{"id":251074,"date":"2024-01-15T12:01:21","date_gmt":"2024-01-15T12:01:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=251074"},"modified":"2023-12-27T10:39:14","modified_gmt":"2023-12-27T10:39:14","slug":"all-roads-lead-to-jerusalem-a-lucrative-border-industrial-complex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/01\/all-roads-lead-to-jerusalem-a-lucrative-border-industrial-complex\/","title":{"rendered":"All Roads Lead to Jerusalem: A Lucrative Border Industrial Complex"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hebron is a Palestinian city in the southern West Bank, 30 kilometres south of Jerusalem. Nestled in the Judaean Mountains, it lies 930 metres above sea level.<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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19 Dec 2023 – Hebron, a laboratory for both technology and violence, reflects the Israeli occupation’s impact on daily life, with sterilized roads, military checkpoints, and settler violence defining the landscape. This journey unveils the complex layers of trauma, dispossession, and dehumanization, challenging preconceptions and raising questions about freedom and oppression.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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We are staring down at the barrel of an automatic rifle, held by a nineteen-year-old. This soldier is one of three giving us a private \u201cescort\u201d through the occupied city of Hebron in the West Bank of Palestine. In the spring of 2023, my colleague journalist Florian Schmitz and I are guided by a group of former Israeli soldiers who started the group Breaking the Silence in March 2004 to shine a light on the countless atrocities perpetrated by Israel in Palestine. They kindly offered us a private tour of Hebron so we can see the impacts of surveillance firsthand. \u201cHebron is the laboratory for technology but also the laboratory for violence,\u201d says Ori Givati, a former Israeli soldier who used to serve in Hebron and is now the advocacy director for Breaking the Silence. The Israeli occupation of Palestine has been a breeding ground for technologies like drones, facial recognition, and AI-operated weapons\u2014technologies that are exported and repurposed around the world.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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We set off from the settlement of Kiryat Arba, on the outskirts of Hebron\u2014one of the areas that the occupying Jewish settlers have claimed as their own. Israel has been moving quickly to occupy more and more land, separating Palestinian territories from each other. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Hebron, which is now divided into two territories: H1, under Palestinian control; and H2, under the control of the Israeli military. If you are a Palestinian, what would have been a two-minute walk to your grandmother\u2019s house now takes you an hour because you have to avoid certain \u201csterilized roads\u201d that are made inaccessible to Palestinians. Sometimes you have to ask for permission just to cross the road to the cemetery to bury your dead.<\/p>\n

\u201cSterilization\u201d is a strange term for the Israeli state to use. Before driving through the West Bank, Florian and I had visited Yad Vashem, the massive Holocaust memorial in Tel Aviv, carved into a mountain overlooking the booming capital. Room after room is filled with artifacts of the Holocaust\u2014toys, letters, torture instruments, and photos of some of the millions who were brutally murdered. Medical instruments for forced sterilization and phrenology, or the study of supposed racial inferiority based on human skull and facial shapes, make me immediately think of the new appetite for the phrenology we see now in the growing obsession with facial recognition, boiling us down to easily analyzable data points.<\/p>\n

Hebron is a haunted ghost town. What were previously bustling streets full of life are now patrolled by armed Israeli guards, many of them barely older than children. As we walk, we pass a group of twenty teenagers, who could not have been older than sixteen or seventeen. Future army recruits, we are told, each with a machine gun, marching through Hebron. Farid Esack, a South African survivor of Apartheid, once visited Palestine and reflected on the similarities there to South Africa. His open letter to the Palestinian and Jewish people is worth reading in its entirety, but one line in particular struck me: \u201cWe do not deny the trauma that the oppressors experienced at any stage in their individual or collective lives; we simply reject the notion that others should become victims as a result of it.\u201d1<\/sup><\/a> This is perhaps why the violence, dispossession, and dehumanization in Israel fundamentally changes you when you see it firsthand, especially when you reflect on the very real generational trauma of the Holocaust and the antisemitism that reverberates to this very day. As Florian, who is German and has been reporting on antisemitism, put it, \u201cIf you oppress someone, are you ever really free?\u201d<\/p>\n

