality’ based on the accumulation of quantitative facts
and the calculation of risk (Foucault 2009). In the context of war and Zionism’s
calculative field of intervention in particular, algorithmic control grows from battlespace knowledge and long-term data registration of patterns of movement,
insurgency methods and modes of communication and extends into mechanisms
to produce spaces and logics of rationality to sustain control.
In fact, because of its long-term work with military algorithms (primarily in the
IDF’s Elite intelligence/technical Unit 8200), Israel is now a leader in developing
consumer applications based on processing vast amounts of information known
as ‘Big Data’. Algorithmic reconfigurations of the battlespace and the military’s
modes of intervening and planning have contributed to Israel’s success in transferring these experiences to a variety of algorithm-based consumer applications. A
range of Israeli companies – often start-ups – have successfully transferred military
algorithmic systems to the civilian/commercial sector, and have often done so in
tandem with their own personal journey from military staff to owner/founders of
digi-tech companies.
Waze is a large data company created by IDF veterans. In 2013, Google purchased Israel’s Waze for more than 1 billion USD; in June 2013, Waze had more
than 50 million users. Waze is an algorithmic-based navigation (GPS) application
that crowd surfs for accurate traffic information and maps in real time. The company describes one of the benefits of this application:
By connecting drivers to one another, we help people create local driving
communities that work together to improve the quality of everyone’s daily
driving. That might mean helping them avoid the frustration of sitting
in traffic, cluing them in to a police trap or shaving five minutes off of
their regular commute by showing them new routes they never even knew
about (Waze 2015).
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After ‘receiving a makeover and gaining ground after the 2006 Lebanon war’ (IDF
2012), the IDF is already using a special version of Waze: the Tzayad (Hebrew for
‘Hunter’). As part of its Digital Army Program, the IDF has from the early 1990s
experimented with precursors to the current system. Tzayad is the army’s GPS,
navigator, and communications system all in one – a crucial aid for IDF forces
that helps commanders in the field coordinate their activities. The system works as
a platform to share information and is able to collect data from multiple sources
simultaneously and interpret the data into a single stream (IDF 2012).
According to the IDF, the programme allows units to share information on the
location of friendly and hostile units, much like a GPS programme in a car or on
a phone enables the locating of restaurants or other businesses. Used mostly by
ground forces, all participating units are able to stay updated with the location and
movements of other units, and to focus on winning the fight rather than on gathering information. Whereas Waze helps drivers find the best route, Tzayad plans
routes for officers in military vehicles and pinpoints hazards along the way. (The
GPS can also be used to trace traffic in the air and at sea). On Tzayad’s interactive
table screen, enemy positions are highlighted in red, while ‘friendly’ positions are
coloured in blue. Waze also maps no-go routes and lists recommended routes. The
‘shared thinking’ of these two systems attests to a reality where soldiers’ methods of
analysing movement in the battlespace are transferred to analysis of civilian traffic
infrastructure to ensure free traffic flows and smooth mobility.
In the same vein, the globally popular application Any.do is based on the IDF’s
processing of accumulated knowledge and data. Developed in 2011 by Unit 8200
veterans, this time management system, or predictive algorithms were designed for
defence purposes. The system draws from the algorithmic structures developed by
the unit to map enemy behavioural patterns. Inspired by the methods deployed
by the IDF in developing Any.do, the creators, namely founder Omer Perchik,
brought in intelligence methods to create a ‘perfect-to-do-list system’ (Leichman
2014). The goal was to understand and therefore foresee people’s preferences and
patterns of action. By the end of 2012, the application was one of the most downloaded worldwide.
While Any.do is developed from an algorithm that deduces the preferences of
consumers, its initial innovations were derived from the IDF’s algorithmic computing developed to detect and map Palestinians’/suspected terrorists’ movement
and behaviour. The use of the algorithm is based on the sovereign’s capacity to estimate/predict an individual’s decisions based on his or her past behaviour and decisions. Thus, algorithmic systematisation of these patterns is made into (tentative)
rules of action. Any.do is a progressive planning tool used to organise the calendar
based on an individual’s or organization’s previous plans and preferences. Thus,
while for ‘the terrorist’ the algorithmic veil is a mode of surveillance, for the Any.
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do user, it is a customised service. Currently, the application’s time management
application is one of the world’s most popular applications for mobile devices. (On
a side note, Style.it, the personal stylist Israeli online service application, follows
the same philosophy as Any.do. It was originally developed as an algorithm to trace
and prevent suicide bombings. However, through its commercial transformation,
Style.it tracks the user’s fashion preferences and provides purchase and styling
suggestions from a source of retailers.)
Even the atmospheric and meteorological sciences have found intersections
with algorithmic security practices. At the aforementioned Eurosatory fair, Israeli security giant MER Security and Communications Systems presented a new
portable meteorological system. Dr Uri Stein has used his skill in meteorology to
bridge the gap between military technology and meteorology. He has also been
active in developing a warning system for military technology that takes changing
weather conditions into consideration, which can be ‘a decisive factor when preparing surgical attacks’ (Interview with Dr. Uri Stein, Eurosatory, Paris, June, 2012).
This system provides meteorological support to artillery units and various
modes of attacks, ranging from tanks, the air, snipers, as well as HLS applications
such as airport defence, fire fighting, and policing operations. The device’s aerial
and on-the-ground- sensors collect and transfer meteorological data from target
areas to a central computer unit where algorithms combine this data with those
received from the global weather forecasting system. The data is then translated
into actionable intelligence by predicting how, based on real-time collection of
data and predicted weather forecasts, local weather will develop over the next hours
or days. According to Dr Stein, Israel has been a particularly rewarding place in
which to develop the system because of its small size and highly differentiated
weather conditions from the desert in the south to the cooler inland temperatures
hs meant that military responses required a high degree of flexibility of changes
in temperature. Dr Stein said the system was developed in a joint effort between
the IDF and MER based on specific IDF specifications. The devices are currently
placed on IDF tanks and in military bases in Israel and the OPT, but also increasingly in other settings across the globe. Since weather conditions are challenging
for most battlespaces, MER’s devices have a universal value: they are relevant not
only in military zones but is also at sporting events and other civilian venues.
As these examples illustrate, Israeli entrepreneurs have successfully commercialised algorithms for both military and civil applications. By doing so, proactive
control has now entered new avenues such as time management, trade strategising
and others spaces where calculation of risk is conflated with the calculation of
cost (time, energy, and resources for the app user and even society more broadly),
which is becoming a dominant concern/motivating engine for global customers.
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When I interviewed Shaiy Yermiyahu, co-founder of Israeli security company
Hydro-Noa, he plainly ascribed the key to the permeation of algorithms to ‘a general sense of laziness’, i.e., the demand for algorithms is based on ‘people’s desire to
invest a minimum of input while sustaining or maximizing output…this is clearly
a driving force in the proliferation and spread of predictable software’ (Interview
with Shaiy Yermiyahu, Tel Aviv, 28 August 2012).
Saving time and resources are key for the military, police, consumers, and business owners. Hence, for those developing algorithms of control, there is diminishing
difference between tracking down terrorists and consumers. Beyond algorithmic
systems but still in the area of predictions, Israeli companies also display skills in the
field of lie detection, another capacity developed by the state’s intelligence sector.
Selling ‘the truth’ and constructing identities
At the Israeli Security and Defense Expo (ISDEF) in Tel Aviv in June 2012,
Nemesysco, an Israeli company specialising in voice analysis technology (another
term for lie detection) handed out fortune cookies. These cookies carried the same
message to the attendees: ‘You are about to reveal the truth – much faster than ever
before’ (ISDEF Nemesyco booth, Tel Aviv, June 2013). The company representative at the fair enthusiastically presented the philosophy of the company’s products
as a technological breakthrough at the intersection of intelligence, psychology,
and software engineering. The company’s core expertise rests on its Layered Voice
Analysis (LVA) technology. By analysing key vocal properties in speech and identifying various types of stress, cognitive processes, and emotional reactions, LVA
software enables operators to determine a subject’s state of mind. Based on this,
Nemesysco creates a so-called ‘emotional signature’ of an individual’s speech at
a given moment in order to detect ‘deceptive motivation, criminal intention and
general credibility’ (Nemesysco 2014). Through a systematic correlation of real life
vocal data and key human emotions, the system detects unreliable testimonies.
According to the representative, the technology is used by Israeli intelligence agencies in interrogations and for routine questions at checkpoints; it is also sold to
private actors for a variety of purposes.
The Nemesysco representative explained that Israel’s long-term reliance on
intelligence for security purposes has motivated the company’s work. Recently, the
company’s scientists established a joint effort with scientists at Duke and Harvard
universities in the US to develop a new algorithm. This device is designed to
‘identify deceptive intentions in real-life scenarios by analysing peoples’ stress levels
in specific sequences’ (Nemesysco 2014). The system has been developed in close
corporation between psychiatrists, linguistics experts, and software engineers, and
fits nicely into Nemesysco’s marketing statement that its products respond to:
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…the different needs of the security, corporate and financial markets, enabling organisations to enhance crime detection and prevention; expedite
investigations; identify and fight fraud more effectively; improve veracity
assessment during recruitment processes and provide better services to the
public at need (Nemesysco 2014).
This system does not directly reveal fraud; it provides automatic warnings in
case of imbalances and irregularities in behaviour. The non-liar and the liar can be
‘whoever’. In the export /commercialisation phase of the LVA system’s life cycle,
detected deviances are then elevated to speak to more objective parameters. In this
way, the technology diffused into the context of business with a differently charged
context of ‘honesty maintenance’. The filtering out of suspicious individuals can
be applied to a broad array of people groups, from potential criminals to people
interviewing for jobs.
Nemesysco has sold its products to a range of customers such as the Los ­Angeles
(California) Sheriff’s Office, Boston’s Logan Airport and the Guatemalan Finance
Ministry62, which have incorporated LVA technology into their standard security
routines. Nemecysco’s technology targets law enforcement and airport security in
particular, but it is also used for commercial/corporate purposes According to the
company, the Israeli LVA system is currently in use in 87 countries, including the
US, Russia, Canada, and the UK. The spread of LVA technology helps disseminate the idea of a verifiable demarcation line between truth telling and lying. The
detection of this line is a performance of security that hinges on an operational
system, a universal tool for dissecting the ‘risky’ group from the ‘at-risk’ group
shaped by the nature of the context-dependent categories.
In the same vein, the Israeli intelligence company Terrorgence has made a business out of advanced cyber security, surveillance, and online penetration of social
networks. Its staff of more than 60 personnel cultivates and operates virtual entities
in online spaces, developing communication lines and forming connections in
critical open and deep web sources (Terrorgence 2014). Terrorgence is a private
enterprise composed of intelligence veterans: well-trained Arabic speaking Israelis
work in Terrorgence’s control room. According to the company representative,
most of their staff is not only fluent in Arabic; they have also mastered the use
of Arab cultural codes, what the representative referred to as ‘the sharia discourse’
(Interview with Terrorgence representative, ISDEF, Tel Aviv, June 2012).
62
In 2006, Nemesysco’s HR1 was deployed to help the Guatemalan Finance Ministry recruit new
employees to avoid counter theft, drug use, fraud, and bribery amongst its staff, and to verify
the candidate’s propensity for honesty and loyalty in the workplace (Nemesysco 2006).
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The company is hired by a public or private client to access and infiltrate
by computer a social media platform (most often what Terrorgence refers to as
­‘Jihadist peer-to-peer platforms’) in order to intercept and obtain information from
communication and interaction. While the access the staffers get, according the
Terrorgence representative, ‘is mostly legitimate’, the challenge is to act naturally
while engaging in ‘chats and exchanges’ (Terrorgence 2014). The infiltrator/consultant is usually hired to investigate a suspected threat or debates around a new
method or product, and uses the same methods of the Mossad and Shin Bet. One
Terrorgence staff described a typical example of communicating online:
Sometimes I sit flirting with an Arab man all day, playing an Arab
­women. We are one of the only companies thriving only on human
­interaction. We do everything legally. We cannot hack – that’s a one-way
street and we can never go back then…. (Interview with Terrorgence
representative, ISDEF, Tel Aviv, June 2013).
Terrorgence works from the philosophy that big data merely provide context
to the specific intelligence that can be coaxed from it with a virtual human touch
(Interview with Terrorgence representative, ISDEF, Tel Aviv, June 2012). Thus,
its methods embody a pro-active human-centric approach as opposed to a techno-centric passive approach. Company representatives’ long-term experience with
intelligence and interrogation techniques has been a key motor in the development
of Israel’s digital security industry. The Israeli state’s long-term surveillance schemes,
which are designed to discipline or prevent interaction between at risk and risky
elements, lay at the heart of this.
Both Nemesyco and Terrorgence indicate that Israeli security companies have
become profitable agents for the translation of military practice to commercialised
security, surveillance, and planning schemes. Singling out suspicious behaviour
has become a key mode of security; the ability to detect deviancy, irregularities,
and lies is a much sought-after capacity. This requires not just technologies, but
ideas as to what constitutes normality and its negation deviance. Israel’s policies of
differentiation have clearly become a fertile source of innovation.
This discussion has demonstrated how an individual’s space for action is shaped,
disciplined, and controlled through cyber and virtual technological innovations.
The next section unfolds this perspective further by addressing the ways in which
security technologies codify and subject (colonial) bodies.
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6.4 Coding bodies: Biometrical tracking
The technology of corporal management is a key element in the governing of
­Israel’s occupation of Palestine. The Israeli Ministry of Defense export unit SIBAT
lists companies ready to export this segment of security under the following categories: facial recognition, fingerprint technology, fraud/lie detection, hand geometry
sensors, iris recognition, retinal scanning, signature verification, speech analysis
and voice recognition, and deconstructing most body parts into measurable units
(SIBAT 2012). This might be termed the biometrical part of the digital envelope.
In the biopolitical battlespace of Israel-Palestine, the body is both the target and
the source of violence. To understand how this trend operates, and in turn how
it is commercialised, the chapter proposes some ways in which Israel’s digitalised
control in the OPT has come to mark, codify, categorise, and ultimately control
the colonised body.
Appaduria’s work on colonial India is a useful illustration of such control.
Appadurai looks at how the bodies (of the Indian population) were disciplined
though the production of zones of calculation and management. He identifies this
process as a creation of ‘boundaries around homogenous bodies’ (Appadurai 1996:
133), which both constructs cleavages of differences between the people categorised into different groups and in turn flattens the differences among people within
a given category or zone (Amoore 2006). Because the zoning and codification of
the colonised body is a central feature of Israel’s rule, it makes sense to examine
the link between technologies of control and the corporal dimension of the settler
colonial project, where the body itself becomes the object of control and at the
same time a carrier of information for the sovereign to use. Biometrical access
control is a case in point. In this way the racializationis not based on any sort of
biological detection, rather it is in the targeting that race is made.
Biometrical access
General (ret.) Aharoni Zeevi Farkash was once head of what is commonly
referred to as Israel’s and perhaps the world’s best tech school, the IDF’s Unit
8200. In late 2013, Farkash visited New York City, where his Israeli biometrical
security company FST21 has its US office63. He made this visit to promote and
implement the company’s new newest innovation, SafeRise. The security system
has been installed in the lower Manhattan housing complex of Knickerbocker
Village, a 1,600-unit apartment building. After FST21 installed its security system,
63
In addition to working in Unit 8200, Farkash was the Head of the Israeli Security Directorate
(Aman) from 2002–2006, and is the commander of the IDF’s technological and logistical unit.
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the problem of access (in the form of bottlenecks and long queues) has decreased
and money to pay the human security guard/doorman has been saved.
The SafeRise system is a biometrical access system that works as follows: Photographs of each resident’s face are taken and stored in a database. When a resident
approaches the door, a high-tech scanner checks his/hers face, which is either
recognised by the system, whereby access is granted, or rejected as unverifiable
(SafeRise website). Security personnel are needed only if a person trying to enter
is unidentifiable. The system is based on a composite of facial and body structures
created by combining scores of photographs taken from various angles. FST21 has
developed the SafeRise technological platform based on biometrical technology
that grants the body the role as ‘a unique unit’ (FST21 website). In this way, access
is managed based on the storage of data on those features. Thus, the body is the
key to security. Farkash emphasised the effectiveness of SafeRise in an interview
with the New York Times: ‘Access should not interfere with the pace of life, SafeRise
is marketed on the logic that security could be convenient…for the good people’
(Aharoni Zeevi Farkash, in Singer, 2014).
This technological security solution is Farkash’s brainchild. As Farkash has
stated in an interview, at the Israeli checkpoint the ‘difference between life and death’
can be boiled down to ‘depicting the one terrorist among the 30,000’ (Aharoni Zeevi
Farkash in Singer 2014). SafeRise promises to detect and depict this danger. Once
SafeRise’s technology is installed, whether in an airport (where the technology is
currently being tested), a government building, a private office, or at a checkpoint,
‘all the individual has to do is to be him/herself ’ (SafeRise promotional material).
In the same vein, the Israeli security start-up SDS (Suspect Detection System)
has developed a technology called Gogito (which means ‘I Think’ in Latin), which
detects hostile intentions. The system can be deployed at borders, checkpoints, and
in airports and other sensitive spots. It checks various parameters such as skin
conductivity, blood pressure, changes in facial temperatures, and pupil dilation.
According to SDS promotional material, pupil analysis is more accurate than
fingerprint analysis because the pupil is harder to fake and its form varies from
person to person (i-HLS 2014). The subject’s fingerprints and vocal imprints are
also recorded. These physiological parameters may indicate stress, and stress raises
suspicion. The system can identify criminal intent, membership in shady organisations and even temporary criminal service on behalf of a third party. Subjects
asked whether they’re members of a (specific) criminal or terrorist organisation
will show some uncontrollable physiological reactions if they do actually belong
to the group (i-HLS 2014).
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The above cases are a few examples of the ‘bodification’ of digital security,
where the creation of boundaries is distilled into a process of rationalised codification while also serving the broader purpose of boundary making along ethnic,
racial, or class lines. The ideas behind these technologies and their effects illustrate
how digitalised practices of control emanating from experiments and practices of
surveillance and control of Palestinians are extracted and distributed globally. This
extraction indicates how ways of controlling the Palestinian body are transferred
to commercialised products.
This digital security trend taps into a broader techno-moral shift towards the
digitalisation of corporal control. In the push to digitalise the body, there is a
broader shift towards a reality where bodies are controlled through codification.
This trend provides the sovereign, i.e. the holder of the control system, with the
power to inscribe ‘race’, class and other political logics into the system’s operational core. While in Palestine this code is often rooted in pre-existing categories of
identity constructed by the sovereign, the systems can easily be retrofitted to other
purposes. Within this new topography of digitalised power relations, through
biometrics or other technological systems, the body – the individual – becomes
a source of information in and of itself and thus an object of codification and
disciplining. The attachment of codes of access and exclusion to bodies enables
these advanced modes of control.
DNA mapping and profiling has also begun to penetrate the security field as
another way to create and build knowledge about a population (Parsons 2011).
The securitisation of DNA reifies the function of the body as a carrier of information selected and processed by the sovereign. The body as the carrier of information
for the purposes of bodily control needs to be seen as part of a broader reconfiguration of identity management. An increasing number news pieces have been
published in recent years that the state of Israel has included DNA registration
as part of its intelligence gathering and mapping of Palestinian demographics64.
However, companies have also started to experiment with DNA as a commercial
product.
64
In 2012, the Palestinian National Authority Detainees Ministry announced that it considers
Israel’s use of DNA tests on Palestinian prisoners as a violation of international law. Palestinian
National Authority lawyers have filed a complaint with Israel’s Supreme Court to demand the
end of forced DNA tests for Palestinians jailed by Israel (Maan 2012). In 2012, it was reported
that a wave of hunger strikes protesting forced DNA tests occurred among Palestinian political
prisoners (in Israel’s Nafha, Majiddo, Galbor, and Ramon prisons).
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For example, the Israeli start-up GeneQ, developed in the Shomron laboratory
of Tel Aviv University by university scientists, has developed a sophisticated software application that can help identify individuals’ ‘genomic DNA’. This testing
system can be operated through a smartphone and is intended to be used for medical purposes (such as genetic disorders), and as a tool for the police to recognise,
identify, and generate data on targeted individuals (GeneG 2014).
6.5 Conclusion
This chapter has served as a brief look at how Israel’s digital, biometrical, software-based security systems and technologies work as a means of power control
and extended warfare. Israel’s practices of digitalised risk management are hard
to limit to one avenue of technological innovation or reduce to one trend alone.
Within the context of Israel’s security industry’s cyber security, digital surveillance
and biometrical systems take many forms and shapes. However, from the view of
the sovereign, what they have in common is the ability to predict and thus prevent
unwanted events. They can minimise risk, filter access, and sanction movement
based on the codification and categorisation of people.
The proliferation of this sort of control in the OPT underscores the claim that
technology when deployed by humans to control humans is a complex synergised
interface. The deployment of cyber, digital, and biometric control techniques
provides an image of clean control, but in reality it is messy. One ffect might be
that it helps conceal the structural violence inherent to the permanent siege of
the OPT. Taken together, the shift towards virtual and digitalised warfare alters
and reconfigures the notion of both time and space in the practice of security,
providing Israel’s techno-nationalism with a contradictory ethos of both being
tied to territory while effectively expanding the space for battle. The digitalisation
and biometrification of the topography of control, along with the development
of digital data archives, incorporates spaces where people interact virtually. The
refined frontiers of battle and disciplining come to create the conditions for a
reconfigured nexus of virtual and real.
To summarise: the permeation of control though digital systems and the surveillance of online spaces extend the battlespace into a real space without borders
and reifies the notion of an invisible enemy where the criteria of success, i.e. the
absence of threats, are close to impossible to estimate and verify. The chapter has
discussed how bodies, feelings, behaviour, and other human attributes and qualities are securitised and made into objects to be managed. This happens through the
production of a digital image of ‘reality’, or the construction of a rational field of
210
action which can help serve the interests of the sovereign. As the Israeli journalist
Amira Hass puts it: ‘You exist if the Israeli computer says so’ (Hass 2005)65.
In this way, Israel’s frontiers of battle and control are reconfigured. While they
may now be less visible, these frontiers are nonetheless powerful political boundaries that provide new space in which to pose the question of who is controlled
by whom.
The following chapters unfold the digitalised features of control in more detail
in the context of urban control and warfare and in relation to border security and
management.
65
Hass’s quote refers to Israel’s policies and practices of controlling the population through
­differentiated data registration (Hass 2005).
211
212
CHAPTER SEVEN
7.0‘SMART CITIES’, ISRAELI URBANISATION, AND URBAN
CONTROL
‘If I wish to substitute a new building for an old one, I must demolish
before I construct’ (Herzl [1902] quoted in Wolfe 2006: 388).
7.1Introduction
Israel’s real time surveillance capacities and urban insurgency practices have become important ‘weapons’ in the country’s export of technologies and techniques
that are proliferating under the much-celebrated and catch-all concept of ‘smart’
or ‘safe’ cities. These concepts are often promoted as large-scale projects of urban
digital upgrading solutions66. On the dark side of this innovative shift toward
smart solutions, techniques of urban control, and even warfare, are increasingly
penetrated urban spaces globally that are concealed under the ‘smart label’.
The smart city idea has become a key component of the portfolios of the
Israeli security industry. While aimed at exports, smart city solutions are rooted
in the dual experiences of settler colonial control warfare and the concomitant
urbanisation of Jewish life in Israel-Palestine. By analysing a range of sites of this
duality, this chapter argues that Israel’s security companies have a central and (due
to its rapid process of urbanisation, high-tech economy and colonial structure) a
particular role in the globalising phenomenon of the smart city. Through a range of
mini-cases, the following chapter unfolds how the alleged ‘smartness’ is a product
or a contemporary culmination of the experiences of the national security state
operating in varying spaces, through different methods, and across locations in
the colonial sites of the OPT and inside Israel proper.
The chapter introduces the celebrated concept of ‘the smart city’ and dissects
some of the key debates around the concept as it has been discussed in academic
and semi-academic deliberations. The analysis introduces some ideas as to how its
66
On a global scale in 2012 it was estamited that private and government investors spent USD
8.1 billion USD on smart city technologies. However by 2016, according to industry estimates,
that number is projected to reach USD 39.5 billion USD. Currently Europe is estimated to
host 38 self-proclaimed smart cities, North America 35, Asia Pacific 21, the Middle East and
Africa six and Latin America two.
213
Israeli versions can be situated within a settler colonial framework by pointing to
the ‘dark side’ of urban planning. The latter includes the management of slums,
peripheries, and segregated spaces through schemes inspired by counter-insurgency etchniques and colonial (urban) planning. The chapter inserts the concept of
the smart city into the broader history of Israeli urbanisation and proposes some
ideas as to how a fertile link between settler colonial practices, urban control, and
the smart city has surfaced through the construction of the Israeli versions of the
smart city67.
7.2 Welcome to the ‘smart city’
The ‘smart city’ is as an ecosystem of digital urban services and control. Globally,
the smart city has become the buzzword in holistic urban governance systems
deemed ‘smart’. The smart city combines computing with technologised urban
management systems. It is characterised by a mix of pervasive wireless networks
and distributed sensor platforms (from video surveillance to meteorological stations) that monitor flows from traffic to sewage and provides information in
real-time or in the anticipation of risks. The term is usually used to label entire
cities, smart homes, smart buildings, and larger smart ensembles like airports,
hospitals, or university campuses equipped with a multitude of mobile terminals,
embedded devices, and connected sensors and actuators that are installed with
sophisticated surveillance, zoning, and digitalisation systems. Smart cities combine
video surveillance, fire detection and crowd flow monitoring. They also include
customer tracking and larger but temporary initiatives like command and control
systems established for sports mega-events. Nam and Pardo stress how a smarter
city should be treated as an organic whole – as a network or as an interlinked
system (Nam and Pardo 2011). Tailor-made smart city solutions are designed to
target a range of niche purposes and interconnected issues such as energy savings,
anti-terrorism, crime-prevention, public service delivery, and traffic management
based on the embedding of smart technology sensors, CCTV, and drone technology into the urban fabric.
