Gaza:
Not Just A Prison, A Laboratory
By Naomi Klein
16 June, 2007
The Nation
Gaza in the hands of Hamas, with
masked militants sitting in the president’s chair; the West Bank
on the edge; Israeli army camps hastily assembled in the Golan Heights;
a spy satellite over Iran and Syria; war with Hezbollah a hair trigger
away; a scandal-plagued political class facing a total loss of public
faith.
At a glance, things aren’t
going well for Israel. But here’s a puzzle: why, in the midst
of such chaos and carnage, is the Israeli economy booming like it’s
1999, with a roaring stock market and growth rates nearing China’s?
Thomas Friedman recently
offered his theory in the New York Times. Israel “nurtures and
rewards individual imagination,” and so its people are constantly
spawning ingenious high-tech start-ups - no matter what messes their
politicians are making. After perusing class projects by students in
engineering and computer science at Ben Gurion University, Friedman
made one of his famous fake-sense pronouncements: Israel “had
discovered oil.” This oil, apparently, is located in the minds
of Israel’s “young innovators and venture capitalists,”
who are too busy making megadeals with Google to be held back by politics.
Here’s another theory:
Israel’s economy isn’t booming despite the political chaos
that devours the headlines, but because of it. This phase of development
dates back to the mid-nineties, when Israel was in the vanguard of the
information revolution - the most tech-dependent economy in the world.
After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Israel’s economy was devastated,
facing its worst year since 1953. Then came 9/11, and suddenly new profit
vistas opened up for any company that claimed it could spot terrorists
in crowds, seal borders from attack and extract confessions from closed-mouthed
prisoners.
Within three years, large
parts of Israel’s tech economy had been radically repurposed.
Put in Friedmanesque terms: Israel went from inventing the networking
tools of the “flat world” to selling fences to an apartheid
planet. Many of the country’s most successful entrepreneurs are
using Israel’s status as a fortressed state, surrounded by furious
enemies, as a kind of twenty-four-hour-a-day showroom-a living example
of how to enjoy relative safety amid constant war. And the reason Israel
is now enjoying supergrowth is that those companies are busily exporting
that model to the world.
Discussions of Israel’s
military trade usually focus on the flow of weapons into the country-US-made
Caterpillar bulldozers used to destroy homes in the West Bank and British
companies supplying parts for F-16s. Overlooked is Israel’s huge
and expanding export business. Israel now sends $1.2 billion in “defense”
products to the United States-up dramatically from $270 million in 1999.
In 2006 Israel exported $3.4 billion in defense products-well over a
billion more than it received in US military aid. That makes Israel
the fourth-largest arms dealer in the world, overtaking Britain.
Much of this growth has been
in the so-called “homeland security” sector. Before 9/11
homeland security barely existed as an industry. By the end of this
year, Israeli exports in the sector will reach $1.2 billion-an increase
of 20 percent. The key products and services are high-tech fences, unmanned
drones, biometric IDs, video and audio surveillance gear, air passenger
profiling and prisoner interrogation systems - precisely the tools and
technologies Israel has used to lock-in the occupied territories.
And that is why the chaos
in Gaza and the rest of the region doesn’t threaten the bottom
line in Tel Aviv, and may actually boost it. Israel has learned to turn
endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and
containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in
the “global war on terror.”
It’s no coincidence
that the class projects at Ben Gurion that so impressed Friedman have
names like “Innovative Covariance Matrix for Point Target Detection
in Hyperspectral Images” and “Algorithms for Obstacle Detection
and Avoidance.” Thirty homeland security companies were launched
in Israel in the past six months alone, thanks in large part to lavish
government subsidies that have transformed the Israeli army and the
country’s universities into incubators for security and weapons
start-ups (something to keep in mind in the debates about the academic
boycott).
Next week, the most established
of these companies will travel to Europe for the Paris Air Show, the
arms industry’s equivalent of Fashion Week. One of the Israeli
companies exhibiting is Suspect Detection Systems (SDS), which will
be showcasing its Cogito1002, a white, sci-fi-looking security kiosk
that asks air travelers to answer a series of computer-generated questions,
tailored to their country of origin, while they hold their hand on a
“biofeedback” sensor. The device reads the body’s
reactions to the questions and certain responses flag the passenger
as “suspect.”
Like hundreds of other Israeli
security start-ups, SDS boasts that it was founded by veterans of Israel’s
secret police and that its products were road-tested on Palestinians.
Not only has the company tried out the biofeedback terminals at a West
Bank checkpoint, it claims the “concept is supported and enhanced
by knowledge acquired and assimilated from the analysis of thousands
of case studies related to suicide bombers in Israel.”
Another star of the Paris
Air Show will be Israeli defense giant Elbit, which plans to showcase
its Hermes 450 and 900 unmanned air vehicles. As recently as May, according
to press reports, Israel used the drones on bombing missions in Gaza.
Once tested in the territories, they are exported abroad: the Hermes
has already been used at the Arizona-Mexico border; Cogito1002 terminals
are being auditioned at an unnamed US airport; and Elbit, one of the
companies behind Israel’s “security barrier,” has
partnered with Boeing to construct the Department of Homeland Security’s
$2.5 billion “virtual” border fence around the United States.
Since Israel began its policy
of sealing off the occupied territories with checkpoints and walls,
human rights activists have often compared Gaza and the West Bank to
open-air prisons. But in researching the explosion of Israel’s
homeland security sector, a topic I explore in greater detail in a forthcoming
book (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism), it strikes
me that they are something else too: laboratories where the terrifying
tools of our security states are being field-tested. Palestinians -
whether living in the West Bank or what the Israeli politicians are
already calling “Hamasistan” — are no longer just
targets. They are guinea pigs.
So in a way Friedman is right:
Israel has struck oil. But the oil isn’t the imagination of its
techie entrepreneurs. The oil is the war on terror, the state of constant
fear that creates a bottomless global demand for devices that watch,
listen, contain and target “suspects.” And fear, it turns
out, is the ultimate renewable resource.
Naomi Klein
is the author of many
books, including her most recent, The Shock Doctrine: The
Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which will be published in September.Visit
Naomi’s website at nologo.org.
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