The settlers first came to Hebron under the pretense of celebrating Passover in 1968, and they never left. Hebron now has twenty-three military checkpoints. There are active patrols all over the city, with around 650 soldiers serving to protect 800 settlers\u2014around a thousand on weekends\u2014all equipped with cameras and surveillance equipment. Breaking the Silence tells us that there are also \u201cextraordinary\u201d missions to provoke Palestinians into violence. According to Ori, \u201cSettler violence is Israel\u2019s policy. The state wants to make it look like Palestinians are violent and must be controlled, so soldiers are sent in to protect them.\u201d And violence will be met with violence and with the construction of further settlements. I am reminded that when settlers come to take the house of a Palestinian family, they are sometimes forced to self-demolish the home to avoid paying a massive fine to the Israeli government.<\/p>\n

As we wind our way through the cobblestone streets, a small car drives by and a woman settler films our small group with her cell phone, waving a familiar hello to the soldiers. She trails us for a while before speeding off. We climb a hill of broken stones to meet with Issa Amro, a Palestinian activist who runs a community center out of his house, a meeting hub right next to a military checkpoint. We can see the soldiers looking on as we have our coffee and snacks under the shade of a massive olive tree. On the opposite wall is a painting of the red, white, black, and green map of Palestine. Issa had been brutally assaulted by Israeli soldiers the week before while walking around with a Washington Post <\/em>journalist. The violence was captured on video, which immediately went viral. He wears an army jumpsuit and a Che Guevara\u2013esque cap and his behavior is confident, although occasionally betraying the awareness that he may be Hebron\u2019s number one persona non grata. And he is obviously not the only one to be harassed and assaulted. The settlers in Hebron regularly assault children, throw garbage on Palestinian homes, and make the lives of Palestinians unbearable on a daily basis. In fact, while we were there in February 2023, a raid in Nablus killed at least eleven people, including teenagers and a grandmother. In a separate incident, Israeli settlers shot a Palestinian man. As Issa says, \u201cWhen you\u2019re scared to walk out of your front door and know you will be attacked, you prefer to move away.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Israel\u2019s ongoing repression of Palestinians and the occupation of their territories for more than half a century has been publicly called a system of apartheid, not only by Israel\u2019s leading human rights group, B\u2019Tselem, in its 2021 report, but also subsequently by international groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. One way that Israel is able to maintain these violent policies is through the surveillance technology that permeates every facet of Palestinian life. As the former Israeli soldier Ori told me, \u201cHow do we control the Palestinians? We make them feel like we are everywhere. We are not only invading your home but also your private digital space.\u201d Indeed, privacy is virtually nonexistent in a place like Hebron. Cameras point into every bedroom, and courtyards like the one we sat in as we spoke with Issa are installed with long-range video and audio surveillance equipment. We wave hello, just to be polite. Issa has in turn been giving video cameras to Palestinians, as a way for them to be able to turn the lens on Israeli soldiers. He also has many installed in his house as a form of protection. But these cameras are no match for the vastness of the Israeli surveillance infrastructure. Israel controls Palestinian Wi-Fi, installs cameras on nearly every lamppost\u2014some even disguised as rocks in farmers\u2019 fields\u2014and employs a vast network of biometric surveillance, including facial recognition cameras at checkpoints. Israeli settlers are now being equipped with their own drones by an Israeli company that publicly presents itself as an NGO. Meanwhile, AI-operated guns are mounted at checkpoints.<\/p>\n

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One night, we head back to Issa\u2019s house from our hotel in H1, where we seem to be its only guests. Florian drives us through the maze of Hebron\u2019s streets while Issa navigates via a patchy video link: \u201cLeft, left, now to the right, watch out for the goats.\u201d When we pull over as instructed, a young Palestinian man startles us by jumping into the back seat. He quickly explains that his name is Ahmad, he is an activist, and he is there to help us with the rest of the extremely complicated way back. We would have to avoid the \u201csterilized\u201d roads that he is not able to be on as a Palestinian.<\/p>\n

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Back at Issa\u2019s house, we sit next to a fire roaring in an old oil drum. Ahmad and the other men cook us chicken and prepare coffee, with the sound of the azaan<\/em>, the call to prayer, reverberating over the hills\u2014an auditory reminder of Palestine in this divided city. Living in Hebron his whole life, Ahmad is no stranger to surveillance. \u201cThey check us by the eyes,\u201d he says. \u201cThey stop us one hour or three hours for nothing. 20055 . . . My number is 20055 at the computer. We are numbers, we are not humans.\u201d I can\u2019t help but think of Yad Vashem.<\/p>\n