In the broadest terms, the entrenchment of smart city thinking attests to a
broad shift from the deployment of digital devices (the digital city or the intelligent
city) to the utilisation of networked infrastructure to both to increase economic
67
214
In the Israeli smart city discourse, the ‘safe’ city is often used synonymously with ‘smart’ to
underline the emphasis on public security and an improved quality of life. This speaks to Israeli
discourses on homeland security as well as to the branding of municipal smart solutions in cities
and towns in Israel.
and social mobility and control it. As a techno-utopian vision and as concrete
strategies of digital upgrades of urban zones, the smart city vision is unfolding in
rapidly growing numbers of urban zones around the globe, including to megacities
in the global south, thanks to omnipresent internet connectivity and the miniaturisation of electronics. According to most smart city practitioners – consultants and
engineers – the smart trend is leading municipal and other levels of urban planning
into a digital age where the conditions for ecosystem management are optimised
through technology and new collaborative efforts between tech companies, the
public, security agencies, and state and municipal authorities.
The smart city label is eagerly deployed by companies and policy makers and is
intended to carry positive connotations of public security, progress, and resource
optimisation. The term is often used in very generic terms, and referred to as the
next stage in the process of urbanisation (and securitisation) of urban space.
However, on a more conceptual level, it remains vaguely defined (Hollands
2008; Vanolo 2014). There have been lively discussions in academic circles as to
what constitutes this ‘smartness’, how to define it and its intents and effects. In
its most celebratory versions, the smart city brings to the forefront the idea of a
‘wired city’68, as the main developmental model and of connectivity as the source
of growth based on previous academic debates on ‘smart growth’ and ‘intelligent
cities’ (Vanolo 2014). Hollands demonstrates how debates about the future of
urban development are increasingly influenced by discussions of smart cities. According to Hollands, the smart city is a category of urban labelling whose meaning
and content remain fuzzy and inconsistent, but in very large terms relate to the
ways in which technology, people, and communities are connected and interact in
the city: ‘Despite numerous examples of this “urban labelling” phenomenon, we
know surprisingly little about so-called smart cities, particularly in terms of what
the label ideologically reveals as well as hides’ (Hollands 2008: 3). The smart urban
labelling separates out the hype and use of such terms for marketing purposes, as
opposed to referring to actual infrastructural change and its socio-economic effects
(Begg 2002; Harvey 2000; Hollands 2008). In the hands of private companies, the
smart city is most commonly presented in positive terms as an innovative approach
to optimise the digitalisation of and mobility in urban spaces.
Komninos suggests four key points to quantify the minimum that is necessary
to define an urban entity as smart:
68
The literature on innovative environments and entrepreneurship and planning of digital or
intelligent cities is often known under the banner of ‘wired-cities’ (Komninos 2002).
215
1.
2.
3.
4.
Application of a wide range of electronic and digital technologies to communities and cities;
Use of information technologies to life and work within a region;
Embedding of ICTs in the city; and
Territorialisation of such practices in a way that brings ICTs and people
together in a community of learning (Komninos 2002).
A foundation of a smart or intelligent city is based on a digital city infrastructure that connects a local community and drives growth, efficiency, productivity,
and competitiveness (Yovanof and Hazapis 2009). Essentially, the smart city is a
system control linked to transportation, communication, energy flows, and logistics in the urban space for people to learn and adapt to on an ad hoc basis.
A key critique of the smart city is its unfulfilled promise of emancipation,
service, and improved mobility to all inhabitants of a given urban space. It is also
criticised for paying little or no attention to the ‘losers’ in social polarisation, i.e.
those deemed immobile, the urban poor, the unwanted, and criminalised (Hill
2013; Klauser, Paasche and Söderström 2014; Wood 2007). In the context of
the growing demand for smartness, a new consortium of interests is increasingly
attached to the regulation and control of urban life.
Hill characterises the novelty of the smart city as part of a permeating ‘urban-industrial-intelligence-complex’ (Hill 2013), i.e. a ruling complex that is made
up of and produces data that is processed into statistics on trends and events,
whether they be routine or specific events in a given urban space. However, the
trend to smartness poses a larger critical question: in a given society, which people
do these technologies benefit and who comes to suffer from exclusion or intensified
control?
Indeed, while smart technologies reduce the need for traditional governance
mechanisms, urban governance (policing, or mundane urban planning schemes)
becomes more pervasive, even militarised. It is vital to undertand that Israel’s smart
city systems are part and parcel of the broader context of Israeli urbanisation, destruction, control, and war that began with the urbanisation of Jewish immigrants
in Mandate Palestine and culminated in Israel’s major urban security schemes.
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7.3 Zionism and urbanisation
In September 2012, Tom Rosamilia, Senior Vice President of IBM, spoke at a
high-tech conference in Jerusalem. In front of an enthusiastic crowd of people,
Rosamilia unfolded how IBM is pursuing the goal of becoming a world leader
in smart city systems. IBM, he said, plans to ‘turn the entire planet into a web of
smart cities using Israel as a showroom’ (Tom Rosamilia, presentation on IBM’s
engagement in Israel, High-tech Israel Association, Jerusalem, September 2012).
In June 2013, communications giant Cisco announced its plans to transform
Israel into the world’s first fully digital country with a fibre-optic network69. Like
IBM, Cisco aims to use Israel as a showcase of innovation; its network will eventually serve as the backbone for electricity, television, healthcare, and even military
infrastructure in Israel.
Thus, these huge corporations, each their own way, intend to establish Israel
as one big smart and wired city, and to benefit from it. These moves towards
smartness are only the latest stage in a long-term process of urbanisation of Jewish
communities in Israel-Palestine.
Urbanisation has been at the heart of Zionist capital accumulation and territorial expansion from the beginning of Jewish immigration to Palestine (Davis 1977;
Masalha 2007; Nitzan and Bichler 2002). From the outset of Jewish immigration
to Mandatory Palestine, the very project of Jewish settlement had an urban core
that prompted the development of urban control tactics that had deep ramifications for Palestinian urban life. As Zionist scientist Elazaro-Volcani stated at the
time of Israeli state formation:
The stream of modern life draws the countryman to the town. To exchange
the town for the country is to swim against the tide after 2000 years of
exile and of life in town…an effort of quite unusual intensity is required
to overcome the obstacles (Elazaro-Volcani in Troen 1988: 7).
Since the first waves of Aliyah in the 1880s, cities in Israel-Palestine have
been zones of counterinsurgency and violent clashes. Over time, cities in Israel-­
69
Cisco is building the network for the Israel Electric Corporation and the Israeli telecommunications corporation Beteq. According to the agreement between Cisco and Beteq, Cisco is
providing vendor financing of about 140 million USD; the cost of the entire venture has been
estimated at USD 1.39 million.
217
Palestine have developed into sites of intense segregation and class division taking
the form of archipelagos of security, capital circuits, and centres of potential warfare. M
­ ainstream Zionist versions of the movement’s creeping Jewish urbanisation
of Palestine tend to either focus on making virgin territory bloom or rejuvenating
urban space lost to the past.
Indeed, ‘Zionist urbanism’ has been expressed in both Zionist architectural
visions and programmes, including the Arieh Sharon Plan, an ambitious construction program launched in 1950. This was Israel’s first urban master plan for the
replacement of the vision of the Jewish peasant with a vision of a modern urban
(Jewish) society. The project was shaped by very rapid progress from a development
axis of rural-land frontiers to a burgeoning urban-industrialisation frontier sweeping into a developing metropolitan frontier. While in pre-1948 Palestine the Zionist urban planners activated the most modern(ist) architectural and town-planning
discourses available in Europe, the actual process of Zionist urbanisation in the
Yishuv was not a simple transplant of European ideas (LeVine 2005).
Consistently, through interaction with other colonial forces, transnational urban designs have been woven into the settler colonial fabric. The Israeli growth
economy has moved consistently forward through core-area-oriented domestic and
foreign capital investments (Kipnis 1998). Israel has steadily advanced, expanded,
and has now digitalised its technological-metropolitan frontiers. According to
(Zionist) planning expert Daniel Elazar, Israel’s process of ‘Jewish’ urbanisation
has been the most advanced stage of the continuing frontier process – for the sake
of its Jewish citizens (Elazar 1992). Israel’s infrastructure intersects with a built-in
structural segregation architecture rooted in the concept of the kibbutz, which
served both as an economic motor and a tool to create politically homogenous
communities (Rosen and Razin 2009)70.
70
218
Between 1882–1947 Israel’s agricultural settlements were in large part led by young people
who had emigrated from Russia and Eastern Europe. Approximately 550,000 Jews arrived in
Palestine in that period. By contrast, the Yishuv focused its energies on building communal
agricultural settlements which intended to enable the return to the land practically as well as
symbolically. Numbering 12 in 1918, these collective settlements grew to 19 in 1921, and to 25
in 1925. By 1945, they totalled 179 (Aaronsohn 1995). Most of the Kibbutzim were built in
the periphery of the north and south as frontiers. They have experienced increased privatisation
and depopulation; however, their crime rates are low compared to the rest of the country. In
2004, 2.1 per cent of the Israeli population (around 116,000 people) lived in a kibbutz (Pavin
2006).
It is possible that the fundamental ideas of the kibbutz as a calm, safe space,
and as a gated community have been a source of inspiration to the Israeli version
of a smart city utopia. Israel has sought to re-create the experience of communal
homogeneity nationwide through the combination of planning through segregation but also in the production of wired urban space that connects people virtually.
The gates of the kibbutz are now being replaced by new, gated communities for
the wealthy and a broader tendency of (more digital) ways of policing and ‘gating
in’ so as to preserve the feeling of homogeneity71. In 2007, Israel had 38 official
gated communities that totalled more than 10,000 residential units (Rosen and
Razin 2009). Unlike the Moshav, the kibbutz settlements were suburban/urban
spaces composed mainly of middle class aesthetics of architectural uniformity.
This helped merge the needs of sprawling suburbia communities with visions of
national security and political ambitions of expanding territory into the West Bank
(Weizman 2004a, 2007). The philosophy of the settlements reflects the Zionist
architect Richard Kaufmann’s planning, which focused on taking the settlers’ needs
into consideration (Popkin 1971).
Along with urbanising the newly conquered territory, the challenge for Israel
was to steadily develop additional urban control grids to optimise the control and
development of territory (Shamir 2013). This constant remake and remediation of
the urban frontiers, i.e. the steady planning of new settlements, reflect the fact that
expansion of urban space is not only the object of Israel’s war but also its fabric,
its ammunition. In this way, as Weizman notes, ‘the struggle over land and habitat
redefines the act of living, settling, extracting, harvesting, or trading as violence
itself ’ (Weizman 2006: 90-91).
Since the time of state formation, life and industrial production have come to
revolve around urban hubs and industrial zones. Around 750,000 Israelis live in
Jerusalem and 400,000 thousand in Tel Aviv; more than 1.6 million people live in
the country’s metropolitan suburban area and some 91 per cent of all Israelis live
in urban settlements (Israeli Ministry of Tourism 2014). The smart city thinking
is a component of this development, which has only grown in recent years. The
smartness takes on many forms and expressions across the geographical space of
Israel-Palestine.
71
Over the last 20 years, industries owned by the state and the Histadrut have been privatised – as
have two-thirds of the kibbutzim (collective farms) – and capital deregulation has allowed Israeli
firms to attract foreign investments (Shafir and Peled 2000).
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7.4 Policing and ‘cities without violence’
Recently, Israel’s policy of zero tolerance for violence resulted in a national effort
to design policing interventions to eliminate violence in order to enhance stability
and growth. Together with the Prime Minister’s Office and the Ministry of Finance,
former Police Commissioner Assaf Hefetz spearheads the government-funded project ‘City Without Violence’ that operates in 84 (out of 255) local police councils.
The project is conducted in concert with the Mezila (Division of Community and
Crime Prevention) and works with local communities to reduce crime and fear
with a special focus on deploying advanced technology. (Mezila is operated under
the auspices of the Ministry of Public Security and operates in approximately 76
communities and villages throughout Israel).
According to its informational material, the programme is based on the understanding that violence is not just a personal problem but also a social one that
requires systematic intervention that includes an understanding of the causes as
well as identification of solutions (Israeli Ministry of Public Security 2013). In the
discourse of zero violence, the Israel National Police (INP) emphasises its dedication to ‘quality of life’ policing by targeting ‘quality of life crimes’. The project is
marketed to promote safe cities inside Israel and is:
…designed to confront and deal with issues of all violence occurring in
a specific city by focusing on all municipal variables affecting violence in
the city such as education and enforcement (Israeli Ministry of Public
Security 2013).
The City Without Violence project was first established in in 2004 in the tourist city of Eilat in the south. Since then, many Israeli cities, including Rehovot,
Ashkelon, Ashdod, Hadra, and Rishon LeZion, have invested in the project. Smart
city techniques have been incorporated in the project. Reuven Ben Sachar, the
Mayor of Givatayim, explained in a government PR publication that his municipality has followed smart city logic by installing city call centres as sophisticated
command, control, and operation centres. In addition to monitoring patrols, the
call centre controls the security camera system installed in public parks in the city,
which has proved to be effective in preventing and documenting incidents (and
in preventing consumption of alcohol and vandalism in public spaces) (Israel
Gateway 2009).
In the future, the project is slated to actively involve some 250 influential
private and public organisations at the municipal level. Community stakeholders
220
will be asked to sign a pact of no violence, which will be implemented through
sub-initiatives to promote self-policing and even to encourage citizen volunteers
to promise to report on other people. The overarching goal of the project is to
refine the systematic and intelligence-based management of a city. As Kilcullen
notes, how the development of collaborative and information-sharing tools for
modern counterinsurgency is key: the ‘common diagnosis of the problem, and enablers for collaboration may matter more than formal unity of efforts across multiple
agencies’ (Kilcullen 2006: 122). The methods and technologies at hand in the City
Without Violence project are described as a toolbox. What the counter-insurgency
models and the zero violence policy share is the amalgamation of both peace and
pacification.
In a settler colonial state like Israel, the pursuit of zero violence is based on a
utopian image of controlled stability amid encompassing threats. The reality is
much messier. In practice, the cleared urban spaces operate as geopolitical sites of
interlinked Palestinian urban enclaves marked by Israeli efforts to ethnically gentrify
the sites. The steady spread of smart city ideas often occurs in conjunction with a reconfiguration of policing missions. In Israel, the benefits of these security and public
service-oriented initiatives have been reserved for Israel’s dominant ethnic group:
Jewish-Israelis (around 20 per cent of Israeli citizens are Arabs/Palestinians)72.
Denes describes this paradox as a situation where the ideal of (ethnic) closure is
mapped against the reality of the settler-colonial condition of heterogeneity fashioned as a vision of national rescue that relies on purifying violence (Denes 2011a:
9). In the smart city, the image of a city without violence is the fantasy locus; the
Israeli vision of national rescue lies beneath the vision of zero violence. This is not
to imply a violent disposition among community members, but to highlight how
the utopian dream of no violence paradoxically develops out of this context of
segregation. This organised type of engineering through smart city policing does
not necessarily conform to Zionist nationhood ideals, but provides a multitude
of designs of subordination and reinvention promoting new urban geometries.
Israeli companies are exporting and selling similar ideas of the zero violence
vision as a core component in their promise of security. They often draw on Israel’s
own experiences of staying safe despite hostile surroundings. Mid-size security and
72
As Hasisi and Weitzer argue: ‘In divided societies citizen’s relations with the police are shaped in
large part by their allegiance to or alienation from the state…’ (Hasisi and Weitzer 2007: 728).
Accordingly, policing in Israel has become an agent of state repression (Shalhoub-Kevorkian
2004). The seemingly permanent tension between Jews and Arabs has turned the police into a
militarised/central state security apparatus (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2004).
221
smart city company Runcom has its headquarters in Rishon LeZion. The company
was founded by Dr Zion Haddad with ‘extensive experience in the development
of military and commercial communication systems from the Israeli military’ and
provides ‘4G End-to-End Mobile Solutions’ supporting city administrators and
law enforcers in the prevention of crime and overcome terrorism and vandalism
(Runcom). When I met with Ronen Shapira, Runcom’s Strategic Projects and
Projects and Business Development Manager, at the ISDEF security fair in June
2013, he explained how the company’s testing grounds are located in numerous
typical Israeli cities and in sites outside the country. A recent Runcom’s customer
is the City of David in the heart of the Old City in Jerusalem.
Runcom installs surveillance systems in (crowded) Palestinian residential areas,
and markets itself as a provider of security that can help increase the flow of both
Jewish immigration and tourism to Israel. This project is slowly penetrating and
undermining Palestinian neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem with settlements and
the building of Jewish heritage tourist attractions, archaeological excavations, and
‘rediscovered’ underground water systems.
Together with the conglomerate Brightstar, Runcom has delivered a comprehensive safe city solution to the Argentinean capital of Buenos Aires. Marketing
employee Yair Shapira of Runcom explained to me at ISDEF security fair in Tel
Aviv in June 2012 that this contract was landed through the Israeli government’s
connections with the mayor of Buenos Aires, who, according to Shapiro, is Jewish.
The mayor was very much in favour of bringing in Israeli expertise to fight high
crime rates and the fear caused by the threat of such crimes.
Much like the deployment of other variations of the system in many other
Latin American cities, the security system in Buenos Aires is directly connected
to Runcom’s control rooms in Israel. In Buenos Aires, operators in the field or in
the city’s police stations can contact Israeli experts (even Spanish speaking ones) at
this call centre (Interview with Ronen Shapira of Runcom, ISDEF Israel, Tel Aviv,
6 June 2013). This means that everyday security governance can be influenced by
decisions made from Israel.
For Runcom, the deployment of safe city programmes is about regaining control of the city in favour of law-abiding citizens. Two elements are key here: the
ability to prevent violations of law by reacting instantly and to ‘provide deterrent
measures without affecting routine life’ (Interview with Ronen Shapira of Runcom, ISDEF Israel, Tel Aviv, 6 June 2013). Runcom’s urban security systems allow
the detection of suspicious events in real-time based on a system of command and
control tailored to the unique requirements of each city, and on a core technology
of differentiating between routine activity and suspicious activity.
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According to Shapira, Israeli companies secure contracts to implement safe city
projects globally through government-to-government projects73. To accomplish
this, Israeli embassies first set up meetings with relevant in-country authorities
through networking and often informal channels. After a deal is made, Israeli
authorities then contact the relevant Israeli company or system integrator, which
then installs the appropriate smart city systems.
We have here a successful business venture writ large: An Israeli security systems company provides a high-tech solution to the problem of violence, either in
Israel or abroad. These systems are praised by both residents and policy makers.
However, it can also be said that these no violence security systems can be used
as an invasive method to target those who live in the social periphery of a given
population.
The Israeli National Police debate
‘smart’ policing and violence
prevention with private industry
representatives. HLS 2nd Israel
Homeland Security Conference,
Tel Aviv, November 2012. Photo:
Author.
73
For example, Shapira highlighted how Runcom’s cooperation with authorities in Azerbaijan
provided new ideas and experiences based on the country’s highly volatile environment marked
by low legal barriers.
223
7.5 Smart wars and frontier settlements
From kibbutzim to outpost to smart city
Israeli settlements in Israel-Palestine have consistently served as the primary
frontiers for Jewish colonisation (Shafir 1996). Colonisation through its urbanisation strategy embodies revolutionary elements such as settlers’ habitation constructed on the urban frontier. In the context of the West Bank settlement, this
urban expansion is a (often violent) process, which takes place at the expense of
the Palestinian residents.
Israel’s conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 did not produce an
exodus of Palestinians similar to that in 1948; the vast majority of the Palestinian
population remained in the occupied territories (Segev 2007). By 1985, over 50
per cent of Palestinian land in the OPT had been confiscated for settlement construction or otherwise appropriated by the Israeli government (Benvenisti 1984).
Since 1967, large parts of Palestinian in the OPT space has been refashioned as
Jewish through the planned transfer of some 500,000 Israeli Jewish citizens into
the Palestinian enclave of the West Bank (and East Jerusalem). In the same time
span, Israel destroyed more than 28,000 Palestinian homes, businesses, and livestock in the OPT. The most vivid example of Israel’s destruction of Palestinian
urban life is the deliberate destruction of Palestinian homes by drone attacks,
bulldozing, or shootings (Schaeffer, Halper and Epshtain 2012).
Today in the OPT, Israel conducts three concurrent modes of governance:
connecting and disconnecting land from land, land from people, and people from
people. Much like the smart city logic of a holistic control grid, the Israeli military
regime in the OPT relies on connectivity, or what Weizmann calls a ‘network of
points in depth’, a system with intelligent concentration points that creates an interlocking surface, or matrix of control (Weizman 2004a). The system is based on
a matrix of interlocking strong points connected by physical and electromagnetic
links, i.e. roads and electronic communication. Despite its civilised features, the
settlements have an overt war-prone function, hosting watchtowers and providing
secured space for viewing the landscape from various hilltops.
In his seminal frontier thesis of settler colonialism in North America, Turner
finds in settler colonialism an entrenched ‘logic of exceptionalism’, where the
settlers are presented as a ‘chosen people regularly constructing powerful ideological concepts and manifestos to demonstrate their unique mission in the world’
(Turner 1921). Fortified by the religious or spiritual values given to the territory,
such as the notion of settler ‘emancipatorism’, or liberation is also prevalent in the
224
Israeli settler mentality(Turner 1921; see also Collins 2011; Obenzinger 2008).
While ideological settlers need the sense of individual heroism, as Weizman points
out, settlements must form continuity with the ‘holy landscape’. While these
settlements are closed in for self-protection, Palestinian urban space is enclosed
from the outside to prevent security threats from leaking out (Weizman 2004a).
In this way, the creation of settlements as secure spaces in enemy territory walls
in and seals-off the surrounding Palestinian villages. Thus the settlers’ call for the
freedom to move freely is echoed in the demands made by privileged citizens in
the smart city.
Sagi Laron of the smart fence company El-Far explained to me that the company’s agreement with the Israeli Ministry of Defense has made it difficult to install
their technology in some of the settlements because the settlers think that ‘god is
their protector’ and therefore resist the deployment of security infrastructure. According
to Laron, providers of security infrastructure to the OPT have had to be creative
and innovative: ‘You have to mix until you find the right solution without an
actual fence but with sensors and cameras’ (Interview with Sagi Laron, Tel Aviv,
23 September 2012). Like the urban Israeli resident, the settler prefers protection
that is not too pervasive in their daily routine – a privilege that is not available
in the warehoused slum or the Palestinian ghettos. In the OPT, the dominant
prevailing logic is that it is the Palestinians, the natives, who need to be fenced in.
The ‘smart city’ as applied to the OPT is about pursuing normal space for
the settler in the actual battlespace, which amounts to the production of isolated
islands of calm in a sea of Palestinian hostility. The case of the Ariel settlement
and the security system installed around the adjacent village of Qalqiliya are cases
in point.
The Ariel-Qalqilya binary
Ariel Settlement is a territorial ‘finger’ designed to stretch into a long thin form:
it reaches far into the heart of the West Bank. The Jewish community of Ariel was
established in 1978 on Palestinian farm and grazing land. After a major influx of
new Russian immigrants in the 1990s, Ariel today has around 19,000 residents
and effectively cuts off the Palestinian city of Salfit from its regional hinterland
economy (Lein and Weizman 2002; Weizman 2004a). In 2002, Ron Nachman,
then Mayor of Ariel (who at that time also chaired the Smart City Panel at the
Israel Conference of Mayors) began to work intensively towards realising Ariel as a
smart city (Israel Conference 2003). In 2006, Ariel embarked on a smart city pilot
programme to turn the frontier into a hypermodern, attractive, and safe living
space for Israeli citizens (Ariel Municipality website). When the programme began
225
implementation, it celebrated itself as the first of its kind in Israel. Since then, the
digital infrastructure of Ariel has been steadily upgraded in a cooperation between
the municipality and private tech-companies.
In fact, in 2002, the Israeli subsidiary of US software and communications
giant Nortel won the bid to make Ariel a wired city by deploying wireless mesh
access points for high-speed, wireless coverage along the city’s pedestrian mall, at
municipal offices, and on the campus of the College of Judea and Samaria (Ariel
University). In addition, in the programme’s pilot phase, multinational tech giant
Hewlett Packard contributed to making Ariel smart by providing a software-based
storage system to the municipality. Today, Ariel’s networked-topography is based
on the coordination of radio nodes and a plethora of devices installed to collect
data on abnormal events that deviate from standard data. Among other features,
this service gives residents, students, and visitors high-speed wireless access free
of charge as a service provision from the municipality. According to Nortel, the
network provides the city with wireless monitoring of water-meter readings, surveillance cameras, parking, and traffic inspection, and provides wireless video
and voice communications for municipal and university employees (Haddas
2006). Ariel residents can then use their personal digital devices as urban portals,
a technology also used by soldiers on smart military portals in the field.
In addition, the settler presence is linked to intensified communications infrastructure such as antennas linking settlers and soldiers, which are wired and
connected to both their military bases and to communications systems inside
Israel proper. Altogether, the settlement now constitutes a security fortress made
attractive and modern through streamlined suburbia style architecture and digitalised public service delivery.
All of these technological systems serve the aim of concealing the violent nature of the enterprise installed: the smart city systems simultaneously conceal
and reinforce the colonial war in the OPT by easing life for ‘civilian’ settlers in a
highly militarized space while expanding the state’s territorial control. Moreover,
the creation of settlements as safe or smart cities is crucial to the colonial enterprise
because it upholds normalcy, flows of energy, communications, and access to the
world outside while downplaying the system’s militarised nature.
