Haaretz: Opinion: Europe must not buy what Israel is selling to combat terror
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haaretz.com
Whenever a terrorist attack happens such as the one last week in Barcelona,
Israel politicians and security “experts” get on TV to criticize
European naïvité. If only they understood terrorism as we do and took
the preventive measures we do, they say, they would suffer far less
attacks. Most infamous in this regard were the remarks of Israeli
Intelligence Minister Yisrael Katz after the Brussels bombing in March
2016, in which 34 people died.
Rather than convey his condolences in the name of the Israeli government, he scolded the Belgians in the most patronizing way possible.
“If in Belgium they continue to eat chocolate, enjoy life and parade as
great liberals and democrats while not taking account of the fact that
some of the Muslims who are there are organizing acts of terror,” he
pronounced, “they will not be able to fight against them.”
The Belgians reacted angrily, and asserted the position of most European governments:
While we will continue to be vigilant and take the necessary
precautions, we are not going to forsake our freedoms and political
openness to become copies of Israel. For they understand that
Netanyahu’s government is peddling something far more insidious than
mere precautions – even more than the weapons, surveillance and security
systems and models of population control that is the bread-and-butter
of Israeli exports. What Israel is urging onto the Europeans – and
Americans, Canadians, Indians, Mexicans, Australians and anyone else who
will listen – is nothing less than an entirely new concept of a state,
the Security State.
What is a Security State?
Essentially, it is a state that places security above all else,
certainly above democracy, due process of law and human rights, all of
which it considers “liberal luxuries” in a world awash in terrorism.
Israel presents itself, no less, than the model for countries of the
future. You Europeans and others should not be criticizing us, say Katz
and Netanyahu, you should be imitating us. For look at what we have
done. We have created a vibrant democracy from the Mediterranean to the
Jordan River that provides its citizens with a flourishing economy and
personal security – even though half the population of that country are
terrorists (i.e., non-citizen Palestinians living in isolated enclaves
of the country). If we can achieve that, imagine what we can offer those
of you threatened by terrorist attacks?
In a brilliant shift in imaging, Israel has managed to turn 50 years of Palestinian resistance to occupation
into a cottage industry. By labeling it “terrorism,” it has not only
delegitimized the Palestinian struggle but has transformed the occupied
territories in a laboratory of counterinsurgency and population control,
the cutting edges of both foreign wars and domestic repression. It has
transformed tactics of control and their accompanying weapons of
surveillance systems into marketable products. No wonder, as Netanyahu
constantly reminds us, “the world” loves Israel. From China to Saudi Arabia, from India to Mexico, from Eritrea to Kazakhstan, Israel supplies the means by which repressive regimes control their restless peoples.
Israel’s vast military reach is well-documented. It extends to more than 130 countries and brought in $6.5 billion in sales in 2016. Less known but more corrosive to civil rights are Israel’s security exports. Three examples:
1.
Israel harnesses foreign security agencies and police forces to lobby
for Security State practices in their own countries. It scoffs at the
unwillingness of Western democracies to employ ethnic and racial
profiling, as Israel security and police do at Ben-Gurion International Airport
and throughout the country. In specific contexts like airports
profiling may indeed be efficient – Ben-Gurion is certainly one of the
safest airports in the world – but it comes at the price of humiliating and delaying those targeted.
When extended outward into society, however, it loses that
effectiveness and almost invariably turns into a legalized method of
intimidation against whatever populations a government seeks to
control.
2.
The Israeli national police holds dozens of training programs and
conferences with police forces from around the world, with an emphasis
not on domestic police tactics but rather on “internal
counterinsurgency” and the pacification of troublesome populations. The
Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange Center in the U.S. claims to have had 24,000 American police trained
by their Israeli counterparts. Unlike other Western countries that
erect a wall between their militaries that conduct operations abroad and
their domestic security and police agencies charged with ensuring the
security but also the civil rights of their citizens, Israel has no such
internal constraints. The IDF and the police are one interlocked unit,
with paramilitary forces – the Shin Beit, the Border Police, Homefront
Command, Yasam and others – further connecting them. Thus in Israel the
distinction between citizens with civil rights and non-citizen
“suspects” and targets gets lost, and that is a distinction Israeli
police try to erase in their training of foreign police as well.
3.
Israel is a world leader in securing cities, mega-events and
“non-governable” zones. There is a direct link between its lock-down of
Palestinian neighborhoods, villages and refugee camps and the marketing
of such tactics to local police to create sanitized “security zones” and
“perimeter defenses” around financial cores, government districts,
embassies, venues where the G-8 and NATO hold their summits meetings,
oil platforms and fuel depots, conference centers in “insecure” Third
World settings, tourist destinations, malls, airports and seaports,
sites of mega events and the homes and travel routes of the wealthy. So
involved is Israel in Trump’s border wall that is nicknamed the
“Palestine-Mexico border.”
There the Israeli
firm Magna BSP, which provides surveillance systems surrounding Gaza,
has partnered with U.S. firms to enter the lucrative “border security”
market. NICE Systems, whose technicians are graduates of the DF’s 8200
surveillance unit. Privacy International investigated how the autocratic
governments of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and
Kazakhstan managed to monitor human rights activists, journalists and
other citizens within and outside their countries, revealing the most
intimate details of their personal lives. "The biggest players,” concluded Human Rights Watch, “are multinationals with offices in Israel – NICE Systems and Verint.”
In its ultimate form
the Security State peddled by Netanyahu and Katz is merely a form of
police state whose populace is easily manipulated by an obsession with
security. Israel’s model is especially invidious because it works;
witness the pacification of the Palestinians. That seems like a potent
selling point indeed. The problem is that that it turns a country’s own
people into Palestinians without rights. It would seem that the Security
State can be reconciled with democracy – after all, Israel markets
itself as “the only democracy in the Middle East.” But only the world’s
privileged few will enjoy the democratic protections of the Security
State, as do Israeli Jews. The masses, those who resist repression and
exclusion from the capitalist system, those who struggle for genuine
democracy, are doomed to be global Palestinians. The Israelization of
governments, militaries and security forces means the Palestinianization
of most of the rest of us.
Jeff Halper is an
Israeli anthropologist, the head of the Israel Committee Against House
Demolitions (ICAHD) and the author of War Against the People: Israel,
the Palestinians and Global Pacification (London, Pluto Books, 2015).
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