Since our visit throughout the West Bank in the spring of 2023, Israel has launched a brutal operation against people in Gaza, relying on various technological tools to aid in its mission to target as many people as possible. These days a new gospel is coming from the Holy Land. The Gospel, an AI system deployed in Gaza helps generates new targets at an unprecedented rate, using artificial intelligence to optimize its operations. 18,787 Palestinians have been killed since October 7, 2023 (www.aljazeera.com<\/span> (external link)<\/span><\/span><\/a> 15 December 2023).<\/p>\n

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Israeli Eyes Turn Outward<\/h2>\n
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Israel is at the center of much of the world\u2019s surveillance technology that is normalized and tested out on Palestinians.2<\/sup><\/a> One of the leading players in border surveillance and spyware, for example, is the Israeli company Elbit Systems. Headquartered in Haifa and started in 1966, Elbit Systems expanded from weapons logistics to become a surveillance powerhouse of nearly eighteen thousand employees worldwide with a revenue of $5.28 billion in 2021. Elbit Systems\u2019 flashy demonstrations make frequent appearances at various conferences like the World Border Security Congress, with the company\u2019s cheery yellow logo hiding a business model that Israeli writer Yossi Melman describes as \u201cespionage diplomacy,\u201d which tests out surveillance technology both at the border and in conflict zones, often turning its eye on those trying to document what is happening on the ground. Elbit Systems is Israel\u2019s biggest defense company, but much of its technology is also used for border enforcement, from armed autonomous surveillance drones like the Hermes, first tested out in Gaza, which now patrols the Mediterranean Sea, to the fixed AI surveillance towers sweeping the Arizona desert.<\/p>\n

For anyone working in this space, names like Elbit send chills down their spine, as does the NSO Group\u2014also Israeli\u2014arguably the world\u2019s most successful cybersurveillance firm. Since its founding in 2010, the NSO Group has cemented its global hold through its stellar surveillance capabilities, notably with Pegasus, its flagship surveillance application for spying used by governments from Saudia Arabia to the United Arab Emirates to Greece. Pegasus infiltrates mobile phones to extract data or activate a camera or microphone to spy on owners. The company says the tech is designed to fight crime and terrorism, but it has been found by investigators to have been used on journalists, activists, dissidents, and politicians worldwide. The NSO Group has been implicated in human rights abuses all over the world, including the brutal murder and dismemberment of Saudi journalist and political dissident Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018.3<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The NSO Group also turns its eyes inward, to residents of Jerusalem and other cities. At least six Palestinian human rights activists have been hacked, including two dual nationals, one French and the other American, like French-Palestinian Salah Hammouri, a lawyer and field researcher at Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, based in Jerusalem.4<\/sup><\/a> Making life difficult for anyone doing work on these issues, even Israeli activists, seems to be the prerogative. Ori and his colleagues at Breaking the Silence are routinely harassed and interrogated, and some have even been arrested. When asked about the likelihood of spyware on their phones, they shrug\u2014it seems to be par for the course. Even Florian and I take extra precautions, uploading all our photos and audio to an encrypted cloud system and wiping our phones clean. It still isn\u2019t enough, though, as we are thoroughly interrogated at the airport on our way out, my suitcase picked over. It contained an \u201cincriminating\u201d cookbook, children\u2019s toys, and a few leaflets from a human rights organization, which the airport security agents used as evidence of our presence in the West Bank. After our passports were confiscated for what felt like an eternity and more persistent interrogation, our documents were handed back with a flourish and an invitation to \u201ccome back.\u201d At least this time, we didn\u2019t have to hand over our phones.<\/p>\n

Other examples in this network of surveillance include the Israeli company Cellebrite, a firm marketing itself as the \u201cglobal leader in digital intelligence,\u201d which advertises its devices to authorities interrogating people who are seeking asylum.5<\/sup><\/a> First founded in 1999 and now a subsidiary of Japan\u2019s Sun Corporation, Cellebrite markets forensic tools that empower authorities to bypass passwords on digital devices, allowing them to download, analyze, and visualize data. There is now also a physical, high-tech securitized wall in Gaza, which was completed in 2021 with construction assistance from Europe at a cost of $1.1 billion. Both construction and security firms were involved in erecting the wall; Elbit Systems\u2019 surveillance contributions included robots, drones, and unpiloted ground vehicles. All the devices are equipped with visual, electronic, and intelligence equipment and powered by AI, operating through command-and-control bases along the barrier.6<\/sup><\/a> There are also many other, less well-known players and Israel also operates increasingly vast databases on nearly every Palestinian. The Blue Wolf app came first, downloaded to Israeli soldiers\u2019 phones in Hebron to record information to identify people like Issa Amro and Ahmad as they make their way through various checkpoints in the occupied city. According to Breaking the Silence, surveillance has become gamified, with soldiers incentivized to register as many Palestinians as possible, keeping them under constant observation. In 2022, Amnesty International and local digital rights groups like 7amleh found that the Blue Wolf app has been augmented by Red Wolf, a CCTV camera system using AI-driven surveillance tools including facial recognition. The software uses a color-coded system of green, yellow, and red to guide soldiers on whether to let the person go, stop them for questioning, or arrest them.<\/p>\n