Despite the presence of soldiers and armed settlers, the settlement frontier
can operate with an air of normalcy because the security architecture is the very
foundation of the frontier. The settlements’ smart city installations, like those in
Ariel, embed the very core function of the neo-colonial metropolitan frontier as a
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hyper version of its more mundane variations elsewhere. The urban architecture of
settlements is an excellent example of the interweaving of settler colonial frontierism and Israeli smart city thinking. Indeed, settlements are smart cities by default
because of their function as metropolitan technological frontiers with a maximum
level of security and high quality of technological service delivery. As the Ariel
case demonstrates, the smart city grid in the OPT consists of integrated projects
designed to improve daily life, provide security for settlers, and work to sustain
a conjectural (Jewish) civilised public sphere represented through discourses of
public security. However, the same cannot be said of the smart systems installed
around the adjacent Palestinian city of Qalqilya.
The walled-off Palestinian Qalqilya is situated at the foot of the hilltops of
­Ariel. In the aftermath of the 1967-war, the IDF ‘trimmed the edges of the West Bank
and nearly half of Qalqilya was destroyed’ (Li 2006: 38). Today, smart technology
and crude infrastructural installations are used to encircle the village. The urban
enclave is strangled by the Israeli construction of an eight metre high bulletproof
concrete wall with watchtowers equipped with firing posts every hundred meters.
(In non-urban Palestinian zones, the wall is a three metre high touch-sensitive
electronic fence with deep concrete foundations and barbwire on the top). These
wall structures are equipped with cameras and sensors to detect movement in the
buffer zones on both sides, and a total of eight turnstiles.
The intelligent concrete structure is surveilled from a guard tower. The control
system, which constitutes both a physical axis of counterinsurgency and a practice
ground for new techniques and technology, prevents the village from expanding
and being modernised. In 2006, it became possible for workers to leave the village
and access their land. However, this access consists of the villagers moving through
a terminal operated by the military that consists of metal corridors where people
wait and wait some more, and then move like cattle moving through a cattle chute
through the barbed wire fencing. Li describes the enclave as the West Bank’s ‘first
Gaza Strip’ (Li 2006). The control system in place is a form of ‘infrastructure
war’ that works to warehouse and seal off undesired groups. The contrast between
Ariel’s privileged life and Qalqiliya’s limited life reflects Israel’s capacity to both
operate Jewish settlements in the OPT and govern Palestinian life, and the duality
of Israel’s differentiated urban regimes.
To summarise: this Ariel-Qalqilya binary illustrates well the differentiated logics of rule in the OPT and the smart city dichotomy of mobility and immobility.
Such polarisation or segregation of urban life is not just an effect, but also a
matter of intent. The notion of preparing and making space open to intervention
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so key to smart city thinking shares its features with the early urbanisation of
Jewish settler communities. This long-term engagement has provided a useful
experience for Israel about how to make urban space open to management and
intervention. As Israel provides services and security to the suburbia-like wired
frontier, communities of settlements in the OPT differently Palestinians in the
surrounding areas are subjected to extensive control, surveillance, and enjoy less,
if any mobility. It is possible that the fundamental ideas of the kibbutz as a calm,
safe space, and as a gated community have been a source of inspiration to the
Israeli version of the smart city utopia. Certainly, Israel has sought to re-create
the experience of communal homogeneity nationwide through the combination
of planning through segregation but also in the production of wired urban space
that connects people virtually.
7.6 Israeli smart city spaces and projects
The Digi-Tel-Jaffa binary
The Tel Aviv-Jaffa binary is one of the starkest examples of the duality (construction-deconstruction) of the Zionist pioneers’ urban planning schemes. ­Today,
Tel Aviv is dubbed by some experts as the world’s smartest city, and is often referred to as ‘Digi-Tel’ to underline the city’s role as the high-tech heartland and
creative hub of Israel.
Arguably, the trajectory of Tel Aviv illustrates the path of Israel’s mode of frontierism. In recent years, it has gone well beyond simple e-government schemes.
A few years back, Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai launched an ambitious plan to
put Israel’s second largest city at the forefront of the move to digital government.
Today, Tel Aviv’s Digi-Tel smart city initiative allows residents to perform all municipal business online, from paying real estate taxes to filing requests for permits.
Under the project banner ‘The Digi-Tel Residents Club’, members are offered a
personalised web and communication platform functioning as a ‘direct and holistic connection between the city and its residents’ (Smart City Tel Aviv 2013), with
services spanning from license applications and renewals.
The system also connects to a comprehensive system of surveillance and data
collection, including 200 interconnected cameras installed in public spaces and
around critical city infrastructure that are controlled from a control and command
centre ‘equipped with analytical devices that automatically identify irregular incidents’
(Smart City Tel Aviv 2013). The project is implemented in cooperation with Motorola, which provides the information gathering, command and control and the
analytical infrastructure, and with Microsoft’s CityNext program, which contrib-
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utes a secure consumer-to-business software platform (Smart City Tel Aviv 2013).
In 2014, Tel Aviv’s high-tech ecosystem, the Digi-Tel Platform, was awarded the
World Smart City Award at the Smart City Expo and World Congress. While the
project is a huge investment for the city, the thinking behind the project is that
increased efficiency and resource optimisation will justify its costs. However, while
Tel-Aviv represents the epitome of the ‘hypermodern High-Tech Nation’, Israel’s
celebration of techno-national projects such as this conceals the deeper scars of
past and present colonial struggles.
Under the banner of Digi-Tel lies a long process of gentrification of the urban
space. While Tel Aviv has long been the epitome of modernity – an Israeli city that
expresses an enlightened global ethos – its urban life is structured and controlled
through reasoning based on internal colonisation. This logic revolves around the
distinction between ethnic, social, and religious groups, the Jewish-Arab binary
being the prime one. Levine’s work on Jaffa and Tel Aviv describes an ontological
(and historical dichotomy) of erasure and re-inscription between Jaffa and Tel
Aviv. As LeVine recounts, while the metropolis of Tel Aviv is a major theme in
the Israeli-Western imagination of cities, its surroundings are ‘made of sand’ or
‘oriental’ features which, according to LeVine, ‘testifies to the breadth of an Israeli
national culture’:
As in globalization at large, the purported absence of troublesome ‘others’ – in this case Arabs – on the land on which Tel Aviv was built is an
important reason why the city has long been simultaneously considered a
quintessentially national and utopian space (LeVine 2007: 183).
Since the early days of the settlement of Tel Aviv, as land became available,
it was sold on the stringent conditions that only the wealthy could meet. In his
discussion of the Tel-Aviv-Jaffa-binary, LeVine argues that this led to a systematic
erasure of Arab identity in Jaffa (LeVine 2007: 185; Mazawi 1998). LeVine’s
comparison of Jaffa with Tel Aviv demonstrates how the evolution of architectural styles ranging from garden suburbs to contemporary/international building
complexes reflects an increasing focus on defining ‘modern’ as opposed to the
(apparently non-modern) ‘other’ (LeVine 2007: 183). This architectural focus
on modernity makes clear the break with the past and the need for separation
from Arab-Palestinians. According to LeVine, Tel Aviv was developed not as ‘just
another neighbourhood’, but as part of an urbanisation process based on new,
‘imported rules of aesthetics and modern hygiene’ (LeVine 2007: 177). Based on
the logic of preferring a ‘clean slate’, these urban reconfigurations also entailed the
concurrent de-modernisation of traditional Palestinian Jaffa nearby.
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Today, Jaffa is celebrated as ethnically ‘mixed town’; however, in practice it is a
deeply segregated community – its unprecedented number of recently constructed
gated communities bear witness to this. In recent years, the binary has also become
internal in Jaffa. The old oriental structures have gone through an intense process
of gentrification, or further internal colonisation, as Israelis’ purchase of Palestinian
property has turned Jaffa into a contested space. This is what Monterescu calls a
‘neo-orientalist simulacrum, which subverts, spatially and semiotically, the standard
logic of urban representation and modernistic notions of segregation’ (­ Monterescu
2009: 40). The emergence of gated communities in Jaffa and in Israel/Palestine
generally signals a new mode of urban exclusion, which reshapes previous forms of
spatial distinction. The case of Digi-Tel-Jaffa demonstrates how urban development
and modernisation are not evaporating colonial lines and features. Rather, these
features and transplanted into new urban transformation projects.
While the Tel-Aviv-Jaffa binary of modernisation and erasure is a key example
of Israel’s settler colonialism, the case of Jerusalem illustrates another facet of this
colonialism through its urbanisation processes. In Jerusalem (both East and West),
efforts continue to annex territory and upgrade security in this deeply divided city.
Fortress Jerusalem and the case of Mer
The stony walls and iron gates of Jerusalem was not enough’. In order to be
safe, the entire city of Jerusalem needed a technological infrastructure that
the municipality and police could not provide. So they put Mer in charge
(Telephone interview with Mr. Frisner of Mer Security, Jerusalem,
19 September 2012).
Israeli security company Mer has installed an all-in-one security system called
Secure-M in Jerusalem. Marketed as a ‘smart city’ system, Secure-M includes a
precise command centre under hierarchical supervision that is suitable for remote
management and control of urban space. According to Frisner, Mer kicked off
its success as a smart-safe city provider in collaboration with the Israeli National
Police in Jerusalem in preparation for a visit from Pope John Paul II in 1999.
The smart city system in Jerusalem is based on digital zoning systems and
software algorithms to predict movement patterns and systems of access such as
coding, scanning, and identity control systems. Combined with the belligerent
military infrastructure of the occupation of Palestinian East Jerusalem, Mer has
transplanted Israel’s traditional logics of separation and the (quiet, slow) transfer
of Palestinian residents into a digitalised geography of exclusion based on software-based systems of access and control. Among its latest updates is 3-D imaging
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which according to Mer, ‘assists in forecasting the damage caused by an event to
a specific location and its surrounding areas’ (Mer Security 2010).
Amid Jerusalem’s crude infrastructure of tower and walls, this system works as
a unified platform for physical security based on CCTVs, licence plate readers,
perimeter security platforms, fibre optic sensors, and video management systems.
The unified data collection system includes biometric recognition, sensor-activated
camera, and video surveillance feeds. This refined system does not replace the military infrastructure of control already in place; rather, it is designed to target areas of
Palestinian concentration specifically, where potential threats are expected to occur.
In a broader perspective, the joint efforts to fortify the city’s structures of control need to be seen against the backdrop of Israel’s colonial practices in Jerusalem
(Abowd 2014; Rotbard 2006; Weizman 2006). The organisation of urban life in
Jerusalem can be described as an ongoing effort to transform the physical and
demographic landscape of Jerusalem to correspond with the Zionist vision of a
united and fundamentally Jewish Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty. According
to Zink, much of this was accomplished through the violent expulsion of Arab
residents during the wars of 1948 and 1967. However, this Judaisation of Jerusalem also relied on measures taken during times of ‘peace’ that were marked by
‘the strategic extension of ‘Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries, bureaucratic and legal
restrictions on Palestinian land use, disenfranchisement of [Palestinian] Jerusalem
residents, the expansion of settlements in “Greater Jerusalem”, and the construction of
the separation wall’ (Zink 2009: 122). In this way, Smart security installations can
conceal from the public this crude military control of movement and activity in
urban spaces, thereby allowing the city to be transformed into a ‘hub for religious
co-existence, thousands of tourists and high-level official visits’. By 2000, according to
Frisner, Jerusalem could be declared a ’safe and smart city’, thanks to Mer (Telephone
interview with Mr. Frisner, Jerusalem, 19 September 2012).
Mer has installed its Secure-M system at mega and high-risk events and in cities
across the globe. Among the company’s successful international projects are the
security management systems installed at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens,
Greece. Here, Mer monitored 63 connected and disconnected sites in real time
with the same security platform that is installed in Jerusalem. A similar system was
installed in Trinidad in 2009 in cooperation with the government to prepare for
another high-risk event, the Fifth Summit of the Americas (Mer Security 2010b).
While these are just a few examples of Mer’s international engagement, they reflect the tendency of the surveillance and control of urban spaces and the security
around mega-events to be one and the same.
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Magal: From Ramat Ha’sharon to Mombasa
Israeli Security Company Magal is actively forming bridges between local security designs produced in Israel-Palestine and the refinement of global security
assemblages. Amos Magoz, Director of Magal’s Command and Control Center,
explained how the company’s control rooms in Israel have become:
…pilgrimage sites for delegations around the world interested in building
similar solutions to protect their citizens. [Customers abroad] are eager to
learn how to derive the most out of technology to improve local security
and citizen welfare (Amos Magoz, Magal Promotional Material 2010).
Magal’s special involvement in the production of smart technologies led me
to interview Mr. Katz, Magal’s head of marketing, at the company’s headquarters
in Tel Aviv74. Katz explained how the smart city concept is: ‘an entire market
by itself that needs to be nourished and developed in which Israel should take the
lead’ (Interview with Mr. Katz, Head of Marketing, Magal Headquarters, Yehud,
21 September 2012).
According to Katz, Magal’s solutions have become popular beyond Israel’s borders because of their success in Israel, and because of what Mr Katz views as Magal’s
unique approach of ‘doing both products and projects’ (Interview with Mr. Katz, Head
of Marketing, Magal Headquarter, Yehud, 21 September 2012). In the Israeli security industry, products are intrinsically linked to larger projects of an inherently
political nature. For Katz, both Israel’s experience in developing smart devices in
local urban space and its cutting edge security technologies are a comparative advantage in the global market. In other words, Magal enjoys the benefits gained from
being part of the local security experience. The company has an extensive R&D
department and benefits from buying up small start-ups to acquire the newest
technology that fits into their technological niche. In addition, the company’s close
collaboration with local actors, such as municipalities and industrial entrepreneurs,
is key to Magal’s business strategy. Its cooperation and service delivery to the IDF
and the Israeli National Police is a valuable business asset.
While its participation in international projects receives much attention,
­ agal’s intervention at the municipal level is a regular source of business. For
M
example, in 2013, Magal supplied an integrated solution for a safe city project in
the city of Ramat Ha’sharon. This included an around-the-clock primary control
centre, a backup control room, dozens of cameras (the number of which is ex74
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Magal also has offices in Beijing and Madrid.
pected to increase significantly in the future), free public wireless access points,
public address systems, and panic buttons for kindergartens and in public areas. In
order to realise the goal of improving the quality of life in Ramat Ha’sharon, Magal
extended the municipality’s fibre-optic network to cover 80 per cent of the municipality and expanded the safe-city applications for routine and emergency uses. In
this context, Perach Melec, the CEO of the municipality, explained how Magal’s
intervention provides the city with a solid infrastructure of communications, and
is the cornerstone of added value services in both routine and crisis situations:
In fact, over four thousand participants have already made use of the free
internet services at the last City Carnival and we successfully dealt with
over 500 simultaneous users at peak time (Perach Melec in Magal Smart
City promotional material 2014).
During our conversation, Katz explained Israel’s technological progression in
urban security, from barbwire used in the country’s first generation to perimeter
intrusion protection systems to the more holistic smart city systems. He identified the intensifying immigration pressure stemming from ‘the Arab Spring and
problems in Africa’ as a key motivator to refine the systems ‘to prevent unwanted
penetration’. He continued:
People grow up in a world where security requirements are extreme, where
security is mitigation but never a full insurance against threats (Interview with Mr. Katz, Head of Marketing, Magal Headquarters, Yehud,
21 September 2012).
Katz explained that in Israel ‘there is no distinction between military and security’. In his view, this poses some challenges for companies like Magal, but it also
represents opportunities, especially within the realm of urban security. The Israeli
security terrain is a place ‘where all kinds of security is a state matter’, he said. What
is more, the conventional division between military and police often reflected in
the product portfolios of law enforcement and military applications on websites
and in sales material does not apply in Israel. Consequently, there is no point in
differentiating between the two. Katz’s views reflect Neocleous’s critique of narrow
readings of military and security interventions, and support the argument that
security should be broadened to include looking at the rationale and mentality
behind liberal governance and planning strategies. It is in this fertile overlay of
military and civilian security demands that companies like Magal thrive.
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By 2014, Magal was active in 80 countries; it is only one of many so-called
security integrator exporting security systems (including smart solutions) that
export these systems. In 2010, Magal won a bid to provide the gigantic industrial
port of Mombassa in Kenya with a new security solution, including surveillance,
innovative locating sensors, intercom and radio communication, and kilometres
of perimeter fencing – in other words, smart city solutions. This open bid for a
USD 21.4 million contract was managed by the donor, the World Bank, together
with Kenya’s port authorities.
Katz noted that the internationalisation of security is not always easy. Cultural
clashes and lack of contextual knowledge can challenge the relationship between the
buyer and seller and disturb the traditions of each. He used Magal’s involvement
in the 2012 mega-event, the Africa Cup of Nations in Gabon, as an example: ‘the
Gabonese are very slow, everything was like “manana”’ (Interview with Mr. Katz,
Head of Marketing, Magal Headquarters, Yehud, 21 September 2012). However
in Katz’s view, Israeli business and security entrepreneurs have great intercultural
skills and are rarely shy of making themselves heard. And, he said, the Israeli national tradition and culture is highly adaptable:
Unlike many other nationalities Israelis can easily adapt to life in Africa,
in places where an American wouldn’t live. We can live in a dirty place.
We had the project in Gabon, and people just moved there even though
they couldn’t find hotels. Israelis have always been good at adapting (Interview with Mr. Katz, Head of Marketing, Magal Headquarters, Yehud,
21 September 2012).
Magal’s promotional video of their Gabon project contains pictures showing
the security systems in place at the Olympic village; they are very similar to the
security systems in place around the Israel’s West Bank settlements and gated
communities.
Elbit’s Public Security Deployment Scope
When I visited Israel’s biannual homeland security fair HLS in 2012, Elbit,
Israel’s largest private defence and security company, addressed concerns about
how to penetrate informal structures in war zones as well as in urban settings.
The company demonstrated its smart city model by displaying a huge interactive,
three-dimensional generic map of a mega-city. While there was an actual war
reported to be occurring in the urban space depicted on the map, the sky was
nevertheless filled with UAVs, some in motion on a mission and some hanging
low over the city in order to control a delineated area on a more permanent basis.
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This urban scenario was unfolded as a unified concept with the title ‘Elbit’s
Public Security Deployment Scope’; it illustrated how Elbit’s smart city devices and
systems penetrate the urban space through CCTV cameras, surveillance cameras,
SIGINT systems (intelligence gathered by interception of signals), call centres,
alert buttons, sensors, several local control centres, and one centralised (national) control centre. In Elbit’s presentation of the capacities of the Public Security
­Deployment scope, the details on how to reveal hidden threats were laid out under
the slogan ‘Elbit’s New Tools for New Rules’ (Elbit Presentation, HLS Israel 2012,
Tel Aviv, November 2012). The presenter illustrated the system’s dual-use capacities by showing slides of a generic gentrified urban setting and the deployment of
UAVs in a generic warzone. The Public Security Deployment scope included an
array of AUV systems used for surveillance, tracking, and monitoring of movement
and events in crowded urban spaces, refugee camps, and regular combat zones.
The same technologies deployed in this smart city toolbox are also key devices in
the drone systems that hover over the Gaza Strip.
According to Elbit sources, the drone systems deployed in and around Gaza
are matched with new cyber security software that helps reduce the time it takes
to detect and neutralise agents intruding on military networks and cloud systems.
This protective system is developed to simulate real operational networks by recreating what happened and injecting new scenarios and threats to the training. These
devices can be used to take preventive measures to avoid friction around critical
settings such as mega events, critical infrastructure, and political summits with
high-level visitors (Elbit Presentation, HLS Israel 2012, Tel Aviv, November 2012).
The culmination of Elbit’s field-proven by the IDF capacities has ‘gone urban’ in
its all-in-one Command and Control system, Torch2H System, to be used by all
units. Elbit developed its systems initially to assist in the IDF’s detection of the
‘hidden unknown’ in the OPT, and to collect intelligence around the Separation
Barrier in the West Bank and the wall/fence around Gaza.
According to its marketing material, Elbit’s systems rely on the arguably illusory idea of complete transparency, which is a vision shared with the smart city
prophecies. While in practice it is impossible to obtain complete transparency of
information about such matters, Israel’s efforts to innovate around man-made
enclaves of chaos have required an intense merger of cutting-edge science and
practical military experience. In its security systems, Elbit targets the city from its
sub-terrain (with sensors and cameras in tunnels), the air (with drones), supersurface (from roof tops) and at street level (with cameras, passage access and mobile
units). In this way, the IDF’s desire to attain subsurface transparency has created
new power geometries where methods of bypassing materials, walls and other
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structures through surveillance and detection are shared with the entrepreneurial
smart city agents. In this context, Elbit offers an ecosystem for urban control that
reflects its portfolio of products used by the IDF in the OPT75.
Elbit’s smart Gaza logic is emblematic of Israel’s Gaza strategy. Lori Allen
demonstrates how scales – density, distance, time, and level – have produced the
current state of the Gaza Strip as part of the Israeli strategy to keep the Strip separate from other zones and subject to a separate, special treatment (Allen 2012).
The deployment of a language of special requirements or the need for special approaches and tools are often echoed in debates on ghettoisation and management
of urban slums to invoke a sense of emergency (Allen 2012). Here there is a clear
link between the social backlashes of urban policies globally and settler colonial
practices of control.
75
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Through Israel’s three latest wars, Elbit’s exports of UAVs and integrated security systems have
experienced significant growth. In Israel’s Cast Lead offensive on Gaza (2008–2009), the IDF
deployed two of Elbit’s UAV systems – the Hermes and the Heron – in their aerial operations
for surveillance and targeted killings (Journal of Palestine Studies 2009). In fact, after Israel’s
three major operations in Gaza: Cast Lead (2008–9), Pillar of Cloud (2012) and Protective
Edge (2014), this trend of intensified sales has only accelerated (Sadeh 2014). In July 2011,
Elbit reported the first sale of its Hermes 900 UAV to the Chilean Air Force. In January 2012,
Elbit announced a 50 million USD contract to supply two Hermes 900 systems to the Mexican
Federal Police, and in October 2013, the Chilean Navy began evaluating the Hermes 900 for
maritime patrol tasks (Egozi 2013). In December 2012, IAF selected the Hermes 900 as the
next generation MALE (Medium Altitude Long Endurance) for the IDF, and signed a second
sales contract for a significant but unknown number of UAVs. Denmark’s Ministry of Defence
is also considering adding Elbit’s technology to its portfolio of war technology, and in December 2013, Saab, the Swedish auto and arms producer, announced its decision to collaborate with
Elbit on technological innovation of aerial defence systems (ASDNews 2013).
Elbit Systems’ Public Security
Development Scope presentation
(Smart City) at HLS 2012-2nd
Israel International Homeland
Security Conference, Tel Aviv,
November 2012. Photo: Author.
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Compression of time and space
The technology designed to control urban space also includes technology to
perform time and space contractions. The Israeli company BriefCam seeks to occupy this this niche with time-surveillance software, or video synopsis systems, which
are deployed in urban spaces and other locations with high human concentration.
This software allows a camera to perform a total video review as part of a daily
security routine by browsing large quantities of footage in very short time. It does
this by a creative and simultaneous display of events that happen at different times.
In 2013, BriefCam helped identify the Boston bombers, which led the eventual
capture of the suspects. This ability to control time corresponds to Virilio’s discussion of how military space revolves around the development of new technologies.
The production and hierarchies of speed (the distribution of different time regimes
to different social categories of people) is equivalent to what Virilio describes as a
‘hierarchy of wealth’ (Virilio 2006: 50). In essence, this means that the power to
control mobility becomes a source of wealth.
Time contraction becomes another aspect of the smart grid. With BriefCam’s
technology, time, as in many video hours, is condensed to only a few sequences
of detected events as a way to bridge the gap between the many hours of video
captured from a given urban space per day and the shortage of available ‘eyes’ to
scan it. BriefCam’s promotional material includes a case where video recordings
of events from an entire day in Stuttgart Airport in Germany are scanned and
analysed in just one minute. Summarising hours of events into a brief ‘video minute’ allows security employees to browse through events frame-by-frame whether
in a real-time feed or archival footage and draw statistical data from the video
analysis. BriefCam has offices in China and the US and has provided its services
to the Chicago Housing Authority and the US Department of Justice among
others. Altogether the system is part of a trend in security where the notion of
(contracted) time is altered and reconfigured into calculable units of menaingsful/
dangerous events.
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In much the same way, Nice Systems’s smart (safe) city system hinges upon
methods of gathering ‘intelligent insights’ from multiple sources of data from the
city space76. This happens through installation of cameras, movement sensors, and
real-time alerts under the three P’s: ‘Prepare, Predict, Prevent’. In its promotional
video, Nice describes how you ‘can own the decisive moment’ by ‘impacting every
interaction’. Using the slogan ‘The right people, at the right time’, Nice’s promotional
material highlights Israeli’s expertise of preventing crime through complex data
collection and processing, clearly connecting the country’s homefront experience
with the implied promise that Nice’s products are worth purchasing. The basic
philosophy in Nice’s visions of urban control is to view, analyse, and intervene
(only if necessary and in crowded complex areas) without disturbing the daily
routines of the city. The gap between managing routine and crisis is particularly
important to ensuring balance and stability.
In its promotional material and at its promotion booths at security fairs, Nice
presents how its technologies are able to surveil and detect deviant or risky incidents (deviancy from what is statistically ‘normal’) and organise the data obtained
into statistical resources as periodical reports and crowd trends and timelines
demonstrating the sequences of events. Nice specialises in producing an urban
interface by aggregating all data into one situational awareness report and an
interactive timeline based on a select data that is assessed by the control room
controllers of the chain of command. Israel Livnat, CEO of Nice, explained how
the system distributes ears and eyes into the city’ and demonstrates how it is
possible through the use of a software-based processing of data to divide the view
of city into several layers projected to the observer as visual interfaces. These are
categorised into different types of incidents with different workflows attached.