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Armed technology is also on the rise in the West Bank. Companies like Smart Shooter have deployed AI-powered guns in places like Aroub refugee camp in the West Bank that can track targets to enhance accuracy when firing tear gas, stun grenades, and sponge-tipped bullets. Another company, XTEND, boasts that its virtual reality training technology is so effective, soldiers \u201cwithin 10 minutes . . . start downing balloons in the Gaza Strip.\u201d Powered by the Skylord operating system, the technology boasts a \u201crevolutionary micro-tactical Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance platform, with built-in resilient indoor-outdoor navigation and AI capabilities,\u201d all aimed at Palestinians.<\/p>\n

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The XTEND technology was also tested in Arizona. And it is not the only Israeli technology used there. In an investment over ten years totaling at least $500 million, the United States has installed at least fifty-five fixed AI-system surveillance towers made by none other than Elbit Systems. It has been contracted by the U.S. Border Patrol to put Native American reservations along the Arizona border under constant surveillance, including through surveillance cameras and drones.7<\/sup><\/a> This technology was first rolled out in the surveillance sensors for Israel\u2019s separation barrier through the West Bank, a barrier the International Court of Justice ruled to be illegal way back in 2004 but still stands today.8<\/sup><\/a> The European Union\u2019s appetite for Israeli surveillance has also exponentially grown as it tries to wall itself off from further \u201cundesirable\u201d migration. The Observer<\/em> and Statewatch also uncovered various contracts to track migrant boats reaching the shores of Europe. The agreements, negotiated between Elbit Systems, the European Union\u2019s Frontex, and the European Maritime Safety Agency, total $115 million.<\/p>\n

However, this AI and surveillance technology flows in multiple directions. In one notable example, Google, Amazon, and the Israeli government signed a $1.2 billion contract for Project Nimbus, providing advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning technology to the Israeli government, which could augment the country\u2019s use of digital surveillance in occupied Palestinian territories.9<\/sup><\/a> This, while the West Bank is in the middle of some of the worst violence and apartheid repression in decades. The contract provoked anger among both Jewish and Palestinian Google employees, who have publicly spoken out about the project. Some, like computer scientist Ariel Koren, have been fired; some have resigned. Others have been silenced.10<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

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Outpost Border Guards<\/h2>\n
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Bordering is a practice. In Israel and Palestine, you can see this practice of division and dehumanization enacted daily. The creation and recreation of this division is more dynamic than rigid understandings of borders would seem to indicate. Physical walls, for example, can be expanded to hem people in, but when coupled with a vast, increasingly automated surveillance infrastructure, the border can be made to extend well beyond a dotted line on a map or a crossing point separating one state from the next. Raluca Csernatoni, an expert on European security and defense, evocatively writes that \u201cthe increased use of drones to police borders has resulted in the decentralization of the border zone into various vertical and horizontal layers of surveillance, suspending state power from the skies, and extending the border visually and virtually.\u201d11<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 As Professor Ayelet Shachar writes in her book The Shifting Border<\/em>, \u201cOur gates no longer stand fixed at the country\u2019s territorial edges. The border itself has become a moving barrier, an unmoored legal construct.\u201d12<\/sup><\/a> One of the ways that borders have been shifting is a phenomenon called \u201cborder externalization,\u201d or the transfer of border controls to foreign countries.<\/p>\n

Surveillance technology is central to this. Technologies that manage migration, whether retinal scans or automated AI lie detectors at airports, all collect data, make decisions, and report to the state the necessary information on potentially unsafe migrant bodies, rendering them into security objects and data points to be analyzed, stored, collected, and rendered intelligible. And in an environment of narratives emphasizing risk, terrorism, and the need to keep Western countries safe, new forms of control emerge. For journalist Antony Loewenstein, author of the award-winning book The Palestine Laboratory,<\/em> this is yet another instance of \u201cdigital orientalism,\u201d echoing the work of Palestinian theorist Edward Said\u2014treating certain groups with suspicion by definition while others are welcomed with open arms.13<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Countries with the largest defense and security sectors, such as the United States, Israel, and China, are transferring this technology and these practices to governments and agencies around the world. The same goes for multilateral organizations such as the European Union. The Transnational Institute (TNI) itself has been working on these issues for decades, thinks about externalization as a \u201ccarrot and stick\u201d approach, creating financial and policy incentives for third party actors, and often poorer nations, to push established borders further and further from their geographic location.14<\/sup><\/a> Often framed as cooperation, externalization replicates power hierarchies, with impoverished countries like Niger doing the dirty work of the EU to stem migration, sometimes with Israeli surveillance technology. As writer and activist Harsha Walia reminds us, these practices work to perpetuate border imperialism, where powerful actors like the United States and the European Union wield tremendous geopolitical power and financial influence over countries in Latin America, Africa, and the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region. Shameful imperial and colonial histories play out in new ways, simultaneously causing mass displacement and actively working to stifle it. A greater number of people on the move that apparently need to be controlled means more lucrative high-tech projects for the private sector to develop.<\/p>\n

Israel is a major player here, with Israeli security companies among the most successful\u2014and profitable\u2014in the world. The country\u2019s world-class weapons industry is consistently tested out on Palestinians and then marketed as \u201cbattle tested\u201d; consequently, as journalist Antony Loewenstein argues, \u201cthe Palestine laboratory is a signature Israeli selling point.\u201d15<\/sup><\/a> Israel has actively supplied weapons to myriad repressive regimes, including South Sudan, the Ceause\u015fcu regime in Romania, the Assad regime in Syria and Russia\u2019s military support for the regime, Sri Lanka, and the Duvalier regime in Haiti, among many others.16<\/sup><\/a> Elbit\u2019s Hermes drones are even patrolling the Canadian Arctic for environmental monitoring. And right after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Elbit stocks rose by 70 percent\u2014war is indeed profitable.17<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

One of the reasons why externalization works is that it plays into the global weakening of international norms that protect the right to seek asylum. In a complicated geopolitical reality where people on the move who are seeking protection are caught in the middle\u2014without access to lawyers, humanitarian aid, or even doctors\u2014people who have the right to seek safety are actively prevented from being able to do so. Powerful countries band together in a performance of common victimhood, falling back on blatant Islamophobia and racism against African migrants and Muslim \u201cinvaders\u201d in particular to justify increasingly hard-line policies of surveillance and exclusion. Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein, who has spent years documenting surveillance technologies used against Palestinians, argues in his 2023 book The Palestine Laboratory<\/em> that the threat of being overrun justifies experimentation, often first in Israel and then in US and the EU. These are not new ideas. In the 1980s, cultural theorist Stuart Hall cautioned against authoritarian populism, which often stokes fears around immigration, terrorism, crime, and left-wing subversion.18<\/sup><\/a> This brand of populism contributes to the increasing normalization of technology as a mechanism of control and, more specifically, as an antidote to being overrun by the unwanted and dangerous\u2014a way to see, control, monitor, and exclude. We must also pay attention to particular sites of experimentation that center on groups with fewer protections available to them, such as people in experiencing humanitarian emergencies or encountering the migration management bureaucracy. Surveillance capitalism, meet disaster capitalism. Migration data is already being politicized to justify greater interventions in support of threatened national sovereignty, weaponized by far-right groups that continually wage wars on migration. And the private sector, meanwhile, stands to make a quick buck.<\/p>\n

Journalist Todd Miller and others have been writing about the rise of a multi-billion-dollar border industrial complex, the confluence of border policing, militarization, and corporate investments.19<\/sup><\/a> This industry is fast and growing, projected to have a total value of around $68 billion by 2025\u2014higher than the annual GDP of most countries\u2014with the largest increases in global biometrics and AI projects.20<\/sup><\/a> Big money is involved in the management of borders, as private security companies make major inroads with lucrative contracts, procured by governments, for shiny new tech experiments presented as the only surefire way to strengthen border security.21<\/sup><\/a>From vast private prison complexes on islands like Nauru and Christmas Island, where Australia sends its asylum seekers, to American company BlackRock, the world\u2019s largest asset management company, being a major shareholder in eleven border and surveillance industry companies.<\/p>\n