The presentation’ s illustrations show visuals of the urban space presented in both
vertical and horizontal slices combined with audio recordings and data on human
concentration, trends in levels of pace, and direction of movement. According to
Nice, in larger cities the system might have 20–50 incident reports taking place
concurrently (Israel Gateway 2009). At the end of an operation, the data of the
entire process, from the situational awareness report to an incident, is compiled
76
Neptune Intelligence Computer Engineering (Nice) was founded in 1986 by seven Israeli
ex-army colleagues. It is one of Israel’s largest private security companies and specialises in risk
control security solutions. The company initially focused on developing solutions for security
and defence applications, but soon refocused their efforts on civilian applications mainly
for contact centres, financial services, and business intelligence markets. In July 2009, Ze’ev
Bregman was appointed as CEO of Nice, replacing Haim Shani, who stepped down to become
the General Manager of the Ministry of Finance of the State of Israel. As of 2010, the company
employed more than 2,700 worldwide. Nice serves over 25,000 organisations in enterprise and
security sectors in more than 150 countries, including over 80 Fortune 100 companies.
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on a CD with the data and event sequences recoded. Livnat said that Nice’s data
collection system as an asset that ‘can be used in court’ (Israel Gateway 2009).
These few examples illustrate the systemic approach to urban control that
occurs under the smart label. These installations exemplify how private and stateowned Israeli companies integrate their security technology into complete systems
of urban control. The systems mask the geopolitical context in which they operate
by reframing the management of political frontiers as technical challenges to be
solved through policing, counter-insurgency, social intervention, or urban reconfiguration through planning. The cases of Magal, Mer, Elbit, Nice and Briefcam
demonstrate that it has become routine for private security companies to play
a central role in shaping urban space as zones of counter-insurgency and urban
control. In this way, private capital interests are mixed into urban reconfigurations
that produce a variety of models for making urban space open to control and new
modes of intervention.
7.7 Conclusion: the smart city revisited
The Israeli smart city is the fruit and instrument of Israel’s land capture and population control. It is a long-term project of social engineering. At the same time, it
is the culmination of the successful digitalising and upgrading of urban life for the
select group. The smart city imagery seeks to project the imagery of a stabile Israel
Nice’s showroom at HLS Israel,
the Second International Israel
Homeland Security Conference,
Tel Aviv, November 2012.
Photo: author.
240
outward while at the same time benefitting from the contradictions and simultaneous state of order and chaos that reigns in the urban terrains of Israel-Palestine.
The promotion of Israel as a high-tech nation, in combination with the IDF’s
modes of urban modernisation, warfare, and control of Palestinians, has made the
diversified Israeli control logics already in use ready to fit under the banner of the
smart city concept. The smart model is deeply rooted in Israel’s settler colonial
features that developed from a mix of historical and contemporary sources and
revolve around two major axes of planning: the establishing of new urban centres
and the Judaising and modernising of existing ones at the expense of Palestinian
livelihoods. For the Palestinians, Israeli urbanism has become the site of dislocation
and dispossession that results in a constant source of fear of the erection of more
new frontiers, more surveillance, and perhaps death.
The smart city constitutes a repackaging of the Israel state’s colonisation
through a complex process of urbanisation. Inside Israel proper, the smart city
works as a both a publicly embraced and a commercialised banner for a variation
of ‘neoliberal urbanism’ bound up in ethnic segregation (Peck and Tickell 2002).
Just like the fantasy that national purity is utopia, the prototype accounts of the
smart city put forward by security companies would never happen in a real city.
Nevertheless, this quest for perfection is the driving force of the security industry.
This analysis has demonstrated that it is the imperfection of the urban terrain
in Israel – ruptures of violence and a permanent sense of withheld violence –
that allows the security industry to harvest techniques that implement its smart
city v­ isions. The expertise extracted from the accumulated experiences of Israel’s
response to felt threats meets the demands of many decision makers and businessmen seeking to reconcile the contradictions between routine and crisis management in the metropolises globally. The Israeli conversion of military/security
systems to smart city systems has given Israel a role in controlling urban locations
and providing infrastructure to smart projects around the globe. While they are
sold as neutral agents of improvement, the function of smart city systems cannot
be detached from the ways in which urbanisation and warfare have come to intersect in the global south and the world’s megacities. In this way, the violent politics
of the street and neighbourhoods in Israel-Palestine, the real battlespace of daily
life, are reinserted into global assemblages of urban warfare and security through
Israel’s contraction of its experiences into the smart city concept.
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CHAPTER EIGHT
BORDER SECURITY PART I:
8.0 ‘THE HOMELAND BEGINS AT THE BORDER’77
8.1 Introduction
‘The European dream of open borders everywhere will never happen’, a public-­
relations representative of a major Israeli homeland security company told me at
a security fair in Tel Aviv in November 2012. According to the salesperson, since
Israel’s nascent stages, the securing of borders has been a central challenge:
Israel has since its birth been experiencing the same permeating and diffuse threats which are now and especially after 9/11 felt everywhere at
borders today, especially in the west, but also on a global scale, whether it
is the effects of migration, rapid urbanisation, terrorism, drug wars, or a
rise in mundane forms of crime (Interview with Mer public-relations
representative, Tel Aviv, November, 2012).
The representative continued to explain how Israel’s sense of being ‘under threat
from all sides’ has provided it with an opportunity to develop significant expertise
in border security:
Israel’s borders are not just Jewish, they are some of the most secure in
the world…. Through wars and fighting terrorism, Israel has learned its
­lessons the hard way (Interview with Mer public-relations representative, Tel Aviv, November 2012).
Across the globe, the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US left government agencies
struggling to come up with new methods to contain threats of violence. As a result,
the development of technologies to fortify and refine systems of control for borders, walls, and passages has now grown to become a global industry. Based on its
long-term experiences, Israel’s expertise in border management is in high demand.
This chapter examines how the Zionist techno-national mechanisms of exclusion /inclusion have provided the Israeli security industry with an advantageous
77
Interview with Moty Cohen, the Israel Export and International Cooperation Institute,
Tel Aviv, August, 2012.
243
position in the global industry of border construction and control. It argues that
the discriminative practices and special conditions of racialised border making and
control of the Israeli state have become a component of a lucrative business that
provides access for some while denying it to others.
The chapter analyses the genesis of border thinking and border security practices in Israel’s settler colonial project by addressing the border control between
Israel and the OPT as well as some intra-Zionist debates as to what constitutes the
nation’s ‘mental’ or ‘human’ borders78. Instead of merely focusing on official gateways and infrastructure, this discussion includes historical as well as contemporary
cases to show how Israel’s borders have been imagined, constructed, and managed
over time, and operated on a 360° front. The chapter is divided into two main
sections: background and conceptual analysis, and the practice and technologies
deployed by security companies in the field.
8.2 Borders of national belonging
‘To be born is to be born in a place, to be “assigned to residence”’
(Augé 1995: 53).
If borders are about more than the demarcation of lines between national
territorial units, which is the case in Israel-Palestine, how are we to make sense of
them? Border making and border control are crucial tools that help construct the
nation physically and ideationally. As Sparke argues, borders are ‘condensation
points where wider changes in state making are worked out’ (Sparke 2006: 152).
In this sense, techniques of border security embody the epitome of what technological nationalism means. Technologies carry the meaning of the nation and also
enable its realisation. Multiple systems of control at borders lay the foundations
for the exercise of power (Gazit 2009).
Borders are hard and material. But they are also organic instruments used to
integrate and collect data and manage the dispersion of people. Israel has constructed borders as markers of Jewish entitlement to the land, as Coleman notes,
rather than as a coherent ‘sovereign script’ (a definite formalised territorial lines);
its borders have become places of forceful contention (Coleman 2005). They are
not just a function for the division of space, but are replete with geo-economic and
geopolitical ‘storylines’ that reflect the social and geopolitical struggles involved in
78
244
As explained in section earlier the chapter refrains from analysing Israel’s borders with Jordan,
Lebanon, and Syria.
the process of nation making. The chapter’s sections explore borders as:
–– Practices of sovereignty and exception that affect the territory that they
­conquer and divide.
–– Sites for computerised surveillance and sorting (a refinement of biopolitics).
–– Places for disciplining human bodies as they are affected by such measures
and as carriers of identities to be managed.
Because borders mark the homeland, Walters’s notion of domopolitics captures
how the state is managed as a ‘household’. The nurturing of borders takes a central
position in this household. As Walters writes: ‘Domopolitics implies a reconfiguring of the relations between citizenship, state, and territory. At its heart is a fateful
conjunction of home, land and security. It rationalises a series of security measures
in the name of a particular conception of home’ (Walters 2004: 241). This metaphor resonates with the ways in which the Jewish nation has been and is nurtured
through the practices of the selected household, where security is about safeguarding the community and its place of belonging, and borders act as a nodal point.
Borders represent the ‘external dimension of internal security’ (Bigo 2014).
When domopolitics is played out at the border, it serves the process of nation
making by providing a platform for bioregulative measures that rests on deeper
biopolitical forces (Crampton and Elden 2012; Foucault 2003). The drawing of
the nation’s human borders then comes to mark the lines between the internal and
external not just in terms of territory but in terms of human fabric. These lines
determine how the sovereign’s claims to security and liberty and circulation and
containment are negotiated (Walker 2006).
As Zionist mobilisation for nationhood displays a combination of bioregulatory desires and colonialist impulses, there is a close correlation between border
making and tropes of biopolitics. Israel’s tight yet unfinished/broken borders attest
to the unfinished nature of Israel’s ethnocratic nation building; its national vision
of ethnic purity is, in reality, reflected in messy and undefined borders. Minimising friction and messiness by homogenising spheres of power (ideally) requires a
constant nurturing of Israel’s many borders. In this perspective, the linking of the
state’s bioregulation to border practices helps explain how the imagination and
construction of borders have worked to serve the higher purpose of making the
racial state of Israel. This link also provides the basis for a rationalisation of border
security that has resulted in the production of a given product or systems in order
to define, uphold, expand, and retract the borders. Thus it is that the settler colonial reality of dual rule in one space – one for the settler population and one for
the occupied or marginalised people – is defined and rearticulated at the border.
245
Concomitant to the national defining motifs of border making, the border
performs as a security-economy nexus. States need to retain open borders to participate in the flow of the global economy; borders regulate the movement of capital
and goods. In Harvey’s spirit it makes sense to analyse how the contradictions
arising from the intersection of territorial and capitalist logics produce a border site
where these forces come together and are managed and reproduced. The differentiation in flows creates spaces of uneven development. For Harvey, the dynamics
of uneven geographic development are shaped by different geographical flows or
mixed mobility between categories of people and across time according to policies
and regulations (Harvey 2006). At the same time, because states in contested regions in particular need to find a balance between remaining open and ensuring
security, border security entails a political economy of insecurity bound up with
themes of (im)mobility to ensure and delimit the circulation of people’s and goods
(Andreas 2009; Frowd 2014; Sparke 2006). Cresswell defines mobility as corporal
practices of relative mobility of different groups and individuals (Cresswell 2006),
i.e. social practices of routinised movement and the effect of these processes. As
the ability to control mobility means power, within the project of Zionist settler
colonialism, the body of the individual itself becomes an identity marker that
the borders are supposed to manage through physical limitation or deterrence.
Clearly, the logics of territory, mobility, and capital are not interchangeable, but
constitute mutually dependent elements in capital accumulation. Rather, their
intertwinement is made explicit at the border.
Borders, then, are to be considered concentration points where the politics
of access and denied access act as a mechanism to make the economic and social
stratification work. As part of Israel’s settler colonial rule, this is made manifest
by the state’s concrete practise of sanctioning borders. To understand the implications of this, it is necessary to relate the history of the Israeli border experience
in more detail.
8.3 Israel-Palestine’s ‘human’ borders
Within the context of the Israeli settler colonial project, two parameters of successful border demarcation and security seem to prevail: stability and social calm on the
periphery of the nation’s outer boundaries and the nurturing of the ‘new Jew’, i.e.
the Israeli citizen, which is facilitated by a process of isolation and separation from
the native ‘other’. Essentially, the continual ‘othering’ of Arab, or the Palestinian
entails a multidimensional process of material and ideological border construction.
246
It comes as no surprise that protecting the border is central to the work of the
security industry. This was confirmed when I interviewed Moty Cohen, the head
of the HLS section at the Israel Export Institute. He briskly told me: ‘Securing the
homeland begins at the border’ (Interview with Moty Cohen, the Israel Export
and International Cooperation Institute, Tel Aviv August 2012). Cohen’s comment
echoes the official approach of the Export Institute’s homeland security unit, which
identifies border protection as one of the most pressing security challenges. Connecting homeland security to border control has made the relationship between
demarcated territory and the protection of the Israeli nation clear. Thus, defining
the homeland depends on the basic systems installed to demarcate the boundaries
and space but also on the human fabric of the homeland. As in Israel’s broader vision for homeland security, border protection is imperative in order to ‘protect our
way of life’, as the Export Institute’s motto puts it (Israel Export Institute 2013).
The notion of guarding life worth protecting and ensuring its quality is the pivot
around which the security industry revolves. This displays an almost ontological
difference between those in need of protection and those who need to be kept out
or in, and those wanting to cross and penetrate new territory. This connection
reflects the normative basis of the racial state and its techno-national strategies.
Israel’s comparative advantages in border control are rooted in Israel’s condition as a ‘de-bordered’ state (Tawil-Souri 2012), i.e. a state with no defined and
formalised borders. Indeed, since its Declaration of Independence – both in times
of war and low-intensity conflict between wars – Israel has consistently expanded
its territory. The OPT and Israel have no formalised border system, but are divided by a complex of external and internal lines and points that criss-cross the
landscape79. The construction of borders in a territory with undefined territorial
borders requires tools with which to construct the nation – the state’s human fabric, if you will, which has its origins in the very thinking behind the Jewish state.
Nevertheless, few countries have been as assertive as Israel in enforcing its de
facto borders by restricting movement and denying access. Historically, three politico-historical dynamics or aspects of Israel’s border storyline have been central
to the Israeli border experience:
1.
79
Major historical ruptures, particularly the changes brought about in 1948
and 1967, and the effects of the drawing of ‘Oslo map’ in the 1990s.
The only time Israel has shrunk its territory was when it withdrew from the Sinai from
1973–1982.
247
2.
3.
Israeli strategies and actions to counter and manage the Palestinian ‘demographic threat’80 and its deep association with territorial divides.
Everyday military practices at OPT border crossings and checkpoints. These
storylines are rooted in the visions and practices of the state’s territorial logics
and its strategies of human engineering.
Rather than understanding borders as stable, defensive mechanisms, we must
Israel’s borders as instruments intended to realise Israel’s changing racialised interventions vis-à-vis the Palestinians, which has been hardened through the erection
of exclusionary militarised lines and borders. I characterise this process here as a
simultaneous process of (being granted) ‘access’ and (being) ‘denied access’. The
inclusion of the ‘select’ members of the nation into the political project of Zionism
– what I refer to as ‘access’– displays the first signs of human border demarcation.
‘Denied access’ refers to the mechanism that excludes the (native) ‘other’ from
the lines of mobility offered to the members of the nation. Indeed, the question
of guarding Israel’s human and territorial borders by using an array of selection
procedures has involved both inter-Jewish and Jewish-Arab lines of demarcation.
Access
Since 1950, the state of Israel has by law opened its borders to world Jewry
by encoding the granting of Israeli citizenship to all Jews. The codification of the
Right of Return stipulated: 1) ‘Every Jew has the right to come to his country as
an oleh’81, and 2) ‘Aliah shall be the oleh’s visa (Knesset, Law of Return 1950).
While the law articulates the Zionist vision of Jewish return, the reality of installing Jewish access and Zionism’s human border construction has been messy. The
Zionist project has been consistently conflicted by struggles over national membership and how to consolidate those within the newly founded state. As part of
the Zionist mobilisation for nationhood, the colonial power and its population
have been the objects of ingathering, filtering, and socialisation. Since before the
state’s inception, the demarcating of the nation’s borders fluctuated around two
80
81
248
The Palestinian demographic threat to Israel is conceived of on three levels. In the domestic
sphere, the Israeli population in early 2003 was close to 6.6 million, 1.25 million of whom were
Palestinian Arabs. Given the 3.4 per cent annual growth among Israeli Palestinian citizens, the
Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics predicts that by 2020, Israel’s population will grow by 21–24
per cent, notwithstanding massive immigration from the former USSR and Russia (Shafir
2005). The political positions on the demographic threat can very roughly be seen as separated
into two camps. One camp focuses on the consequence of Jewish majority being undermined
because of the birthrate of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, while the other camp is more
concerned with the overall demographic projections of Palestinian-Arab majority (when the
territory of Israel-Palestine is considered as one) as a fundamental threat to the Jewish state.
Aliyah means immigration of Jews, and oleh (plural olim) means a Jew immigrating to Israel.
vectors: in the terrain of scientific debates over who is a Jew (Bloom 2008; Denes
2011a) and by extension around the practices established to produce a priori
­categories of citizenship as part of realising the ideological and geo-political goals
of Zionist settlement (Abu El-Haj; 2012; Weiss 2004). This has been informed by
the production of a difference between the New Hebrew and the diaspora Jew, a
debate that is still present in discussions of Zionism and post-Zionism (Campos
2007; Shohat 2006). As a state structure founded on a strategy of gathering in
and managing ‘exiled’ global Jewry, access to Israel-Palestine from the diaspora
has come to play a central role in the creation of the Zionist state formation as a
melting pot for Jews with different backgrounds.
One of the Zionist movement’s first border ‘tasks’ was to socially engineer the
human borders of Zionism (Weiss 2004; Bloom 2008; Denes 2011) by determining the rules and practices of access to the new territory. In fact, in the pre-state
days and at the time of state formation, the immigrant body itself became a site
for negotiating and demarcating borders (Seidelman, Troen, and Shvarts 2010).
As Weiss notes in her account of the bodily aspects of Zionist mobilisation: ‘Israeli
society (like the pre-state community before it) has always moulded and regulated
bodies as part of the ongoing reconstruction of its collective identity’ (Weiss 2004).
For example, between 1948 and 1951, waves of mass migration hit the newly
established state of Israel. These flows prompted discussion among Zionist elites
about whether the newly arrived olims should enjoy unrestricted entrance or be
subjugated to a selection process based on medical criteria (Davidovitch, Shvarts,
and Seidelman 2007). Inflows of settlers were the subject of managerial discourses
about how to forge a prosperous Jewish nation82. For example, during this time
more than half of the 700,000 Jewish immigrants who passed through Sha’ar
Ha’aliyah83 (an immigration processing camp near Haifa) were subjected to medical examinations (Davidovitch 2004). Based on social and medical classifications,
medical screening of immigrants was required before they were allowed to leave
the camp84. While access regulation in the camps is only one example, this construction of (human) borders was based on Zionism’s biopolitics of differentiated
82
83
84
The Law of Return alludes to the condition that the Jew is not likely to endanger public health
and is not engaged in activity directed against the Jewish people (Knesset 1950).
This term means ‘gateway to immigration’.
Zionist archives of card catalogues and personal files of accepted immigrants and candidates for
immigration from 1920–1964 contain more than 650,000 cards of those who applied for entry.
A considerable number of these applicants were rejected for more than medical grounds. In the
Zionist project, the nation had be gathered and constructed into its territorial base in a short
period of time through this vigilant ingathering. These practices helped give birth to the Jewish
nation’s borders
249
engineering of a people in conquered and divided territory. These practices are
reflected somewhat in Foucault’s evaluation of population engineering, which
suggests that:
A population is constantly accessible to agents and techniques of transformation, on condition that these agents and techniques are at once
enlightened, reflected analytical and calculating (Foucault 2009: 71).
Israel’s regulations of access to the desired territory based on visions of racialised state building and ontological homeland security rationales have operated on
several levels. This has been limited for the most part to Arab-Jewish dichotomies,
but has also been deeply influenced by inter-Jewish struggles and inter-ethnic
strife about who is an Israeli and who is a Jew, which has been a field of political
contention when deciding kinship borders of the Zionist projects. Shenhav (2009)
theorises that Zionism’s conceptual rupture between nationalism and ethnicity
has caused it to imagine and erect its borders through the simultaneous creation
and negation of its ethnic groups. This even involved asking Mizrachim Jews to
cancel their ‘ethnic otherness’ in order to be mobilised for the national project,
and detach themselves from everything ‘Arab’ (Campos 2007; Shenhav 2009). The
Zionist’s and subsequent Israeli state’s regulation of its nationalised human border
was fraught by ambivalence about the ideological and demographic fixation on
Jewish kinship boundaries. This has haunted Israeli debates on citizenship and
Jewish national identity, aided by state-led efforts to assimilate its Jewish populations into the container of the state.
To summarise: Israel’s/Zionism’s borders have remained fluid because they
depend on the political envisioning of an ethnic, national community. In a settler
colonial context, the denial of movement and access is a core vector of governance.
Denied access
The notion of ‘denied access’ involves the exclusion, control, and containment
of Palestinians from territory and the privileges enjoyed by Israeli citizens. These
mechanisms are developed and deployed to control, inhibit, and regulate (Palestinian) movement inside the OPT and between the OPT and Israel proper.
Historically, in Israel-Palestine, and today in the OPT, frontiers have been
and are erected in a variety of ways so as to create dividing mechanisms based on
ethnic fault lines. Today, this skeleton of border systems has culminated in the
installation of the aforementioned smart techniques deployed to manage populations and control territories.
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In 1923, the Zionist revisionist Jabotinsky wrote in his much-quoted ‘Iron Wall’:
Zionist colonization must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the
native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only
under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach
(Jabotinsky 1923).
Jabotinsky’s ‘Iron Wall’ vision has often been invoked to illustrate the rationale
by which Israel has sought to separate Palestinians/Arabs from its Jewish population. During the time between the first Zionist settlement and the watershed year
of 1967, the state’s efforts were focused on creating space for Jews in Mandatory
Palestine and on shaping and defining the economic and social contours of the
Jewish nation at the borders. When the time came in 1949 to draw an international border between the nascent Israeli state and the Arab states around it, the
border was constructed not only as a line that separates physical communities, but
also as a fetishised entity and a demarcation of cultural differences between Israel
and Palestine/the Arab world. Borders were constructed in order for the nation to
define and defend itself against the ‘Arab other’, who was/is perceived as a malicious, faceless mass of people conspiring against Israel (Rabinowitz 2003). In 1955,
then Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan wrote in an article in Foreign Affairs that the
term ‘frontier security’ had ‘little meaning in the context of Israeli geography’:
Scarcely anywhere in Israel can a man live or work beyond the easy range
of enemy fire. Indeed except in the Negev, no settlement is at a distance of
more than 20 miles from an Arab frontier (Dayan 1955).
While Dayan was focused on proximity as a cursor of a potential threat, he
also warned that simple territorial border protection was not enough to protect
the young Jewish nation. Following this fear or paranoia about its proximity to its
enemies, Israel’s obsession with border insecurity only grew after 1967; this unwillingness to accept any division of land has been a salient feature of Israel’s border
practice. After 1967, the borders were hardened and militarised. Only twelve years
later, in the wake of Israel’s conquering of the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai, and the
Golan Heights during the Six-Day War, Israel’s Foreign Minister Abba Eban defied
the status quo ante by referring to the new 1967 borders as ‘Auschwitz Borders’:
I have openly said that the map will never again be the same as on June 4,
1967. For us, this is a matter of security and of principles. The June map is
for us equivalent to insecurity and danger. I do not exaggerate when I say
251
that it has for us something of a memory of Auschwitz. We shudder when
we think of what would have awaited us in the circumstances of June
1967 if we had been defeated; with Syrians on the mountain and we in
the valley, with the Jordanian army in sight of the sea, with the Egyptians
who hold our throat in their hands in Gaza. This is a situation, which
will never be repeated in history (Eban [1969] quoted in Dimant 2014).
The late 1960s signalled the imposition of Israeli military occupation of the
West Bank and Gaza, but did little to clarify the borders of the Israeli state. Since
then, Israel’s borders have been ripped up and constructed into a network of
structures and lines to sustain the occupation while taking more land (Lein and
Weizman 2002; Gordon 2008). This contradiction between non-division and de
facto separation has been a key feature of Israel’s security strategy and narrative.
A crucial shift took place after the Six-day War in 1967. Israel went from
fighting conventional wars in 1948, 1956, and 1967 to controlling and managing
the Palestinian population under occupation. Israel’s border control has now been
militarised and is focused on keeping the OPT and its people separate from Israel
proper for the purpose of minimising friction. The essential difference between
the 1967 occupation and previous and subsequent occupations is the large civilian
population that came under Israeli control without being considered citizens of
the state. This difference has turned the control and repression of a civilian population into the central activity of the Israeli military. The Israeli military, police,
and the intelligence community have been tasked with establishing a regime of
classification to differentiate between different kinds of Israeli citizens and different
kinds of Palestinian subjects. To establish this regime, the main strategy employed
by the Israeli army has been the control of space (Halper 2009: 47–56, 2000). In
other words, Israel’s post-1967 strategy of military self-sufficiency begun in the
1960s became one of a new geography of control.
In order to better understand the current political geography that makes the
OPT open to control, the political and geographical changes brought about by
the Oslo Accords is a fitting place to start. Accordingly, the post-1967 development of new human categories to use in border control that were based on the
new geopolitical reality were advanced, diffused, and refined by the policies of
the Oslo Accords.
252
8.4 The borders of the Oslo Accords
Israel now operates with a number of types of international borders: seaports,
airports, and territorial land crossings.
The country’s territorial land borders include its northern border crossings
with Syria and Lebanon (intended for use only by military and UN staff), the
three ­Jordan River crossings on its eastern flank (Sheikh Hussein for Israelis and
foreigners, Allenby Bridge for internationals, Israelis and Palestinians, the Rabin
crossing for Israelis only), the Taba crossing for foreigners and Israelis, and the
Nitzana Border crossing with Egypt intended for goods and diplomats. Currently,
only two of Israel’s territorial border crossings (Egypt and Jordan) are internationally recognised.
Israeli airport authorities operate three ‘full service’ international airports:
Ben-Gurion (Tel Aviv), Haifa and Eilat; Nevatim Airport is used only for international military flights. Israel has three seaports with international access in
Ashdod, Hadera, and Haifa.
Perhaps the most debated border is the post-1967 ‘Green Line’, which is a
territorial border in principle, but is not enforced as such legally (even though
it is recognized as such by the international community) and symbolically. This
symbolic line is the official point of reference for the international community;
in principle, it ‘prepares’ the geopolitical basis for the (eventual) division of the
land into two states (according to UN resolutions and international political consensus). In practice, however, the post-1967 Green Line has never held the status
of an international border and remains in place simply as a ceasefire line between
Israel proper and the West Bank and indicates the position of military forces at
the conclusion of the war in 1948.
The above list constitutes Israel’s official crossings, checkpoints, terminals,
walls, and fences, along with sophisticated data registers and ID and biometrical
systems now installed at the borders. This system ensures that individuals become
carriers of information through which the sovereign controls and sanctions access.
Instead of conventional border control activity that includes clearly demarcated
lines and practices of ID checks, movement and exit from the OPT is governed
by a matrix of control systems enabled by a much more complex system of border technologies and infrastructure. This complex mix of systems is linked to the
broader anatomy of Israel’s occupation that is built on a technology that includes
layers of separation mechanisms geared to manage individuals through human in-
253
teraction with technological objects. This network formation has occurred through
the dialectic of political decisions and technological possibilities.
The no-contact rule and managing the threat of violence
The political geography brought about by the Oslo Accords (1993 and 1995)
helped spur an advanced matrix of border control in the OPT. The Oslo borders
reconfigured and to some extent digitalised the binary between insurgency and
counterinsurgency, occupier and occupied. Covering all of the OPT, checkpoints,
settler roads, zoning and ID systems as they stand today are both relics and functions of the 1992–1993 US-backed interim agreement between the Palestinian
Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Israel.
In the official military and political discourse, the Oslo rules regarding borders installed by both the IDF and the quasi-autonomous Palestinian National
Authority were proposed as a scheme to improve public security (for Israelis)
through means of separation and isolation from the Palestinians. While one effect
of these ‘Oslo borders’ was an opening of Israel’s external borders to international
trade and increased flows of exports, they also created conditions that enabled the
compartmentalisation of Palestinians into enclaves to be guarded as if they were
surrounded by conventional borders.
In fact, the Oslo Accords drew no actual borders but sanctioned zones and
institutionalised rules of passage. Gordon has argued that Oslo represented for
Israel a shift away from administering the lives of the Palestinians to a strategy of
separation through division and outsourcing of security tasks to private companies
while still exploiting the resources of the OPT (Gordon 2008; Klein 2010). Israel
was effectively left with the power to check all Palestinian passage and engage with
the population on a case-by-case basis through the access-denied system. In other
words, Israel controlled the permit determining the individual’s legal identity. This
practice reflected a desire to control the movement of each individual as part of
a broader strategy of allotting fractured groups, clans and families of Palestinians
to different territories.
By 1991, Israel had cancelled the general exit permit that had allowed Palestinians to move freely between Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. In 1993, it
began to demand that individuals obtain specific permits in order to leave Gaza
and the West Bank (Bashi 2013: 251). At the same time, settlers’ movement in
the OPT was systematically facilitated and improved, which eased their movement between the dotted Palestinian ‘islands’ in the sea of Israeli terrain control
and gated communities (Handel 2009). Taking into account the demographic
254
Map of the West Bank after the
Oslo Accords and the route of the
‘Separation Barrier’ (UNOCHA
2014)
255
distribution of Jewish Israelis (settlers in the OPT) and Palestinian life in Israel
proper, it becomes clear that the ideal of ethnic separation is impossible to realise.
Weizman describes the post-Oslo OPT terrain in the following way:
The dynamic morphology of the frontier resembles an incessant sea dotted with multiplying archipelagos of externally alienated and internally
homogenous ethno-national enclaves – under a blanket of aerial Israeli
surveillance (Weizman 2007: 7).
Clearly, Oslo’s physical manifestation of restrictions on movement and separation has not led to the installation of a Westphalian border system. Rather,
Oslo brought about a decentralisation and proliferation of contact points between
occupier and occupied (and between Palestinians across hundreds of barriers),
and paved the way for Israel to minimise and concentrate contact to border lines
between the side of the lines installed
Gordon’s argument that Israel is interested in resources but not the people is
confirmed in the security architecture installed by Oslo has also allowed Israel to
test technological infrastructure such as walls, fences, checkpoints, and identity
registration systems. However to supplement Gordon’s analysis it also holds that
Oslo has allowed Israel to develop and test technologised and deeply anthropological methods of ID checks at crossings through which, as the next section
demonstrates, Israel can monitor and control the population without boots on
the ground.
8.5 Conclusion
In a settler colonial context, demographic considerations and policies of demographic change are closely tied to the ideas and practices of Israeli border making.
The intellectual and military/strategic discourses on borders as tools to separate
and shield Israeli Jews from the native ‘other’ are important components of Israel’s
border practices. The extreme separatism installed in the OPT has been realised
as part of a broader calculative politics of demographic strategising, which has
been key to the shaping of the Jewish presence and the extending of Jewish land
in Palestine during the last century. (See, for example, the ideas of Israeli demo­
grapher Soffer 1989).
Military strategising rests on a mix of narrow security concerns, larger aspirations of expansion, and the broader aim of controlling demographic balance.
­Taken together, these forces work as a form of intervention to realise its bioregulatory aims. While the process of ingathering of new Jewish citizens of Israel has involved a struggle to define or demarcate the boundaries of the Jewish nation, it has
256
also been formed by and shaped the notion of the negated ‘other’ – the P
­ alestinian.
Border systems that came into place as a result of the political geography determined by Oslo have brought about (once again) a reality where Palestinians are
bordered and governed objects. Oslo represents the recipe of how to construct and
manage multifaceted borders through the strategy of ghettoisation and separation.
The second portion of the border analysis examine how an array of technologies
and systems of border control and security have been developed and deployed
through the technologies of separation, surveillance, and transit systems.
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258
CHAPTER NINE
9.0 BORDER SECURITY PART II: SEPARATION, SURVEILLANCE,
AND TRANSIT
9.1 Introduction: Walls, barriers, and fences
Perhaps one of the most vivid examples of Israel’s border security expertise is the
erection of (border) architectures of separation: walls, barriers, and fences. The life
and the territory of the OPT have come to be governed through a network of both
crude and ‘intelligent’ barriers and fences. This chapter examines how these border
control mechanisms reflect a range of distinct logics of broader control embedded
in Zionism’s techno-nationalist efforts of population engineering. It also explores
the role of companies in developing and exporting a variety of Israel’s logics of
border security and analyses the nature and effects of the practices emanating from
these logics. The chapter begins with a critical inquiry into the border conditions
and security companies’ involvement in guarding the Gaza Strip.
9.2 Gaza’s frictionless borders: transfer and ruling from afar
The walling off of the Gaza Strip is the most extreme example of Israel’s border
security. Gaza’s virtual, naval, territorial, and aerial borders are controlled by Israel,
and produce a multi-dimensional geography of separation and repression of the
1.7 million people residing in the tiny strip of land. Israel’s strategy of control of
Gaza depends on tightly sealed borders, and in many ways represents a hyper version of Israeli border management, i.e. the strategy of abandoned control i.e tight
control but without physical presence to minimise friction between occupied and
occupier. The political geography of Gaza’s hermetically closed borders reflects an
experiment of maximum securitisation of an entire urban space; or to use Weizman’s
description of the West Bank, ‘a laboratory of the extreme’ (Weizman 2004b: 83).
The logics guiding the control regime of the Gaza Strip can be seen as the complex
effect of the Zionist remaking of Palestine. Today, this has materialised as a sort
of ‘end point’ of people transfer, where transfer of people has been replaced by
ghettoisation and enclavement85.
85
According to Masalha’s extensive work on the concept of transfer in Zionist thinking and
practice, the organised removal of the indigenous population has been an ongoing practice that
links the ideology and concrete policies of territorial conquest (Masalha 1992b, 2000).
259
In its current form, the separationist enclosure of the Gaza Strip is the culmination
of what Shafir in his history of Zionist practice has termed ‘the maximalist aim of
Jewish territorial supremacy in Palestine’ (Shafir 1996: xiii).
As is the case of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Gaza came under Israeli
occupation in 1967 and has remained so ever since. (From 1948–1967, it was
under Egyptian rule). Before and after Israel became a state in 1948, Gaza has
been a refuge for displaced Palestinians, in particular those from the fertile coastland of ‘historic Palestine’ (Allen 2012; Roy 1991, 2007). By far the largest part
of the population is made up of refugees living often within an hour’s drive from
their place of origin inside Israel. While Israel’s colonial frontiers are constantly
shifting in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the process of active transfer
of Palestinians and the annexation of their land is still in motion, the borders of
Gaza seem fixed. Israel’s acclaimed abandoning of the Gaza Strip in the 1990s and
the 2005 unilateral disengagement from settlements in Gaza can be seen as part
of a strategy of ensuring a reduced responsibility for administering the Palestinian
population in the Strip (Azoulay and Ophir 2013). However, Israel has still maintained its iron fist of control of the territory, which is often referred to in populist
discourses as ‘Hamastan’ (referring to the ruling Islamist group Hamas) or more
plainly ‘enemy territory’ or ‘Islamist entity’. Today, the confined people are held
behind lethal fences and walls with no means of escape. (The chapter’s section
on separation architecture below deals with the separation wall in Gaza in more
depth.) The goal of separation has been reached in Gaza. The Strip is, Li argues, is
(re)produced into an ‘animal pen’ or ‘internment camp’ based on a strategy that
he calls ‘controlled abandonment’ (Li 2008).
As a consequence, the controlled abandonment regime determines that contact between Israelis and Gazans is reduced to the realm of security realised in
large part by high-tech/digitalised systems. Under the pretext of disengagement86,
according to the official Israeli strategy, these systems ensure minimum friction
86
260
In reference to the unilateral decision to pull settlers out of the Gaza Strip in 2005, the
­Disengagement Plan stated: ‘The relocation from the Gaza Strip…will reduce friction with
the Palestinian population’, ‘The process of disengagement will serve to dispel claims regarding
Israel’s responsibility for the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip’, and ‘Israel will guard and monitor
the external land perimeter of the Gaza Strip, will continue to maintain exclusive authority in
Gaza air space, and will continue to exercise security activity in the sea off the coast of the Gaza
Strip’ (The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2004).
between the soldier and the Palestinian87. As a consequence of this controlled
abandonment strategy, Israeli control of Gaza includes multifaceted modes of
containment entailing zoning systems, restricted access, and buffer zones88, and
statistical and logistical control and domination that serve the Israeli geopolitical
goal of frictionless separation. As Tawil-Souri argues, the Gaza Strip is ‘a kaleidoscope of bordering mechanisms and containment devices, in which multiple points
and overlapping zones of control are juxtaposed, some diffused, some centralised,
some contradictory’ (Tawil‐Souri 2011b: 12)89.
As a former IDF soldier explained during an interview, this strategy has altered
the way the IDF operates:
Since Cast Lead, there have hardly been any incursions. The military is
only going into the strip in the areas close to the fence. Very rarely units
go inside. If they do, it usually means war. In some ways the control over
the military equipment around the strip is becoming automatized. If you
have women soldiers standing in offices, they control with remote controlled
machine guns, and then they have ability and the responsibility to prevent
any kind of infiltration into the country (Interview with former IDF
solder, Tel Aviv, 26 June 2013).
Israel’s military rule over Gaza has been marked by rare but large-scale coordinated incursions and a concentration of confrontations around the border zones
As Graham notes, the increasingly militarised borders of Gaza are ‘shoot to kill
zones’ (Graham 2011: 243).
A number of technological security innovations have grown out of these attempts to realise the ideal of absolute separation.
87
88
89
The Gaza rule has even led Israeli officials to claim that Gaza is not occupied but sui generis
administered territory. However, Hajjar argues that this claim is ‘sui generis nonsense’: rather
than providing self-determination for the Palestinians, the current set-up provides Israel with
a self-instituted ‘license to kill’ in defiance of international law (Hajjar 2012).
The buffer zones absorb 14 per cent of Gaza’s land and almost 50 per cent of all arable land
(Roy 2012).
As a result of these conditions, even the cracks (i.e. pockets of resistance such as infrastructure-like tunnels and holes) have become modes of governing. Gaza’s tunnels are key transportation lines for goods from the outside. The mix arms and goods smuggling makes the economy a
military target.
261
Frictionless patrolling: the robot servant
Israel’s experience of counterinsurgency and separation in Gaza in particular
has led to debates on the ‘Israelisation’ of urban counterinsurgencies on a global
scale (Graham 2010b). The abandoned control regime has morphed into a sort
of conceptual formula of how to conduct frictionless border control such as unmanned border patrolling, which has become a successful export commodity.
When Silicon Valley high-tech giant Google recently launched its new driver­
less car, the news went around the world. It was presented as a revolutionary
leap into the future, and for many, a dream come true. Meanwhile, the IDF has
since 2008 started to test and deploy unmanned jeeps known as the Guardium
and produced by the company G-Nius to guard the borders surrounding Gaza
Strip. Today, these vehicles, controlled with a joystick and mouse from a nearby
control room, roam around the Strip along the intelligence smart fence. While all
of G-Nius’s models are made for ‘autonomous mission execution’, the Guardium
MKIII carries a remote-controlled lethal weapons system with a rapid sensor-toshooter-loop operating around the clock. These circulating robots match the aerial
surveillance and potentially lethal drones patrolling the enclave’s airspace leaving
the people in Gaza under tight, potentially deadly surveillance.
The technology enabling these innovations grew out of the desire to retain tight
control over the Gaza Strip with as few soldiers on the ground as possible in order
to prevent loss of soldiers’ lives and to avoid friction. The Guardium system was
developed in a joint venture by two of Israeli security giants, the privately owned
Elbit and state-owned IAI. Under the slogan ‘driven by innovation’, the G-Nius
venture is now planning to release a new generation of the jeep. This includes ‘The
Loyal Partner’, an unmanned ground vehicle to be used to inspect the interior of
houses from within and to transport ammunition and measure of protection to
soldiers in combat90.
Such systems of control in Gaza signify both the historical legacies of colonial
control in Palestine, the present state of siege, the strategy of ruling Gaza from
afar, and possibly a window into future trends of war, policing, and border control.
The Guardium is among many innovations emblematic of the link between Israel’s
logic of rule and technological innovation.
90
262
Border patrolling robots have also been deployed along the borders of Lebanon and Egypt, but
at the time of this writing, it was unconfirmed whether the Guardium is now operating there.
Guardium UAV in the southern
part of the Gaza-Israel Border.
Photo: Zev Marmorstein: IDF
Spokesperson Unit.
Guardium UAV in the southern
part of the Gaza-Israel Border.
Photo: Zev Marmorstein: IDF
Spokesperson Unit.
263
During my aforementioned visit to the Institute of Homeland Security Research at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Dan Blumberg said that the centre
supports American and Israeli manufacturers in developing UAV technology for
driverless vehicles. A major starting point for the centre’s research is to make security platforms autonomous:
We need to find a way to give the robot human skills, like when it picks up
a tomato, we need to teach it not to crush it. The same goes for intelligent
combat’ (Interview with Dan Blumberg, Ben-Gurion University, the
Negev, 17 August 2012).
Blumberg explained that the idea is to create systems of control to be at the
forefront in military capacity and technological innovation. He emphasised that
it is important for his research centre as well as for the MoD to follow ‘the laws of
the robot’, essentially preventing robots from taking charge away from humans,
as in the case of the Guardium. While borders are digitalised, human judgement
is still essential to connect event detection to a specific course of action.
In a broadly disseminated defence publication, Cen Vidal, First Sgt. and chief
mechanic of Guardium, explained why the vehicle is so powerful: ‘To the Palestinians it’s largely an unknown quantity, they have no idea what it’s capable of ’
(Army Recognition 2012). The autonomous systems are also a key component in
the psychological warfare that takes place along Gaza’s border in times of war that
generates spectacular violence.
The borders of Gaza act not just as impenetrable barriers but also as potentially
lethal constructions. Other UAVs have been deployed along the border buffers,
and are closely integrated into the broader control and command system. A salesperson from Rafael, the IDF’s prime security manufacturer branch, told me at a
security fair:
The robot is just the waiter, a collector of information and an executer of
our commanders’ decisions (Interview with anonymous Rafael representative, ISDEF, Tel Aviv, June 2013).
Along with a range of other military and border control agencies, the US
Border Control Agency has shown interest in embarking on the next generation
of Guardiums to learn from Israel’s Gaza experience.
The case of Gaza’s border control is a peek into the future of digitalised border
264
control. The Guardium case illustrates the attempt to project the idea of Israel’s
borders as being not just ‘smart’, but impenetrable91.
To link the division of space to the ideological tenets of separation in the broader Zionist national project, it is fruitful to examine Israel’s ‘hafrada’ architectures
(Hebrew for separation or separateness) that are deeply rooted in the Zionist
schemes of territorial control.
9.3 Borders of separation: Hafrada logics
At the time of the Arab revolts in 1936–1939, the British had already experimented with watchtowers and walls to contain dissent and violent revolts. In the
1970s, the Israeli state began to construct settlements inside Gaza that included
the building of walls with the familiar turnstile gates and barbwire around Gaza’s
refugee camps (This would be replicated later in other parts of the OPT) (KeithRoach 1994 in Khalili 2013). In 1994, as per the Interim Agreement between
Israel and the Palestinian National Authority under the Oslo Accords, Israel built
what it called a ‘security fence’ around Gaza. Officially, the fence was not intended
to constitute the border, as Palestinian movement between the West Bank and
Gaza was a condition of the agreement. However, although the fence was meant
as a temporary measure attached to the open-ended nature of the agreement, it
has become a permanent instrument of complete siege, which has effectively been
imposed on the Strip since 200792. After the 2005 unilateral Disengagement Plan,
when the Israeli government withdrew its settlers from Gaza and ended its permanent military presence inside the Strip, the security zone system is now based
on a core distinction between inside and outside Gaza that revolves around the
walled security system.
91
92
Another pivotal innovation to sustain the status quo while reducing Israeli casualties is Rafael’s
‘Iron Dome’. In collaboration with the US and the IDF, this system was developed in the
aftermath of the 2006 Second Lebanon War with Hezbollah. The system was developed to
intercept and destroy rockets and curb military attacks without military intervention. The ‘Iron
Dome’ and the related ‘David’s Sling’ can be deployed as shields from cross-border attacks in
other zones. South Korea has expressed an interest in deploying the system along its border
with North Korea.
According to the official agreement to which the PLO has consented and with a multilateral
­dimension through the formalisation of both Jordan and Egypt’s responsibilities in enforcing
this (as well as the EU and US) corresponded to a zoning and internal structuring of the Gaza
Strip according to lines ascribed with different colour codes: blue lines for Israeli areas (as
around settlements and their road network), green (broken and unbroken) to demarcate the
provisional borders and a shaded pink to demark the border with Egypt. Certain areas were
carved yellow as special Israeli security areas.
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Ten years after the Disengagement Plan, the Israeli government decided to construct what is perhaps the crudest manifestation of the prohibition of movement
and the separation of land in Palestine: the West Bank wall, which is officially
called the ‘Separation Barrier’93 by the UN and other international agencies. The
structure consists of an eight metre-high concrete barrier in some stretches and
three meter-high in others, an electrified fence with additional barriers on either
side constructed of razor wire, trenches, and 30 to 100 metre-wide military roads
that are connected to multiple surveillance systems. The 723 kilometer-long structure interval separation system is built with disruptions for identity check and
watchtowers from which the surrounding areas can be controlled and managed.
In Hebrew, the structure is termed ‘Mikhsol ha-hafrada’, which refers to its most
obvious effect – separation – and carries with it a number of measures, including
state strategies used to prevent penetration, annex land, and preserve a solid Jewish
majority inside Israel. The hafrada structure is based on a two-pronged logic: it
entails both the act of separation or isolation of one ethnic group from another
and the establishment of an institutionalised regime of domination94.
The Separation Barrier and its control devices are not only instruments of geopolitical division, but also of observation and control. The Barrier is, as Weizmann
says, a sensitive linear sensor directed at Palestinian towns and cities, with a political
architecture shaped by various forces in Israel (Weizman 2007: 162–165). Needless
to say, the hafrada logic has devastating effects on the lives of the Palestinian population and the landscape95. The Barrier affects each individual in different ways.
As Azoulay and Ophir put it:
93
94
95
266
The construction of the West Bank wall was announced by Israel’s Ministry of Defense in 2002;
its construction began in 2004. The estimated price of the project has mounted to a staggering 3 billion USD, not including the annual maintenance cost of approximately 260 million
USD. The project has been a lucrative deal for the countries involved. The involvement of the
private security companies followed the decision to cut the route of the planned wall/fence into
smaller subdivisions and put them out for tender separately to one of 22 private contractors
selected by the MoD. Whereas the costs are covered by the public budget, the security industry
and multinational companies are acquiring larger shares of the benefits (Hever, 2010; Cronin,
2010). In the case of the Separation Barrier, the project was devised and sequenced under The
Department of Regional and Strategic Planning of the IDF’s Central Command, and staffed by
engineers with expertise in security design (Weizman 2007).
Currently Israeli companies, in collaboration with the MoD, are replicating the hafrada architecture along the country’s border with Egypt and at the northern border with Lebanon. Thus,
while the walled systems produce geopolitical divisions as calculative fields, for the industry, the
projects have also helped build a network and an experience that expands beyond the space of
the OPT.
It is estimated that the Barrier affects the livelihood of 250,000 Palestinians (UN OCHA 2010).
The rising concrete, in view everywhere, means that total separation is
imminent, that the very existence of bare life is at stake, that every passage
is temporary, and that everything gained at the checkpoint is ephemeral
and has to be regained through the another tortuous round of negotiations
(Azoulay and Ophir 2005).
This practice of walling off territory has been woven steadily into demographic
and geopolitical strategies of division of the post-Oslo political geography.
In the West Bank, soldiers operate on both sides of the Barrier, while in Gaza
the walled system is more complete and based on a more consistent strategy of
ruling from afar through robotically managed borders96. Both structures combine the long-term strategy of intelligence gathering based on human intelligence
(HUMINT) and signal intelligence (SIGINT), which is why the construction is
both a separation mechanism and a counter-insurgency effort.
Accordingly, Jabotinsky’s aforementioned plea for an ‘Iron Wall’ is echoed in
the Israeli security industry’s rationale for the Separation Barrier.
Some of the companies that have been granted tenders for the Separation
Barrier by the Ministry of Defense were already involved in Gaza in the 1990s.
In this way, the Gaza and West Bank systems are variants of the same ideological
and geopolitical tropes of hafrada architecture, but with different technological
attributes.
96
For some of the most instructive accounts of the nature of Israel’s rule in Gaza, see Bhungalia
(2010); Li (2006, 2008); and Tawil-Souri (2011b).
267
Hafrada as an operational concept
The Israeli MoD has deemed the West Bank Separation Barrier ‘an operational concept…conceived by the Israeli Defense Establishment in order to reduce
the number of attacks on Israel’ (Israeli Ministry of Defense 2007). The Barrier
demonstrates how the OPT is approached as a biopolitical field or a field of
calculation (of people and space) demarcated and managed by internal lines and
borders. The effects of the Separation Barrier are often framed to demonstrate the
success of the hafrada algorithm; the calculation of how to optimise separation is
closely linked to how the success of the project can be measured by a reduction in
terrorist attacks and undesired infiltration. As Weizman demonstrates, the algorithm from which the route is designed, ‘seeks to compare, measure and evaluate
different bad consequences’ (Weizman 2007: 163). Writ large, industry actors
praise the project as a major R&D effort, where ‘intervention through innovation’
thinking led to measurable success. It has come to exemplify the conversion of a
lab prototype to a real world solution and an extreme prototype version of border/
separation architecture.
West Bank “Separation Barrier”,
Ramallah/Qalandia, 2012.
Photo: Peter Hove Olesen
268
Among security practitioners I have interviewed, the political motive to retain
demographic control is framed less blatantly: the architecture is seen to serve
narrower security purposes. The building of separation structures is typically articulated more as a necessary unilateral move to curb terrorism and infiltration.
During my fieldwork, I met representatives of a number of companies that have
contributed to the building of the Separation Barrier. These actors believe that
while their company’s contribution to the Barrier might not be their most sophisticated technological performance, it was the best product placement one could
ask for. Israel’s controversial security infrastructure has become a business opportunity for them; their companies use their contributions to the Barrier to give the
hafrada architecture a universal ‘flair’ that makes them flexible and marketable to
other countries.
In 2002, Israeli security giant Magal won 80 per cent of the bids issued for the
installation of the intrusion detection systems along the seam line of the Separation
Barrier in the West Bank. At an international security fair, one of the company’s
representatives explained to me how Magal had developed its high-tech fortification contribution to the Barrier, which includes intelligent sensor and surveillance
systems to prevent infiltration and detect irregularities around the structure:
No one can escape our system. We will detect them all and catch them.
They know that, so we have less business to take care of, but we still need
to be there with soldiers and guards. Just in case and also, it looks better
(Conversation with Magal marketing representative, HLS Israel 2012,
Tel Aviv, November 2012).
The Magal representative, who requested anonymity, said that based on its experiences working with the IDF and the MoD, the company is seeking to market
its capacities to foreign border control markets. The representative was proud that
Magal’s perimeter security devices have become a steady feature of Israel’s image
of maximum security: the Separation Barrier.
The hafrada logic has become part of the security industry’s portfolios. How­
ever, clearly, the concept of hafrada architecture is developed both as a unique
system fitted to the extraordinary context of the OPT, and also as a concept from
which to extract experiences for replication elsewhere. There is no doubt that
the Separation Barrier has become known worldwide as a cornerstone of Israel’
reputation as a successful security nation; Israeli security actors are acutely aware
of the rising demand for advanced hafrada technology. While remaining central
to Israel’s regime of control in the OPT and beyond, the practices of erecting
269
walls and defensive and offensive fences have become a fertile export niche. In
fact, Khalili argues, the Separation Barrier has become a generic urban feature of
modern control of space that normalises kinetic and population-centric counterinsurgency (Khalili 2013). The key question centres not only on whether a system
is installed along national-territorial borders, but also on the logics of sanctioning
access/denied access.
Across the scale in the industry, the prevailing message is that walls and fences
serve the function as an outpost against barbarism in its most abstract, yet real
sense, not just as a shield from violent Palestinians, but as symbol and measure of
safeguarding in the abstract global War on Terror. As Israel’s Ministry of Economy
wrote in their promotion of Israeli security: ‘In defense against terrorism or criminal activity the first line of protection remains good fencing’ (Israeli Ministry of
Economy, n.d.). In this way, the hafrada rationale has broad relevance elsewhere,
and has come represent a module or technical device of necessary intervention
that can be customised to fit other calculative fields.
Imperfect hafrada and indigenous resistance
The reality of hafrada remains messy. Despite calls for total separation, clearly
the Separation Barrier is not only a ready-to-go object, but an organic concept
driven by events at its edge and developments elsewhere that affect border practice
(such as attacks inside Israel, a religious holiday, or simply bad weather).
Daily encounters with Palestinians remain a burden and a blessing. They are a
burden because they require resources and manpower, and a blessing because they
provide grounds for testing new methods and technology. Despite the hardship
imposed on them, the Palestinians’ mere insistence on organising life around the
structure justifies the need for constant regulation. Attempts to breach the barrier,
i.e. finding ways of going around it or non-violent public protests in villages are
severely affected by the Barrier. They both reinforce the strength of the arguments
supporting the project, and create new forms of friction between occupier and
occupied that activate the broader spectrum of security systems. Rather than being
seen as a manifestation of opposition, the continued Palestinian presence, reactions
and (sometimes) actual resistance to the project come to be a part of the material
theatre of hafrada. An action of the ‘other’ – even something as simple as pushing
for alternative traffic routes around the structure – reaffirms the necessity of the
structure among defence actors and Israeli citizens.
The products of the security industry are tools to fight the resisting natives
– the ‘indigenous resistance’. In fact, resistance on the ground is an important
270
part of the hafrada production cycle. Once an order for a given security solution
has been placed by the IDF in response to an impending threat and after initial
deployment of the product in the field, the companies’ technical departments are
often contacted with requests for product refinement. At times, the IDF is given a
prototype to test in the field. What is crucial here is that the trials of security technologies such as barriers in the field play back into the refinement and adjustment
of techniques and technology. Thus, for the security company, any engagement in
constructing hafrada installations is about generating new ideas, fine-tuning, and
refinement of its product line.
The structural nature of state violence implicates the human fabric of Palestine
as part of the security innovation and production cycle. In export situations, the
targeted population’s responses to a given security product are of great interest to
buyers, who are then able to anticipate the responses from targeted populations
in other battlespaces. Consequently, the border becomes an experimental site on
which the indigenous resistance of the Palestinians is integrated – albeit not voluntarily – into the refinement process. In a settler colonial context, the resistance
to differentiation is not just a negative side effect, but also a source of innovation.
9.4 Borders and surveillance
Surveillance systems along Israel’s borders have created a permanent condition
of panopticonism informed by Israel’s politics of differentiation. This condition
rests on Israel’s practices of controlling inflows of immigration, and pushing for
the migration of others that together constitute the steady nurturing of the Jewish
settler community.
Border control entails a dimension of increasingly advanced surveillance.
Surveillance can be defined as the ‘focused, systematic and routine attention to
personal details for purpose of influence, management, protection or direction’
(Lyon 2007: 14). Marx’s seminal account refers to this form of segmentation as
‘categorical suspicion’, while Gandy has referred to a similar idea as ‘panoptic
sorting’ (Gandy 1993; Marx 1988). Panoptic sorting works to increase the precision with which individuals are classified according to their perceived value (in
the marketplace) and their susceptibility. Hence, surveillance is not only a passive,
defensive act.
Lyon discusses the term ‘phonetic surveillance fix’, a practice of surveillance
sorting that requires an understanding of how pre-emptive surveillance is not
just a key technique but an ideological construct informed with meaning so as to
271
realise the separation and expansion along the shifting colonial frontiers (Lyon
2011). In the context of Israel, border control is intimately linked to surveillance,
which functions as a form of techno-nationalism tying territorial aspirations to the
national dream of prosperity and security for the national group realised through
technological innovation (Charland 1986). To put it differently, just as in the case
of the critique of security as a self-fulfilling mechanism in the world of border
management, surveillance becomes a key ingredient of its maintenance (Zureik
and Salter 2005).
The case of Controp
In the summer of 2012, I interviewed a staff member of the private security
company Controp in its company offices in the Hod Hasharon industrial quarter
outside Tel Aviv. The company representative, who was of Russian origin but requested to have his name left out had previous experience with the Israeli security
giant Elbit Systems, explained to me how he enjoys the more informal atmosphere
of a smaller company, where science, instead of ‘big business’, was the focus.
As we drove in his car from his home in a bourgeois Tel-Aviv quarter towards
the high-tech industrial zone, he explained to me how Israel’s open borders (for
Jews at least) was the prime explanation for his company’s ‘vibrant state’ and his
personal success (Interview with Deputy Director of Development, Controp, Hod
Hasharon, 27 August 2012). He explicitly praised the Law of Return (for Jews)
as his personal saviour because it rescued him from the hardships of being a Jew
in the USSR in the 1970s. He described his life in Israel as a practical and even
natural way of securing his own situation, which he saw as a matter of survival, and
as a practical way for Israel to use his and other Russians’ technical competences.
The company representative also explained how Controp had developed the
‘Panoramic Scan’, which is used to secure high-value facilities, while showing
me pictures of the Separation Barrier and the Western Wall in the Old City of
­Jerusalem. He was clearly proud when described how Controp had made this
ancient Western Wall stone-plateau intelligent. Surveillance and the prohibition
of access, he said, are the first steps to avoid unwanted infiltration:
We had an open border with the Arabs and they started to come in by
foot. If you don’t lock your door you can’t sleep at night. It’s the same everywhere. We need to lock our doors (Interview with Deputy Director of
­Development, Controp, Hod Hasharon, 27 August 2012).
272
He proudly showed me his company’s contribution to fortifying the Separation
Barrier with surveillance equipment. In fact, based on its successes at the home
front, Controp has successfully expanded to markets abroad, especially in Europe
through Controp’s collaboration with larger Israeli companies such as Elbit Systems and Rafael. (The latter has bought substantial shares in Controp’s holdings).
Currently, the Panoramic Scan is sold to a range of foreign state and non-state
clients, among them the Canadian army.
Currently, most of Controp’s export products secure critical infrastructure
such as oilrigs, airports, and maritime borders. The US Coast Guard and several
European airports have installed Controp’s two bestselling scanning, detection
and recognition systems: the SPIDER and the CEDAR, which are also used by
the IDF and Israeli Airforce (IAF). The borders with the Arabs have served as an
excellent driver of innovation for Controp, the representative said, which in effect
helps the Israeli state create ‘new borders’. Accordingly as Controp’s portfolio
attests, its border control products are not limited to line-based divisions but also
entails interactive devices such as sensors and mobile event detectors.
Controp’s products at display,
showroom at HLS Israel the
Second International Israel Homeland Security Conference, Tel Aviv,
November 2012. Photo: author.
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Sensors, treasures and pearls
Infrastructures of separation are steadily fortified with high-tech/software based
accessories for control and surveillance that can be customised to fit a specific
mission. The technologies ensure that the contact with a penetrator is transmitted
and interpreted in the event of a vibration, a rise in temperature, or a magnetic
reaction. In the management of events, the technology provided to fit a given
barrier works as a sort of accessory system where different sorts of event detection
can be customised from companies’ product portfolios.
To develop the field of border protection, Martin Cowen, a former South
­ frican national now an Israeli citizen and owner of the small Israeli company GM
A
Systems, has developed the detection system ‘V-Alert Sensor’. In August 2012, I
visited Cowen in his office in his villa in a Tel Aviv suburb, where he demonstrated
his digital fencing technology. Each sensor in the product prototype has its own
ID, so the operator knows exactly which sensor sends an alarm to the central
command unit. Each calibrator, which is made in accordance with the kind of
fence it is installed on, displays a large range of capabilities. Currently, the many
products offered by GM are all unified in a so-called DUAL COMM system that
enables communication between locations and the control room through wireless
transmission.
According to Cowen, the algorithm- and software-based V-Alert system can
be installed on all types of solid structures and perimeter fences. Today, varieties
of the V-Alert system are installed on the Separation Barrier in the West Bank and
around settlements as part of an intelligent fencing system. Interestingly, the first
versions of the V-Alert sensor was not developed to guard the Palestinians and
prevent their infiltration into Israel and across barriers inside the OPT. Cowen
and GM first developed fences and technological accessories for the agricultural
industry to keep in and manage animals in both Israel and South Africa. This was a
successful business in Israel especially because of the Kibbutzim’s agricultural-based
architecture. As Cowen described it:
During the First Intifada, we got a request from the settlements in Gaza.
We took technology and fashioned it for settlements – a very simple transfer. The message was: Keep people out and deter with electric shock. Then
in the mid-1990s, we established GM – we wanted to expand. We developed technology based on a need and the demands of users (Interview
with Martin Cowen, Tel Aviv, 8 September 2012).
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With the steady disassembly of the Kibbutz economy and the tightened security measures following the outbreak of the First Intifada in 1987, the basis of
Cowen’s business changed. Its centre of gravity shifted towards the OPT and the
managing of Palestinians and settlers rather than cattle and sheep. In cooperation
with the MoD, Cowen and his team became involved in perimeter fencing. Cowen
explained the company’s trajectory:
After the First Intifada, we became very successful in the local market of
electrical fencing. We deployed 400 kilometres of fencing in the Gaza strip
around the settlements. Today these are destroyed. Today we are present all
along the green line, on the barrier and in towns or villages, in strategic
military areas. Once we had success in the settlement we could go on to
the Jordan Valley and so on (Interview with Martin Cowen, Tel Aviv,
8 September 2012).
This multipurpose system, which integrates both psychological and physical
deterrents, is installed in a range of settings such as the West Bank Barrier, oilrigs,
and around critical infrastructure such as government buildings and diplomatic
missions. Today, 50 per cent of GM’s sales are from abroad and 50 per cent from
Israeli customers. According to Cowen, the company is particularly successful exporting to industrial sites overseas, especially to Latin American and Asian markets.
These markets are in flux because of ‘rapid industrialisation and a general rise in
lawlessness’ (Interview with Martin Cowen, Tel Aviv, 8 September 2012). However, Cowen said that while international clients ‘generally like Israeli technology’,
when taking Israeli technology abroad to overseas and non-western settings, it is
strategically wise to be discreet about the origin of the products, as the Israeli brand
in some places is unpopular.
GM System’s trajectory is by no means unique; rather, it reflects a shift in the
security economy where border and fence technologies have come to increasingly
target the division between population groups inside the OPT and between Israel
and the OPT. The Israeli company Sabrafence (the word Sabra generally refers
to the ideal type of the rejuvenated ‘muscular’ Jew, ‘the Sabra’) specialises in the
evolving field of event detectors, which includes smart gates such as ‘beam barriers’ (crash arm barriers), crash barricades (road blockers), and the so called ‘crash
gates’ (an iron swing door), all of which have been sold to the Israeli government,
the IDF, the Palestinian National Authority, and government agencies in Jordan,
Egypt, Greece, and the UN.
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Moreover, this shift between securing people and objects is a common feature
of perimeter security. On a much bigger scale, security giant Elbit is also busy in
the field of event detection. Along the Israel-Egypt border at the Sinai Peninsula,
the MoD has installed a customised version of Elbit’s ‘tactical reconnaissance
and surveillance enhanced system’. This is a new system made up of unattended
ground sensors (UGS) developed for this specific purpose and used for intelligence
gathering and enhanced awareness of borders to, as Elbit states ‘localize suspected
activity’ (Elbit 2014b). Elbit’s UGS system, which ‘enables continuous border and
facility protection’, was first launched globally at the Singapore Airshow in 2014
and is now exhibited and sold at fairs worldwide. The system can both detect and
classify human and vehicular targets in real-time and is made up of a cluster of
intelligent communication devices, sensing technology, and data analysis tools.
The Pearl is an unattended ground application with an ultra-low power design.
It is deployed as one component of Elbit’s unified system that is distributed into
border areas as information collectors and an unmanned alarm system that detects
movement. The Pearl takes the form of small orbs and roam the ground to detect
and classify the nature of intruder. The US Army and a range of undisclosed buyers have recently purchased the sensors. It is just one of a treasure trove of small
gadgets that reduce the need for foot soldiers on the border. Another of these
small gadgets is the Chameleon 2, a covert day/night imaging software system
that enables video surveillance of wide areas, which the device is able to transmit
back to the command centre. These systems reconfigure the border terrain into
a potentially dangerous, even lethal terrain for unwanted intruders, and serve to
demonstrate how non-sanctioned human encounters with border/hafrada architecture are increasingly reduced to the management of friction.
A key feature of automatised border control is that attacks, infiltration, and resistance are managed and pacified through the detection and prevention of events.
In practice, this means that not only is prohibited border crossing prevented and
deterred, technologies and crude structures mean that life on the other side or
outside the border is hidden and reduced to a sequence of events. Once a separation structure is erected, (border) security management is in principle reduced to
the detection and elimination of ‘events’.
Elbit – from Palestine to Mexico
Hafrada architecture helps condense a space of protracted conflict into a space
of low-intensity war in border zones. As I have demonstrated, this is the case in
Gaza, but it is also a global trend, for example, in militarised zones such as the
US-Mexico border (Dunn 1996).
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Elbit’s involvement in designing the US-Mexico Border has been in the pipeline for more than eight years, expanding in concert with Israel’s own shifts in the
occupation on the home front. In 2003, Elbit sold its Unmanned Aerial Systems
(UAS) Hermes 450 to the US Department of Homeland Security, Customs and
Border Protection (CBP) to deploy along Arizona’s southern border as part of the
Arizona Border Control Initiative. In 2004, these were supplied with the UAS, reported to be the first of its kind in operational use for border patrol. Elbit’s international engagement provides one of the clearest examples of Israel’s border-to-border
exports that highlight Israel’s involvement in border projects on a much larger
scale. Elbit has provided security products in the past to the US Department of
Homeland Security including those for border control activities. In late 2013, a US
government website for federal investment posted a call for companies to bid on a
new ‘Integrated Fixed Towers’ project (IFT). With 2011–2015 as its expected time
frame of investment, the project is estimated to cost 86.82 million USD. In 2014,
Israel’s Elbit Systems won the 145 million USD contract to contribute to the
IFT project over the next year, which added one more year to a guaranteed eight
years of infrastructural support from Elbit. The IFT project is to be implemented
along the border between Arizona and Mexico as part of a large-scale push to upgrade US border protection with high-tech fences97 that can provide ‘automated
and persistent wide-area surveillance to detect, track, identify and classify illegal
entries’ (IT Dashboard 2014). This system will establish high-tech security along
the US-Mexican border, including connecting surveillance towers and expanded
perimeter buffer zones where an intruder can be identified and caught in a matter
of minutes. The underlying premise of the system is to detect movement deemed
illegitimate and risky while facilitating the desired movement of tourists, business,
and goods to keep the transnational circulation of capital moving, as specified in
the US-Mexico economic cooperation agreement of 1994 (NAFTA).
During the same week as the US border control tender was announced, Elbit
America showcased the Peregrine system at the Border Security Expo in Austin,
Texas. The system is integral to Israel’s intelligence apparatus installed around the
Separation Barrier and its connected smart fence, as a:
…field proven border security solution that assesses items of interest with
speed and accuracy…the system is capable of assisting border patrol agents
97
At this stage, Elbit is to provide one tower with more to be ordered on an ad hoc basis. The idea
is to deploy a series of networked, integrated fixed towers equipped with radar and cameras that
will be able to detect a single, average-sized adult who is walking at a range of 8 kilometres to
12 kilometres during the day or night, while sending real-time video footage back to agents
manning a command post.
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in detecting, classifying and tracking items of interest including human
and vehicular targets, on any terrain, at any time (Elbit 2014b).
Accordingly, whether it is fighting drugs, illegal immigration, or terrorism, any
kind of infiltration will be detected by Elbit’s system, which connects decentralised,
tracking devices with the control tower even when miles away. Like Israel, the US
is concerned about establishing a stable balance in their economic/security nexus.
9.5 Border control: passage and strategies of concentration
Limits and liminal transit: Checkpoints and terminals
Today, borders are becoming smart, which makes the crossing process easy and
effective for desired groups and denies access to those who are not wanted. At the
same time, management of the borders is often structured around concentration
points where wider changes in state making are worked out (Hyndman 2005;
Newman 1998, 1999; Sparke 2006).
This working out process is heavily informed by notions of citizenship, the
creation of ethnic fault lines, and a range of subcategories of (denied) identity
attached to data-registration system that codifies (the lack of ) rights. This takes
place at crossings points such as air terminals and checkpoints. Bigo has examined
this process in his work on European border control, and argues that borders
are neither purely fluid nor solid, but ‘gaseous’, i.e. constituted by networks of
policy, border agents’ interpretations, and computerised databases that constantly
exchange information (Bigo 2014). Accordingly, installation of digitalised checkpoints transforms the border into a series of disconnected geographical points that
connect speed to data information sharing. In this way, the meticulous organisation of the concentration points produces a fictive ‘image of smooth channelling’
(Bigo 2014) that contradicts the messy reality of militarised suppression.
During the first decades of the occupation of the OPT, decentralisation of
decision making to low-ranking soldiers and officers was the modus operandi of the
IDF. This decision-making was often arbitrary. By contrast, the current architecture of occupation today is organised around crossings and control posts. In 2006,
the Israeli government established the Defense Ministry’s Crossing Administration,
and designated 48 checkpoints to be ‘civilianised’, which means that they will
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become terminals similar to border crossings (Rapoport 2007)98. In September
2011, there were 522 Israeli roadblocks and checkpoints in the West Bank (not
including a growing number of flying or mobile checkpoints which the IDF can
move from place to place99), which reported an average of 494 incidents in 2011.
In 2013, there was an estimated 99 fixed checkpoints spread across the OPT; as
of February 2014, 59 of these were reported to be located well within occupied
Palestinian territory100.
Automated technological solutions to facilitate and sanction movement at the
crossings rely increasingly on a certain level of predictability (Berda 2012). The
crossings represent an overlay of technological sophistication and a ‘conjectural
style of reasoning’ (Bigo 2014) based on a mix of group sorting and picking,
screening, and interrogation practices to filter the mixed mobility flows installed
to curb Palestinian movement while facilitating Jewish-Israeli movement. These
different time regimes are underpinned by the institutionalisation of a dependency
economy as specified in the Paris Protocol101.
The border crossings are constructed and refined as a technologised platform.
When people are in transit, loudspeakers enable the operator to give orders to
them without hearing any reaction or requests for explanation (Havkin 2011). The
crossings and concentration points are under the control of the Israeli Crossing
Authorities, an administrative unit operating under the Ministry of Defense. The
Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) administers
98
99
100
101
Increased privatisation is another feature of the checkpoint industry (Havkin 2011; Hever
2010). For example, in 2010, there were 99 fixed checkpoints in the West Bank along the
Green Line and inside Palestinian territory. By 2013, only five of those remaining were operated
by the military (Khalili 2013). The maintenance and patrolling of separation architecture is also
managed by transnational companies, which serves to standardise policing. British-Danish security provider G4S is both a key subcontractor of the Israeli MoD to guard crossings along the
Separation Barrier and an active subcontractor in Iraq, where it guards the multiple checkpoints
around Baghdad’s Green Zone.
As the unified platform of data and screening technologies, the border has become portable,
which is the case with the so-called ‘flying checkpoints’ and the growing spectra of mobile identity verification systems installed in the OPT. In effect, the portable border is a biometric border
par excellence, where the carriers of information are the mobile bodies. Often, checkpoints are
erected in the middle of a Palestinian town or areas as an internal checkpoint that serves to
control or prevent Palestinians from moving freely even within their own territory. The mobile
border is a bureaucratised network of technology, data access, and human intervention.
The checkpoints include 17 in Area H2 in Hebron, where there are Israeli settlement enclaves.
A total of 33 of all internal checkpoints are regularly staffed (B’Tselem 2011).
An appendix of the Oslo Accords sought to govern the economic relationship between the
Palestinian National Authority and Israel in what Arnon has called a space between ‘imposed
integration and volunteer segregation’ (Arnon 1997). The Protocol stipulates the rule of import
and export of capital and goods to and from the OPT, and formalises a tax envelope that allows
Israel to extract revenues from the structure, while solely governing all external (Arnon 1994).
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the sites and reports on incidents and changes in procedures and produces weekly
statistics on crossings. This data is divided into categories of commercial, workers,
or medical humanitarian, as well as those of holy worshippers and extended-family
visitors. Computer software and data registration on the population sustain and
unify the border regime. COGAT’s functions and modes of operation act as a sort
of service portal for its users (security agencies and soldiers), whereby the checkpoint’s digital features make it a militarised feature of modern public governance.
The lines of the borders guide and funnel humans to the organised crossings to
have their identity checked and evaluated. Whether mobile or fixed, the long list
of internal and external border crossings divides Palestinians into smaller groups
where special requirements are needed, or as a means to deny passage collectively102.
At the checkpoint, status and recognition are reflected in an individual’s mobility.
These borders, which differentiate the mobility of Palestinians and non-­
Palestinians, create a layered variation of the speed of checkpoint processes. Indeed,
Virilio’s politics of speed the ability to accelerate, move and produce in a relatively
high pace sees the technologically superior party as the one with the power to
move (Virilio 2006). Consequently, technological speed creates politically charged
flows that are bound up in a structure of violence which brings to the fore the micro-practices of how movement from A to B is designed, changed, and prohibited.
Thus, speed is a political parameter, which, as Virilio tells us in his account of the
nature of ‘pure war’ movement, is less exposed but just as bound up in violence,
as is the case of wealth and the violent features of capitalism (Virilio 1983). The
Palestinians’ waste of time becomes the anathema to speeding up or smoothness
in transit. While the annihilation of time i.e. the ability to control ones own pace
and movevemtn - stands as a symbol of modern progress and productivity, the
mixed mobility management of time supports a process of uneven geographical
development that gives meaning to the borders’ sanctioning systems.
Amoore’s account of the biometrical borders points to how border control
as risk management is concerned with controlling two types of mobility: the
legitimate and illegitimate (Amoore 2006). In a situation where crossing and
movement is sanctioned, this filtering translates into a systemic differentiation
between the blacklisted (data-prevented or data-banned) versus the pre-cleared,
or the blue versus the green cards. (The blacklisted/banned category is based on
predictions of future behaviour.) In Israel’s border crossing control, the main line
of division between the Palestinian (depending on his ID category, data, permits,
102
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Needless to say, Israelis and internationals are granted passage.
records, etc.) and the foreigner, the Israeli (settler), is profoundly expressed. In the
part of the Israeli identity management system sanctioned by the Oslo Accords,
even the architectural features of the terminals installed between the West Bank
and Palestinian East Jerusalem (and in effect Israel) involve color-coded lanes and
sub-lanes, dividing passengers according to the geography produced by the Oslo
Accords (Weizman 2007)
The settlers’ passages are made easy: their journeys are rarely delayed. Moreover,
they are rarely challenged when they cross from occupied territory to Israel proper,
which emphasises that the West Bank settlements are natural extensions and an
integral part of ‘the homeland’. The broader function of the occupation’s border
regime serves to facilitate the movement of what Adey has called the ‘kinetic elite
(Adey 2004), i.e. citizens whose welfare and mobility are advantageous to the state
and the economy.
While the increasingly automated non-spaces are meant to express efficient
management of the borders, they also embody Zionism’s schemes of structural
violence. As Handel argues, the techno-physical structure of control in the OPT
cannot sustain itself: it needs an implicit structure of violence, a threat of violence,
to enact its purposes (Handel 2009). The checkpoints and structures of control
are not (only) about regulating movement. They are part of what a former Israeli
solider serving in the OPT refers to as:
The concept of showing your presence, a core component of the system of
control. The system is clear in the West Bank, where Israel expresses de facto
Israeli control of the ground, and therefore constantly uses those missions to
constantly deter the civilian population (Interview with former soldier,
anonymous, Tel Aviv, June 26, 2013).
Checkpoints routinely filter and interrogate people in a regime of mixed/­
differentiated mobilities (the notion of a different capacity of mobility granted
to different people groups) or what Bigo calls ‘institutionalised racism in border
security’ (Bigo 2006). The pragmatic reasons stated for the use of checkpoints only
serve to disguise the discriminatory practices at play. Whereas for the kinetic elite,
passage is most often a ‘mere’ formality, for the Palestinian as for the immigrant or
the criminal, the transit takes on an existential character that comes to represent
the individual’s legal (or non-legal) status. Common to most routinised crossings,
whether at airport control or other transport portals, is the notion of pre-clearance
of certain groups, for example, in the application to be granted a visa. The notion
of pre-clearing is implicit in Israel’s differentiated rule, which has also become a
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routine aspect of much airport processing of groups of people. Just as checkpoints
filter people based on identity, ethnicity, and ID category, airport body and luggage
scanners and data registration software facilitate the speeding up and slowing down
of movement. The enforcement of immigration control is a field where border
control is in high demand. In Israel’s border security industry, the Palestinian is
transformed into a sort of prototype of the unwanted, the infiltrator.
Border crossing is a shaper of political identity. For the Palestinians, their rite
of passage is embedded in a set of categories (that are subject to change) fixed in
the bureaucracy of administering the occupied population according to a set of
political tools and categories. As Hanafi writes, the Israeli military bureaucracy uses
the most sophisticated anthropological (high-tech) tools to divide Palestinians into
categories. The Palestinian population has become a ‘purely objective matter to be
administered, rather than potential subjects of historical or social action’ (Hanafi
2009). In this way, the sovereign attempts to reduce the subjective trajectories of
individuals to bodies (Pandolfi 2002). The checkpoint then helps form corporal
identity in order to exclude and restrict selected individuals or groups, or what
Nikolas Rose has called ‘the securitisation of identity’ (Rose 1999). This securitisation happens, of course, at the expense of the ‘kinetic underclass’, which is often
portrayed as organised criminal, but much more often as the illegal immigrant or
the ‘non-citizen’. This trickles down to the shape and form of the physical frames,
or the architecture where these levels of kinetics materialise as different lanes for
different categories or even pre-cleared categories that do not need verification.
In this way, the control systems induce a reality that cohabits two types of
spaces: fluid Israeli spaces and truncated, fragmented Palestinians spaces. Handel
describes how this has reorganised the conflict’s territorial premises to be structured
around the use of space, reorganising subjects’ trajectories, and submitting the two
populations to differing time regimes of mobility (Handel 2009). At the same
time, the crossings force people to come to the authorities and disclose the ‘truth’
about themselves, which allows the sovereign to update data in the system and
optimise the conditions under which Palestinian self-policing can be promoted.
The crossing point thus becomes a disciplinary site and constitutes concentrated
locations of violence or the threat thereof in a combination of human intervention
and a portfolio of technological solutions.
Crossing points and ‘non-places’
The crossing itself is a special place – a ‘non-place’, perhaps, but still a significant place. The notion of a non-place was introduced by Marc Augé as a
power-loaded space of transit, for example, a network of airport lounges, border
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terminals, gas stations, oil-rigs, and more. These are nodal portions of the global
travel complex in which the mobile elite and the excluded/unwanted spend time.
‘ If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity,
then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned
with identity will be a non-place’ (Augé 1995: 77). Increased tourism and transnational exchanges on the global level have produced a myriad of non-places to
check, register, detain, reject, and sanction people as they seek to cross boundaries.
Intriguingly, in many ways Israel’s checkpoints and terminals constitute power-loaded non-places. Augé continues: ‘Clearly the word ‘non-place’ designates
two complimentary but distinct realities: spaces formed in relation to certain ends
(transport, transit, commerce, leisure), and the relations the individuals have with
these spaces’ (Augé 1995: 94). Inspired by Tawil-Souri (2011) I here argue that
the concept of a non-place carries great resonance to Israel’s production of space
at terminals and checkpoints.
Nobody lives in the non-place; the checkpoint or the terminal is a non-place in
the OPT, sites of temporary dwelling, of coming and going, of interrogation and
incarceration. Border crossings are autonomous zones with their own rules and
logics detached from but deeply affecting the rest of the individual’s journey. Naturally, these are not neutral zones. In the OPT, the passage and the broader question
of mobility controls and border management are intrinsically conditioned by the
documentation and certification of life activities, such as high school diplomas,
birth certificates, and driver’s licenses upon which much deployment depends. The
checkpoints are critical to Israel’s occupation regime and aim to create frictionless
movement, regulate and sort passage, and by extension, to collect data for the
system’s demographic database (Braverman 2011).
When making a border crossing, the individual is in a state of liminality, an
ambiguous, sometimes disorienting place one occupies before re-entering ‘normal’
life and movement. Each life is evaluated and confirmed by the sovereign at the
checkpoint. While the crossings naturally regulate movement and serve to distinguish between illegitimate and legitimate movement, they also serve as a platform
for the collection of data about those passing through them. The act of crossing
is a phenomenon that both reflects its broader political context and constitutes a
particular space and the experience of passage. Israel’s border rule can be altered
in a moment by a distant event such as terror or a celebration103.
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Israel usually closes all its crossings into the West Bank for Palestinians in the event of a military
confrontation or attack, just as it does at the height of its national holidays such as Independence (Nakba Day), Passover, and Memorial Day.
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To summarise: in a settler colonial context, the rite of passage functions as a
tool to differentiate the social process of access and mobility; it is a way of organising mobility into a hierarchical governance system. Israel’s management of
mixed mobilities can serve the broader purpose of class making. As part of the
racial state’s governing of its subjects, the rite of passage reflects a larger concern
with population engineering according to principles of separation that are rooted
in the vision of the nation and the potential of technologies. These logics travel
well to other sites and borders.
Automated checkpoint guarded by
the IDF in the old city of Hebron
(H1). Photo: Peter Hove Olesen.
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Transfer of illegitimacy and the ‘Palestinianisation’ of the border
Bigo argues that security is a continuum that creates new domains where asylum rights, migration flows, terrorism, and responses to criminal activity come
together in one governance system as part of a larger quest to contain citizenship
– often in a static version when confronted with politico-cultural alternatives (Bigo
2002; Walters 2004). This is certainly true in the case of Israel’s export of systems
to check identities in passage.
At a security fair in Israel in 2012, I talked to a representative of Mer Security
about the branding of Israel as a leading force in border security. He explained to
me that while the European immigration control agency FRONTEX104 seems to
have accepted that ‘…freedom and welfare for its own citizens comes at a price for
others’, there is still a need for the West ‘to learn from Israel’. As a consequence
of the current influx of refugees from Africa and Syria, Europe is experiencing
the need to control movement and access of certain groups ‘the hard way’, the
PR staffer said. (Interview with anonymous PR representative of Mer, Tel Aviv,
November 2012).
The technologies of crossings points are far from restricted to the OPT. Israeli
companies have lent and sold its systems of control to a global space where the
division of bodies is desired: at international boundaries, airports, railway stations,
on subways or city streets, in the office or the neighbourhood. Indeed, the systems
of control in the field of Israel-Palestine is extracted and distributed to other sites
of control over borders and critical infrastructure, where allotting of people to
categories of immobility and mobility is sought. Still, despite its globalisation,
the techno-national dream of emancipation through innovation lies at the heart
of the venture. Israeli companies promote and sell an ideologically informed technological capacity to draw lines around particular groups of people, sorting the
suspicious from the normal, and the risky from the at-risk.
This export dynamic of systems to control mobility rests not only on the capacity of each technological artefact, but also on a narrative of enduring despite
existential threats. Recalling Shimon Peres’s vision of a borderless world, which was
presented at HLS Israel 2012, Israeli companies are selling the utopian dream of
safe, smart borders as a shield against the ‘barbaric east’, which is an ‘orientalisa-
104
Frontex is a European legal and political agency responsible for conducting border protection
missions and routine border patrolling. The agency has also been granted the responsibility to
keep European Union member states informed about new technological developments in the
field of border control.
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tion’ , or ‘Palestinianisation’ of border protection as a universal condition. While
Israel’s framing of social realities at the borders as a threat, an unlimited danger,
companies also sell the (illusory) vision and promise of complete control.
At security fairs, the promotion of border technologies is projected through an
image where Israel’s defence of its borders is weighed against a barbaric, abstract
‘other’. In this image, the more calculated demographic threat (of the Palestinians)
is translated into more universal categories of fears of penetration and threats of
terror. Israel’s civility is played out through disassociation from the ‘primitive’
and threatening Arab or Islamic East. This narrative goes back to early Zionist
thought which is not replicated in the rationalisation strategies of the Israeli security industry.
Tom Segev highlights the deep-seated fear and alienation that Zionist leaders
felt and perpetuated vis-à-vis the Arab East. For example, Theodore Herzl, who
founded political Zionism in 1897, asserted that Zionism should provide the
vanguard of (European) culture against (Eastern) barbarism and Zionist leader and
physician Max Nordau told the first Zionist congress that Zionism must attempt
to do to Western Asia what the British did to India, ‘coming to the land of Israel
as envoys of culture, with the aim of widening the moral boundaries of Europe as
far the Euphrates’ (quoted in Segev 1999: 125). These convictions thus became
the substrate against which Zionist identity was shaped, which have been central
components of the conceptualisation of border security. The technological utopia
of stable and secure borders as promoted by the security industry is a powerful
discourse. However, the reality underneath the technological mediation of reality
mirrors a widespread culture of border panic that has become a source of income.
In Israel, this is manifest in the fear of infiltration (from within), while in more
universal framing the fear is manifested in the fears attached to immigration.
Control plays upon fear in order to legitimise itself.
Border technologies travel from different sites and purposes to new sites of
demand. In his study of the immigration-security nexus, Walters discusses ‘transferring illegitimacy’, which is the shifting of discursive targeting and imposition
of nodes of illegitimacy upon different people groups deemed dangerous to and
excluded from the community (Walters 2008). The notion of transferral is very
instructive in the case Israel’s export of border security, as the motor of export lies
within the capacity to demonstrate the flexibility and adaptability of the technology. When, as in Mexico, the system focuses on facilitating access for those desired
inside and preventing access for those unwanted, then ‘race’ becomes the marker
of insecurity. In other words, the Palestinian or the Mexican become the proto-
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typical illegal alien (Ibrahim 2005; Walters 2008). Here, technology becomes the
medium through which the transferal of illegitimacy takes place. What is more,
as the process occurs in a collaborative effort between state agencies, private security companies, and technology innovators, the transferal happens within fluid
transactions between the state and market forces.
What arises from the exchange of technology and practice is a potent linking
of ‘the Palestinian’ and ‘the immigrant’ who share the destiny of denied political
agency and rights. As Bakan and Abu-Laban have suggested in the context of the
War on Terror (in liberal democracies), Israel’s social sorting has become a normalised practice in Western liberal democracies (Abu-Laban and Barkan 2011).
They term this a ‘Palestinianisation’ of what Mills has called ‘the racial contract’,
which rests on an ideologically informed violence where the contract between the
authority and people includes only ‘people who count’ (Mills 1997).
While in the Israeli case the rationale of border security is attached to the
fear of infiltration from within (and without) on a global scale, these ideas and
capacities speak to the widespread fears attached to immigration. Through its
commodification of border technology, Israeli security companies help conceal
the structural violence embedded in Israel’s governing of the OPT.
9.6 Conclusion
The engineering of border construction and its associated technologies represents
the epitome of techno-nationalism. These are technological ensembles used to
define and realise the nation into a state. The material and discursive dynamics of
access and denied access have drawn the contours of Israel’s ideologically informed
border engineering as a long-term, open-ended process of demographic reversal.
This process has been invoked by the state as part of building an Israel that reflects the state’s nationalist features, and to facilitate economic development and
circulation.
Israel’s pre-eminence in border control is based on Zionism’s hierarchical system of racialisation, which is an advantage in the production of globally attractive
technology for border construction, management, and warfare. Through militarisation and digitalisation of its borders, Zionism’s nurturing of its values and norms
has over time been translated through militarisation into concrete, diverse network
of geopolitical division and risk management. The production of borders, while
based on a political imagery, has over time become a mix of border governmentalities, crude infrastructure, and sophisticated technology resting upon pervasive
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narratives of (in)security that have been reinforced through border enforcement.
The immense and intense process of ingathering of Jews from the global diaspora
and excluding people deemed outsiders in the Jewish nation has been a core tenet
in securing a Jewish nation behind new nationalising borders.
The chapter concludes that the case of Israel border construction has been
integral to settlement and sustained territorial expansion that has included and
still includes a wide-ranging set of ideological and practical assemblages of border
production and management tools. Today, the border security industry thrives on
the dual condition of extremely tight border control and the use of ‘indigenous
resistance’ to fine-tune the systems in place. Ethnic differentiation and racist practices have been essential to and necessary for the sovereign to retain power. The
production of security technology is both a symptom of the contradictions of the
experiences of Zionist nationhood – the pursuit of an ethnic state with a large
native non-Jewish population in it – and a remedy to alleviate the effects of these
contradictions. State officials, soldiers, private security contractors, and technicians
are bound up in a messy reality where military involvement in a civilian environment creates new logics of political authority.
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CHAPTER TEN
10.0 CONCLUSION
Earlier in the research I asked: what is the politics of artifacts? This answer to this
comprehesive question can now be unfolded.
Israel’s technologies of control have been developed and deployed as part of
realising the Zionist dream and vision of stable Jewish, ethnic nationhood. To
achieve this, the Israeli state has, in collaboration with a growing number of
security companies, developed a range of security practices that contribute to a
thriving security economy.
Advanced technologies of security fundamentally alter the dispositions of
those dominating and those subjected to domination. New realities of security are
moulded and created through a complex intertwining of settler colonial warfare,
techno-nationalism, and innovation structures developed through the mediation
between state and nation. In the Israeli case, the duality of ontological insecurity;
the obsession with security and military might combined with (Jewish) existential
crisis has driven Israeli security practices and modes production.
As a core force behind the growth of the Israeli security industry, Zionism as
a national and social movement involves a dual structure of settler colonial ideas
of Jewish emancipation in Mandate Palestine and the attendant formation and
nurturing of a kinship-based capitalist structure driven by a strong tech-based
economy. By performing a colonial genealogy of modernity, this thesis argues that
these binaries of progression and regression so key to Zionist settler colonialism
have been engines of security innovation and profit accumulation.
Consequently, security works as a label for much grander schemes of settlement, control, and expansion and liberal governance performed in a state of permanent settler colonial warfare and policing. The Israeli security sector has been
decisive in integrating Zionism into a condition of permanent war as a necessary
modality of national success (and survival). The technologies and techniques produced by the industry serve to protect and improve the permanent war condition
as a way to achieve the ideal of the ethnic nation and to mould and nurture the
homogenising features of the racial state (Goldberg 2006).
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Organised under the label of security, the entire complex of Israel-Palestine has
been shaped and is constantly reconfigured in a triangular motion between the
forces of the state, private security companies, and the natives’ resistance. This has
occurred as a settler colonial variant of techno-nationalism, where technological
breakthroughs have both informed the national project and been directed and
shaped by the national-territorial visions of Jewish nationhood.
The battlefield complex of Israel-Palestine is a biopolitical field of differentiated calculations and a hierarchy of categorisations that hinge on the correlation
between the intellectual thought and ideological formations of Zionism and more
concrete prescriptions for action and domination established to realise its goals.
The research of this thesis contributes a socio-material analysis of the production of instruments of control and war as they have unfolded in this particular
project of national, human engineering. The genesis and dynamics of the security
industry cannot be understood without considering Israel’s broader aspirations of
both territorial expansion and capital accumulation, including the implications
of transferring these technologies and capacities to new sites and contexts. The
case of Israel’s security industry and its alliance with state and military forces
demonstrates how the production and construction of (in)security is an essential
tool of modern control.
10.1 The Israeli security sector
The Israel security sector is one of Israel’s premier industrial sectors. It expresses
the cumulative experiences of state-based violence. It has been the key to Israel’s
broader path of industrialisation. The sector is versatile, unifying, and an always
powerful military-economic dynamic. As Denes puts it, the Israeli security sector
is:
The consummate expression of permanent war’s mobilising of bodies,
­institutions, and values toward a cohesive and vibrant national order
(Denes 2011a: 259).
From the outset of Zionist settlement, dominant capital and military structures
have worked to produce and embrace a plethora of forces and institutions that
has come to embody the Israeli state and nation. The formation, growth, and
nurturing of the industry has developed according to Zionism’s broader goal of
both deconstructing exiting structures (Palestine) and replacing them with new
ones (Israel). The quest for economic independence is a routine part of Israel’s
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settler governmentality, which works to establish and normalise the amalgamation
of ethnic and capital structures into a fertile architecture of ethnic security capital.
Israel’s security sector is structured to provide both the capacity to destroy and
to erect. This observation is based on Wolfe’s assessment of pure settler-colonialism as a process that ‘destroys to replace’. This view of Zionism as a structure of
invasion (Wolfe 2006) looks at ‘what was’ and ‘what became’. The consequence
of this is a force that consistently seeks a balance between the desire to modernise
Israel and de-modernise Palestine. These simultaneous realities do not take place
as separate events, but as co-imbricating structures around which the security
sector is organised.
The Israeli production scheme is shaped by the particular circumstances and
conditions of the Zionist colonial project, whose form of pure settler colonialism
is not based on the extraction of resources for the overseas metropolitian mothership but on conquering and settling the land itself. In this way, the Israeli security
industry reverses the usual extraction perspective of overseas colonialism, which
places extraction and enrichmentin one place thorugh its variety of of pure settler
colonialism. Instead, Israel’s expansive practices and its modes of production create
a force that entails ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2003, 2009), which
in turn ensures the elites a (potential) surplus of capital. The security industry
configures this into a ‘security fix’ where security, accumulation, and territorial
expansionism work together in a dialectical relationship between territorial and
capitalist logics of power. This process is reflected in the concrete territoriality of
the state policies of expansion and domination – strategies of ethnic transfer and
separation – and also in the expansion of global and especially emerging markets.
As Harvey argues:
The incorporation of new space into the system of accumulation absorbs
these surpluses in two ways: First, it promotes their utilization in the
activities involved in opening up the new space and endowing it with the
necessary infrastructure, both physical and social. Secondly, once the new
space has been adequately ‘produced’, the surpluses of labour and capital can be absorbed in the new productive combinations that have been
made profitable by the spatial enlargement of the system of accumulation
(Harvey 2003: 109–112).
In turn Israel’s settler colonial practices support a production scheme where the
expansion and control of territory and people come to create a surplus of capital
that is reinforced and extra-territorialised by the industry’s exports.
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The Israeli security sector is a fertile economy of both material artefacts and
formations of discourses and visions of control, and has become commensurate
to the state’s early investment in intellectual and industrial capacities. The longitudinal history of the political economy of the Israeli security industry reveals a
link between Zionist nation building and the formation of industrial and state
structures, which are all part of the militarisation of the emerging and consolidating Israeli economy. The industry has also been shaped by and has benefitted
from a rapid process of modernisation marked by a fusion of structures of kinship
(Davis 1977) and capital formations. A built-in racialisation of the national settler
colonial project takes place through military-economic alliances that sustain the
mobilisation of ‘ethnic capital’. This was made possible by extensive waves of Jewish immigration of skilled labour into Israel to entrench the nascent state project
The nascent industrial structures have been and still are determined by Israel’s
perpetual mobilisation for war. Enshrined in the state-led strategy of economic
independence, the close ties between capital and military and industrial elites in a
variety of arrangements inside and outside the territory has spurred the formation
of key defence and security ventures and companies.
The Israeli security industry is a result of a productive mixture of Israel’s
anachronisms, its colonial reality, and its concomitant high-tech economy. The
­consolidation of the IDF as a people’s army and the creation of a militarised nation
or a ‘nation in arms’ have brought together economic and military forces in an
exclusively Jewish alignment. The IDF has been the prime breeding ground for
ideas, comradeship, and collaboration that have informed the security industry.
The industry’s connection to military institutions and units ensure the exchange
of people and experiences between the field, the office, and the factory. Concrete experiences, interpersonal relationships, and the educational benefits of the
IDF provide the basis for second careers in the echelons of the security industry,
academia, security companies, and state agencies that constitute Israel’s pan-institutional economy. The staffing of the security industry hinges on the strategic
incorporation of skills and forces from interconnected knowledge, financial and
military institutions.
However, Israeli security companies tend not to be in complete agreement
over the meaning of security and the level of patriotism that drives their entrepreneurism. Neoliberal features of the Israeli economy have turned the industry
into a liberalised marketplace where competition and its organisation represent
a pyramid structure: the subversion of smaller enterprises under Israel’s security
giants has become an essential condition of commercial and corporate life in Israel.
In the dominating Israeli security narrative, the state, along with the technologies at its disposal, has the capacity to alleviate insecurity. The industry serves the
state and provides the best solutions to fight that insecurity. In a wider perspective,
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the debates on what constitutes security and insecurity are central parts of the
ongoing defining and redefining of the meaning of Zionism. At the same time,
the goal of establishing security is both challenged and blessed with elements of
violent and non-violent native resistance. This resistance habitually allows for real-life testing of technologies and products and for the security producers to adjust
their ideas and technology to the realities of the battlespace.
This resource of native resistance rests on Zionism’s inability to ensure congruence between nation and state. The translation and commercialisation of security
helps to form the meaning and purpose of Israeli security technologies as viewed
by a global audience. At security industry fairs, Israel is promoted as a conveyer
of security both inside Israel and far beyond its own borders. While the industry
has been nurtured by nationalism, unstable conditions of ethnic nationbuilding,
and the utopian notion of homogeneity, the industry thrives on a self-promotional
ethos of maximum security.
By extension, Israel’s global integration has to a large extent been shaped by
its security/defence policies and its security production. The insertion of Israeli
security products into the flow of the global economy has both shaped and been
shaped by diplomatic overtures, external reparations, military aid, and a growing
export portfolio with global appeal. While it was shaped first and foremost by
political motifs, Israel’s technological capacities increasingly motivate this international engagement. The country first shifted gradually from a (military)-economy of dependence to a militarised neoliberal economy; it has been subsequently
transformed into an export economy. The security products themselves and the
industry’s skill in promoting them has been a key engine of this internationalisation, which constituted by experience, technological breakthroughs, and active
government support.
Today, Israel’s exports help produce a new militarised cartography of moral,
civilisational, and technological difference. Through its military economy Israel
plays a role in creating lobal hierarchies of uneven development asserted by the
world’s pre-eminent economic and military powers. Both the empirical and conceptual analyses of this thesis have demonstrated how the Zionist expertise and
political economy of security constitute a hyper version of both nationalising and
subjecting forces elsewhere.
As a comprehensive entity, the Israeli security industry expresses a co-imbrication of political intent and technological artefact. This is materialised in the
production of security technologies that is part of the constant configuration and
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allocation of the sources of power in the settler colonial project. The constant pursuit of ‘Jewish security’ has been shaped by and has shaped the notion of Zionism
as a national project.
10.2 Hyper and radical securitised nationalism
Zionism is not unique, rather, as a project of national engineering it has worked
as a time- and space-specific variant of securitised technological nationalism. In
this sense Zionism needs to be approached as a hyper version of securitised nationalism performed through the techniques and schemes of pure settler colonialism realised through technological innovation. Seeing Zionism as a variant of
securitised nationalism includes the envisioning of a national community where
specific national practices of migration and immigration control, planning and
urbanisation, military strategies and doctrines, and industrial and R&D policies
have informed national security practices
To grasp the broader implications of Israeli homeland security, it is essential
to perform a critique of security. Instead of reducing security to a simple matter
of mitigating threats, we need to question the ontological and interest-driven
assumptions behind security as ‘a public good’. This means conducting a critical
inquiry into the broad claim that maximising security is the best remedy to alleviate insecurity. Seeing security as a source of modern state control, as a principle
for order making, and as a vector for the production of new insecurities is fruitful
way to ask fundamental questions about the political and social architecture of
security as a (settler colonial) governance strategy, a technological specification
attributed to an artefact, and as a formation of a national narrative.
The reason for this type of inquiry is clear: technologies of security are more
than the sum of manufactured objects that circulate between manufacturers and
militaries. They also raise the question of how security is performed and how it
reflects a certain doxa on security (Guittet and Jeandesboz 2009: 238). Israel’s
security doxa is rooted in the plethora of forces driving the Zionist mobilisation
for nationhood forward. This doxa has been unfolded here as a set of narratives,
strategies, governmentalities, and ideological interpretations as to what constitutes
security and for whom, how to best practice it, and how to position it in relation
to Israel’s broader industrial development and production. Thus, a recurring theme
of this analysis is the existence of a dialogic relationship between the security industry and Israel’s state of permanent warfare. This correlation is essential to our
understanding of the realities of what Weizman has called ‘the material theatre of
war’ (Weizman 2007).
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Israel’s multifaceted theatre of war relies on ideological tenets and is deeply
tied to techno-territorial forces entrenched in the alliance between nation builders
and machine makers (Efron 2011). In Israel-Palestine, technical and conceptual fields of military transformation compose logics of war and surveillance in
diverse, but interconnected operational theatres. Consequently, Israel’s security
complex produces an ideologically informed notion of ‘public good’ that hinges
on the systematic ingathering of some and the systematic exclusion of others. The
entrenchment of the term ‘homeland security’ as a modus of public security to
realise and protect the chosen nation proves these critical assumptions. Zionism’s
permanent state of emergency reifies homeland security as a way of confirming the
national community. In other words, because war is integral to security in Israel,
it is neither possible nor desirable to end the emergency. Emergency governs, and
the pacification of humans becomes the only way to remove threats. This security/
threat/pacification/exclusion mindset has produced a violent project with no end
in sight: it is a war that has unlimited means to achieve unlimited ends.
In the context of Israel’s settler colonial history and practices, it has become clear
that security is also a node of settler governmentality. By deconstructing dominant
Israeli security narratives and practices on the ground, this study has demonstrated
how facts are constructed as threats and problems to be tackled. As Bigo has argued,
security is about ‘the doing of security’ rather than simply ‘what is being done’ (Bigo
2001). While security technology is sold as a neutral solution to a conceived security
and/or logistical problem, security should also been seen as a way of knowing, of
doing, and of creating new material and discursive images of reality.
A plethora of mental and physical spectres of control have created a hard physical reality entrenched by soft normative factors such as ethno-national hierarchies
and ontological narratives of (in)security. Israel has harvested its technological
finesse from this reality and transformed it into an industry of security.
10.3 Racialisation and ethnic security
To unfold the co-imbrication of security and differentiation, the study has looked
at the Israeli security industry’s production of technologies that help reproduce
the unequal conditions of living so key to settler colonialism. These technologies
rest on an ideologically informed emphasis on different levels of human worth
(defined in very rough terms by the line drawn between the coloniser and colonised). The phrase ‘different levels of human worth’ attests to the intent behind the
technology and its effects of differentiation and racialisation of groups of people
and their ascription to territory based on a hierarchical categorisation of people.
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The nation is defined, delimited, and moulded through this process. Rather than
departing from racial differences as a biological fact, Israel’s security technologies
produces categories of (racila) differemce. It is in the targeting that race is made.
Israel’s features as a racial state have been allotted to the purpose of the technologies and the mode of their deployment. The notion of ethnic or racialised security
has provided the industry with a unifying organisational and operational logic.
The implicit relational character of the settler colonial project and its translations
of relational violence into technologies provide the field with a built-in structure
of racialised governance. This has proven relevant as part of the broader historical
path of the Zionist project and the Palestinian trajectory, and in more specific
instances of invasion and encounters between people and technologies.
Zionism as an ideology and as a set of settler colonial practices is driven by an
ever-present ontological insecurity in Israel and the broader (Jewish) diaspora. Its
quest for ‘ontological security’ has worked as a persistent mental-political compass
for the state building project and is a very real feeling among its citizens, who have
been socialised by a culture of fear and legacies of persecution.
Zionism’s national vision of security has gone through a process of transmission
that has been informed by broader developments in the settler colonial project.
The intense yet intangible security vision manifests itself a security vision where
risks and threats are everywhere. While Israel’s packaging of the security economy in rationalist and scientific arguments is fused with propositions of a liberal
imagery of security maximising as a universal public good, security in Israel often
becomes a racialised security narrative based on kinship. Despite its promotion as
a public good, the idea of security as kinship management and protection prevails
through a Jewish-Israeli alignment shaped and propagated by the Israeli state as
a security issue. Writ large in Israel, the security issue is based on a rejection, or
non-acceptance of geo-political limits in its search for security. The racialised features of state control are based on Zionism’s quest for ontological (and practical)
security for Jewry, which becomes integral to Israel’s method of constructing and
guarding of volatile frontiers. Therefore, security is a conception of the ‘general
interest’ that privileges some identities, interests, and spatio-temporal horizons.
Its ontological (in)security is rooted in an ideological scheme and Israel’s historical
experience thinking about security. This has informed the ways in which Israel
taps into the broader context of practicing security through the identification and
management of majority or minority groups as ‘ethnic threats’.
Israel’s security innovation process and the role of Palestine as a ‘laboratory’
bind together intent and effect in one circular motion. This analysis suggests that
Israel’s imagined community consists of religio-nationalised ideas constructed
into the notion of ethnic unity or patterns of kinship, hence the notion of ethnic
and even racialised security narratives. The close relationship between ethnic or
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racialised warfare/control and the dominant narratives of security capture in an
almost ontological sense the distinction between lives worth saving and those that
are not. The view of who constitutes the nation codes and shapes the filter that
decides whose lives are subject to protection and whose lives are the subject of
oppression/exclusion.
From the settler colonial perspective, security is only for some, and insecurity
is associated with ethnic difference and opposition. The realisation of security is
weighed against the ideal of the absence of ethnic threats. In approaching Israel-Palestine as a biopolitical battlefield, the technologies of difference reflect the tensions
of biopolitics’ ‘positive’ side, i.e. its accentuation or schemes of improvement for the
selected species, and the ‘dark’ side that relates to Mbeme’s view on the necro-political calculus of assigning life to the ‘death world’ (Mbembe 2003). In sum, Israel’s
security sector’s operational features reflect a desire for racialised domination, which
has come to mean an almost unquestioned subjugation of non-Jews.
Differentiation as a mode of governing has provided the Israeli security sector
with a broad appeal to other systems of racialisation and differentiation of control.
This happens through a process of transferring (il)legitimacy from the Palestinian
to other suspect groups or individuals: the ‘Palestinianization of the racial contract’
(Abu-Laban and Barkan 2011; Mills 1997). As the desire to sort and filter people
and flows of goods has intensified, the globalisation of the spaces of control has
only fortified this trend.
The spread of technologies to sustain border regimes of differentiated sanctioning contributes to the globalisation of the Palestinian condition. The idea of
the free, mobile Israeli and the ‘bounded in’ Palestinian mirrors the more broad
contradictions of Western cosmopolitanism and its exclusive/closed interpretations
of nationalised citizenship. Israeli practices of security travel across borders and
assist the imposition of nodes of illegitimacy upon different groups of the dangerous ‘outside’ (Walters 2004).
10.4 Science – an ethos and a strategy
Surely technological breaktrhough and smart upgrades can help improve the lives
of people. Even save lives. However scientific progress also has a dark side. Zionist
elites have consistently rationalised and legitimised Zionism as a ‘civilising mission’,
which is not only used as an engine to unify the Jews in Israel-Palestine, but also as
a mission with a broader impact on the Levant. Science as a strategy, a narrative,
and as a form of capital has been key herein. While the pursuit of an independent
‘Jewish’ economy has been central to the Israeli security industry, science also has
a practical and discursive role.
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Science and Zionist ideas have pushed forward both the national project and
the business sector as a techno-scientific enterprise advocating progress and emancipation. The techno-scientific intersections of war and science have been a centrepiece of Zionist calculations of how to both promote a strong security economy
and depict and shape the combat zone.
The entrepreneurial ethos and spirit of Israel’s security industry is a result
of a range of concrete legacies and self-legitimising discourses of ethno-national
emancipation and the isolation of the native other. This has been and is expressed
in Israel through the prevailing sense of collective necessity that provides Israeli
security actors with the narrative of being a part of an existential mission. It is
important to give credence and explanatory power to a set of dominant mentalities
and discourses that exist among the sector’s actors. Thus, Israel’s emancipatory
ethos and spirit of survival and necessity provide the industry with raison d’etre, a
unifying logic, and a promotional basis.
These ideas and their expression in promotional as well as day-to-day narratives
have created a pronounced sense of social cohesion inside the strata of the industry.
In fact, these narratives of essential or existential predicaments have become an
internal organising principle of the industry. This has been transferred into the
meaning given to its technological output: ‘ein breira’ (necessity) technology. The
articulation of this mission hinges on a tendency to generalise from the Jewish
experience of survival and emancipation to a condition of Jewish security ensured
by a protective state. This shift provides the sector’s ensembles with a self-narrated
claim of altruistic sacrifice for Jewish experience under a strong, caring state. This
cohesiveness projects the idea of an ideological mission that helps to conceal its
violent genesis. It also helps subordinate internal fractions and hierarchies growing out of the neo-liberal organisation of the sector around security giants, which
operate in close alliance with the state.
In addition, the state’s support of a fertile layer of start-up companies has also
kept the production of security technologies within the strategic confines of the
state. In its more practical stages, R&D support and funding for basic research
schemes tie together innovative projects and risk taking with a more stabilising
long-term strategy of the state to use funding to liberate the market while keeping
it under tight state control.
The involvement of Israel’s scientific institutions in innovations for warfare has
been and still is core to the sector.
The scientific subsector functions as the producer of resources of war, while
knowledge-based structures and people are resources for both private companies
and the IDF.
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10.5 Techno-conceptual shifts
Throughout its history Israel’s modes of rule and control have been marked by
techno-conceptual shifts. These changes have taken place in negotiation, competition, and collaboration between developments ‘on the ground’ (namely, Israel’s
wish to refine its managerial approach to governing in the OPT), the security
sector’s industrial organisation, and the opportunities resulting from scientific
research in educational institutions and companies’ R&D. A range of themes and
sites have defined both the destruction and reconstruction of the colonial site in
the OPT and inside Israel proper. The intersection of modernisation (technologisation and digitalisation) and war is a fertile one that as has been demonstrated
in the case of Zionism’s discourses as projected into the domestic sphere. This
intersection can also explain how the technologies and ideas to support this have
found a broader relevance to a global audience and to the general trends of securitisation, war, and policing.
Israel’s skills have come to prevail in the context of the filling of niches, where
specific devices have become well-known brands in themselves. At the same time,
Israel’s exports also happen on a more doctrinal level, where more comprehensive
and holistic operational systems of control have become objects of export (such as
the separation, or hafrada architectures and the ‘ruling from afar’ Gaza strategy).
Israeli system integrators form a broad network and perform a sort of commercialised doctrinal emulation. This was demonstrated through the analyses of a
broad range of technologies tied together in large-scale projects of urban reconfigurations (‘smart cities’) to strategies spanning from the physical concentration of
the state’s triple helix forces (military, industry and academia) in the ‘technopolis’
to the ‘habits of destruction’ (Khalili 2014), as in the case of the almost routine
invasions of Gaza.
These sites and themes, which represent the cutting edge of Israel security,
are very relevant to the long-term strategies and practices of Zionist security and
military pioneers. Therefore in order to understand the techno-conceptual shifts
of the industry and the broader settler colonial project, it is vital to analytically
merge the forces of science, Zionism, and security.
Three domains of security can be identified by examining the nature of the
battlefield and the effect of the technologies: the space between the digital and
the physical, the Israeli ‘smart city’ as a label and system of urbanisation, urban
control, and warfare, and border construction and control as a tool for moulding
the nation and constituting its exclusionary ideological and practical mechanisms.
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A shared feature of these domains is the presence of the politics of intent combined with a progression and intensified advancement of its systems of control
developing at least in part against the backdrop of broader changes in the state’s
dispositions vis-à-vis the native ‘other’.
In relation to Israel’s digitalised avenues of control, interfaces of virtual and
physical control have altered and expanded the battlespace. A range of cyber,
digital, and biometrical control schemes has come to penetrate the ruling systems
of the OPT. These include an intense (pre-emptive) control of the emotional
landscape, i.e. the capacity to mobilise the minds of the colonised and shape their
actions and reactions through an invisible, random presence.
The technologies and systems of digital enveloping represent a sanitised model
of war in which the sovereign aims to keep a distance from direct battle and physical contact. The digital enveloping epitomises a refinement in the modes of subjugation, which allows the sovereign to shape and form lives, bodies, and mobility
through predictive software, online surveillance, and algorithmic control. The
technologised panopticon both de-territorialises and re-territorialises the combat
zones into new patterns of subjection and resistance. These measures alter the settler colonial topography into a complex synthesis of visible and invisible controls.
The racialisation of these conditions takes place through a codification of the
object of control, whereby governing through risk takes place through a set of
ideologically charged, hierarchical categorisations such as ID regimes and permit
systems. Under these regimes, racialised bodies become carriers of information. Accordingly, the techno-conceptual shifts in Israel’s technological capabilities provide
a matrix of control that entails a securitisation of bodies, feeling, behaviour, and
human attributes. At the same time, broader political events such as the political
geography of the Oslo Accords and the outsourcing of security provisions to private entrepreneurs shape the space in which the capacities take form.
The Israeli ‘smart city’ is a key facilitator of this technologised panopticon.
The integrated systems of urban control and warfare that operate under ‘the smart
city’ label were developed through the intersection of the long-term co-constitutional process of Israel’s settler colonial urbanisation and its concomitant control
and deconstruction of Palestine’s urban space. The smart city draws from global
discourses of smartness, but has also grown out of Israel’s desire to urbanise and
modernise the landscape for the settler population and develop and install a broad
range of methods and techniques to establish urban control over Palestinian sites
and even conduct ‘smart urban war’ in the OPT.
Israel’s intense process of urbanisation reflects a constant movement of the
colonial project, which enables companies to harvest and innovate new ideas.
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Israel’s tactics of urban warfare and its desire to control urban spaces were not
developed as add-ons to its military infrastructure; they are an outgrowth of the
logics of pushing forward the settler colonial project in Israel-Palestine. This has
created an urban setting of architectures where the inevitability of punishment
for a crime is implicit. Israeli security companies have not simply taken on the
smart city concept and adjusted its technologies to fit a hyped brand. The very
experience and urban character of Israel’s settler colonial practices and its dialectic
of urban modernisation/de-modernisation and construction/de-construction have
provided Israeli companies with the experience, capacities, incentives, and tools to
provide thoroughly analysed smart city systems. Holistic smart systems are made
manifest in a number of venues such as Digi-Tel (the smart city of Tel Aviv) and
the Palestinian urban enclave of Qalqilya.
The spread of the smart city in various forms constitutes a continuation or
integration of racial control and policing. The multifaceted smart city schemes
help sustain urban regimes of control or even ‘urbicide’, i.e. the destruction of
(Palestinian) urban life and structures (Graham 2002, 2004). Smart technologies
are used to make space open and accessible to control and intervention. Smartness
is a label used by the security industry to deracinate and mask invasive policies,
which is why this smartness enables and sanctions regimes of differentiation. This
fortifies the argument that rather than taking smartness for granted as an outcome
of technological progress, Israeli security actors and system integrators tap into
the global discourses of urban progress. This happens through the customising
and commercialising of Israel’s modes of urban warfare, which transforms them
into urban regimes and techniques of governance and control over people and
objects. Deploying the label or mantra of smartness as an advertising strategy
and metaphor helps to create public acceptance of new technology that often
motivates new combinations of private-public interventions under the auspices
of the neo-liberal state.
The centrality of immigration/access and transfer/denied access to the Zionist
projects gives border making a key role in the broader Zionist project. Israel’s
border construction and control is at the epicentre of the state’s national strategy
of promoting a chosen group and its vision of purifying violence to promote its
security. At the same time, borders are used to demarcate difference and to deny
access to those who are not considered central to the conception of the national
community. As in the case of the smart city label, Israel’s conceptual development
of border control reflects the advanced ways in which borders have implanted
territorial division and expansion and the registration of people.
Israel’s processes of social and geographical change are increasingly aligned with
technological breakthroughs that improve border systems. The broader vectors of
change in the industry include a qualitative shift from crude violence and invasive
303
militarised rule to governing through the threat of violence and risk management.
The imagery of unlimited yet manageable insecurity entails a logic that carries the
promise of controlling future security risks. The very lens through which risk is
calculated is inherent to a belief system, in this case Zionism’s vision of a secure
and stable Jewish state.
The key to power in border control lies in the capacity to turn indication
(meaning data) into actionable information (processed data). Hacking makes the
claim of a duality – or Janus-faced – approach to the calculation of probability.
‘On the one side it is statistical, concerning itself with stochastic laws of chance
and process. On the other side it (probability) is epistemological, dedicated to the
assessing of reasonable degrees of belief in propositions quite devoid of statistical
background’ (Hacking 1975: 12). In addition, what is important about the techno-conceptual shifts is the role of (private) security companies in presenting and
analysing public and private spaces as a version of ‘our’ social reality.
The combination of capacities to remotely control territory and people, the
increased sophistication of data collection, and a clearer division of territories has
created a technologised panopticon of settler colonial rule. This means that the
assessment of ‘reasonable degrees of belief ’ hinges on an a priori demarcation of
risky zones and groups. This fits into a broader scheme of development where
racial identity, meanings, and structures are created through the use and shaping
of new media and communication technologies (Chow-White 2008).
Israel has securitised the geopolitical complex of Israel-Palestine to make territory and populations ‘legible’ to control (Scott 1998). A dominant logic in its
security industry is that the remedy to insecurity is to maximise security. This has
been accomplished by turning people into objects of securitisation (Stritzel 2011,
2014), which is a key feature of Israel’s settler colonial pursuits. Securitisation
needs a vision of security upon which formations of insecurity can be constructed.
While not necessarily being a result of Israeli policy/technology transfer, there is a
fertile overlap in the way Israel controls the city, the border, and its people and the
ways in which neoliberal governance systems have incorporated security into their
programmes. This has facilitated the lives of the wealthy elite network/members
of the community.
10.6 The laboratory of Palestine
There is no doubt the extreme conditions of the OPT, the impunity of Israeli
political and military strategies, and the sovereign’s intimate knowledge of the
304
sites of contestation and securitisation (whether border, city or cyberspace) allow
Israel to take the boundaries of warfare to a new level with each intervention. Each
intervention and techno-conceptual shift in border security has enabled a refinement of the security apparatus that sustains the permanent siege of Palestine. The
routine management of the ‘conflict’ provides a continuous and important source
of energy, resources, and a sense of urgency to the security industry.
An overriding theme throughout this study has been the notion of Palestine
as a ‘laboratory’. To begin with, the notion of Palestine as a laboratory has been
central to the Zionist vision of science as a tool with which to develop the land.
The extension of the conventional laboratory into the land, i.e. to the laboratory
of doing and practicing settlement and national resurrection has been the centre­
piece of Zionism’s trajectory. The ‘lab of Palestine’ provides a metaphor for the
conceptual promotion of the security industry: it is the site of the actual testing
of security practices in the battlespace.
The link between the security industry’s innovation processes and battlefield
calculations has proved to be a fertile one. Native resistance, i.e. Palestinian reactions/resistance – whether it is organised or not organised, violent or non-violent
– unfolds at the junction between technological vision and political reality. The
mere presence of the native Palestinian reminds the sovereign and more broadly
the ethnic nation of its permanent crisis or structural imperfections and helps to
draw the external boundaries of the community in need of protection. To quote
Deborah Rose’s renowned words: ‘To get in the way of settler colonisation, all the
native has to do is stay at home’ (Rose 1991: 46).
The junction between security technologies and operational systems expresses
a duality. The goal of non-friction in the daily governance of the settler colonial
project is driven by the promise of freedom from fear; this diminution of this fear
is delivered by technology. However, settler colonial realities are messy and do not
fit any specific pattern or planned colonial trajectory. In fact, the messiness is a
source of production for the security industry, a source of innovation. The reconstitution or renegotiation of the relationship between the coloniser and colonised
produces a new sense of ‘ordered messiness’. In other words, a security milieu
with the ability to predict and control risks and unknown, future threat scenarios
has become a sought-after asset for the national security industry and a point of
reference for foreign buyers.
This ordered messiness relates to how Israel’s physical and virtual control of
the emotional landscape has become a technologised interface geared for warfare
and conflict management. Both the doctrine of frictionless control and the messiness produce a set of experiences of how to optimise security by detecting faulty
techniques. In this way, the relational violence (Fanon 2008) of the settler colo-
305
nial project is reflected in the innovation process and is distilled under the label
of ‘tested in the field’, ‘used by the IDF’, or ‘battle-proven’. Thus, the patterns of
pacification, resistance, and response to Israel’s racialised interventions become part
of the security production cycle. In fact, the effectiveness of a given technology is
measured by the link between the detection of a problem, or security threat and
the manufacture of an innovative solution that mitigates the threat. The pacified
‘other’ is an integral part of this process and contributes to the commercial success
of a product and the manufacturer’s reputation for battlespace success.
Israel-Palestine is far from the only laboratory providing defence and security
industries with comparative advantages. However, what is special about Israel’s
laboratory is its potency, aided by its incomplete yet hyper-intensive security narrative. Most nationalist projects pursue visions of change and transformation. But
in the case of Zionism, this pursuit has been radical.
The laboratory metaphor also reflects the centrality of Palestine in the industry’s
self-promotion. Looking beyond the typical self-celebratory accounts, we find
industry narratives that produce a self-reinforcing narrative of success and global
impact. These narratives have become a discourse and a branding mechanism that
helps build an image of Israel as a progressive nation among nations with an ethos
that fortifies the state’s status as an indispensable tech giant.
In order to sustain domination, the Israeli security economy is organised as
a distinct scheme of production structured to realise nationalist, economic, and
scientific goals by engineering both Jews and Palestinians into complex political geographies. Palestinian subjugation and the goal to improve life for the settler entail
both pacification and ruptures of violence and resistance. This involves processes
of transfer, a quest for spatial sovereignty, and control and regulation of mobility
and access; it involves methods and technologies of separation based on racialised
practices and architectural innovation underpinned by the ensuing fragmentation
of space, the construction of separate space, fences, walls, and checkpoints to
institutionalise comprehensive population control.
Taken together, the settler colonial and ethnocratic features of the Zionist
enterprise and its desire to expand, combined with developmental features entrenched by a permanent war economy have configured into a complex force
striving to retain advanced industrialisation, an advanced military machine, and
a state economy with strong internationalised features. In many ways, the genesis
and logics of the Israeli security sector have come to reflect the malaise of (western)
control and the fear of losing it.
This research has explored the tools and processes of nationalist human engineering and its roots and effects as they have developed in the battlespace of
306
Israel-Palestine. It has shown how Zionism is a compelling locus for exploring the
formation of cultures and practices of security through racialised nation making
that is tied to and simultaneously exists without attachment to a specified territory.
In turn, the syntax of colonising power relations is the source of war enacted in
the pursuit of a stable mode of Jewish nationhood in Zionism.
Thus, a key dynamic of the security industry is the state of Zionist project as
a yet unrealised endeavour to align state and nation in one territory. Accordingly,
the push to ‘fold population into nation’ (Thacker 2005: 36) and the efforts to
institutionalise the Jewish nation into a state have produced the reality of Zionism’s structural incongruence (Brubaker 1996). These efforts, which have been
marked by separation, transfer, and insecurities, have both shaped the conditions
and missions of the security sector and paved the way for Israel to move from the
production of ‘swords’ into the future of ‘silicon chips’. In short, the intersection
of Zionist mobilisation for nationhood and the global demand for innovative and
cutting-edge security technologies have shaped the interface of Zionism’s calculative ideas and its booming security industry
The security products that Israel’s security industry produces and exports are
not just technologies of warfare and security. They are also an example of the
national experience of assembling actors and institutions into one overarching
political project of ethnic homogeneity and territorial expansionism, i.e. one wartime order. On the global level, this plays into a system that helps sustain a liberal
order in which security is a key structuring mechanism. In this sense, Israel’s settler
colonialism and neoliberal policing are a good marriage.
The core tenets and aspirations of the Zionist project that are the foundation
of the realisation of a Jewish state have produced a historical paradox. The creation
of a secure state for the Jews has produced new insecurities tied to the colonial
experience of both Jews and Palestinians. Insecurities for those subjected to (new)
modes of control, i.e. Palestinians, as well as insecurity for Israeli people as the
settler colonial condition of Jewish nation making has led the trajectory of the
Jewish people into a new epoch of political struggles. These struggles are often
associated with an ethos of emancipation, but in reality they are also tied to the
deep human insecurity which comes from the colonial condition. The duality
of security/insecurity ingrained into the settler colonial project has created a nationalism in permanent crisis. This condition feeds the security industry, but also
discourages the questioning of what kind of security these practices serve. The
argument that Israel modernised through its settler colonial endeavour captures
the paradox in the strong correlation between security and Zionism. The flipside
307
of this correlation, i.e. the negation of Palestinian rights and a hyper-militarised
Israeli state obsessed with security, exposes a perhaps stronger force that is difficult
to repel once it has been established: new forms of insecurities that cannot be
eliminated through intervention.
The Haaretz newspaper outlined these new forms of insecurities eloquently
an editorial in 2010:
A dangerous dissonance has developed between visible reality and its invisible counterpart. The relative quiet that the Israel Defense Forces, the Shin
Bet security service and high tech have granted us has become a toxic quiet.
It has allowed us to celebrate our lives without seeing the circumstances of
our lives. It has allowed us to ignore the threats that are closing in on us.
The argument about time is an argument about life and death. [...T]he
truth is that there is no time. If we don’t act in time, time will beat us. It
is only the silent siren that warns us of the genuine emergency.
‘A Question of Time’, Haaretz editorial, 27 May 2010
308
309
310
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TURNING ‘SWORDS INTO S
­ ILICON CHIPS’
­
– The Israeli Homeland Security Industry
and ­Making of ­Jewish Nationhood
Even before the founding of the Israeli
state in 1948, the Israeli economy has
grown steadily to become the epitome
of a ‘high-tech nation’ that exports
­advanced technologies and software
and hardware to a global customer
clientele. A key pillar of this ‘economic
miracle’ has developed and grows from
the country’s vast homeland security
sector.
Israeli homeland security lies at the
­heart of Zionists nation and state building, and expresses both the discursive
and material struggles involved in establishing and securing a Jewish state in
the former British Mandatory Palestine.
The social history of Israel’s security
economy is a tale of techno-conceptual
shifts in the techno-national evolution
of Zionism.
The security industry produces a broad
range of technologies and systems
of control, which have been developed
over time to meet the needs of the
­Israeli military and the growing settler
community. In recent years, the i­ndustry
has had a large impact well beyond
the cartography of Israel-Palestine.
Building on original empirical material and interviews with actors of the
Israeli security industry and fieldwork
conduc­ted in interviews and at defence
and ­security fairs, this thesis provides
a ­social and economic history of the
genesis, development, and practices
of the companies, institutions, and individuals that comprise Israel’s homeland
security sector. Its research focuses
on how the volatile mix of security,
innovation, war, and racialisation has
served to advance a distinct nationhood
ideal, but has also produced a variety
of ­messy outcomes flowing from the
state’s unfinished character as a homogenised Jewish state.
The thesis engages critically with
­theories of nationalism, race, settler
colonialism, security, and technological nationalism. It examines how
­Zionist visions of ethnic nationhood and
settler colonial impulses have led to a
production scheme revolving around
security innovation, and analyses the
deeper meaning and logic of the dominant s­ ecurity narratives, i.e., the larger
political content of security. It discusses
the ways in which Israeli homeland security is described and practiced by the
industry’s actors and entrepreneurs.
The thesis is also about Palestine, i.e.,
how the land of Palestine has been
reconfigured, ruptured, minimised, and
locked-in and how it has served as a
laboratory for the industry and helped
to realise settler colonial aspirations.
It is an account of what security has
­meant and still means for those living
under Israeli rule, and how the control
and managing of Palestine has become an exemplar of security in Israel’s
branding and engagement on the global
platforms of security trade and knowledge exchanges.