The private sector is in charge of much of the development of new technologies, and states and governments, wishing to control the flows of migrant populations, benefit from these technological experiments. This type of experimentation also shows whose interests matter most, as states prioritize and legitimize the types of interventions peddled by the private sector at conferences like the World Border Security Congress in the form of increasingly disturbing tech \u201ctoys\u201d like drones, robo-dogs, and radars.22<\/sup><\/a>In an ongoing global war on human movement, states prioritize these tools instead of funding solutions to combat racism at the border or improve fairness in asylum proceedings. All these technological experiments are situated in a broader historical system of control, bolstering a lucrative industry where private sector players set the agenda with virtually nothing by way of meaningful governance and oversight. Furthermore, the private sector is often the first to oppose any regulation or oversight, stating concerns about the stifling of innovation and the infringement on the fulfillment of Silicon Valley fantasies. The aim is a free-for-all in the sandbox of tech development, a techno-solutionist utopia, opening up spaces of unrestricted tracking and surveillance.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Move Fast and Break Things<\/h2>\n
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The reason for many governments\u2019 over-reliance on the private sector is a lack of adequate technical capacity within the public sector, even though adopting emerging and experimental tools without understanding, evaluating, and managing these technologies is irresponsible and downright dangerous. The result is that private corporations hold the balance of power when determining what technology is developed, deployed, and subsequently procured by governments.<\/p>\n

Intellectual property laws and proprietary considerations also hide how exactly much of the technology operates, creating a vacuum of accountability. The private sector also plays into this confusion, not releasing information, obfuscating debates, and lobbying behind closed doors in order to prevent regulation and any impediments to innovation that could be seen as diminishing profit.23<\/sup><\/a> With many large and lucrative technology projects there are strong commercial incentives for vendors to impose licensing conditions that keep source code closed and unavailable for public scrutiny. And to increase profit even more, vendors may be interested in using data provided by government for commercial purposes beyond the government\u2019s own.<\/p>\n

Relying on the private sector also has its benefits for states by watering down liability and accountability. Governments can disavow responsibility for mistakes since they aren\u2019t the entities developing the tools. States deliberately rely on the private sector to ensure technological experimentation occurs outside the realm of sovereign responsibility, thereby depriving people on the move of the rights and protections enshrined in domestic and international law by invoking the private sector\u2019s insistence upon discretion regarding proprietary technology and other private interests.<\/p>\n

As Loewenstein writes: \u201cWhen, in 2016, privatized security guards killed twenty-four-year-old Maram Salih Abu Ismail at Qalandia checkpoint [between the northern West Bank and Jerusalem] alongside her sixteen-year-old brother Ibrahim Taha, nobody was ever held accountable. Israel\u2019s shoot-to-kill policy becomes even more widely applied when the so-called security services are outsourced. That is exactly the point, because when an abuse occurs the state blames the private company for the crime.\u201d24<\/sup><\/a> But where does this leave the people affected by these technologies?25<\/sup><\/a> Decision-making regarding which technologies to implement often happens without consultation, much less consent, of the affected groups, as when refugees must have their irises scanned in exchange for weekly food rations inside refugee camps.26<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

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These monopolies of knowledge and power, which vest authority in powerful actors like the private sector and states, exist precisely because there is no unified global regulatory regime governing the use of new technologies, creating perfect laboratories for high-risk experiments.<\/p>\n

Technological experiments in migration are justified because people on the move have been historically made into a population that is intelligible, trackable, and manageable.27<\/sup><\/a> The very rhetoric of migration \u201cmanagement\u201d implies that refugees and migrants must be presided over and controlled, as they are construed to be a threat to national sovereignty, particularly in times when more and more states are turning inward. When sovereignty is under threat, the state justifies its control over populations through continuous messaging about necessary national security and border control, and public spectacles that enforce that messaging.28<\/sup><\/a> This performance is particularly far-reaching when the law is suspended, such as in Australia\u2019s extraterritorial (and extra-legal) immigration detention policies, or, as in the case of technological development, where there simply is no (or very little) law.29<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The private sector likes to forget that it already has an independent responsibility to ensure that technologies do not violate international human rights law, such as under the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.30<\/sup><\/a> In the development of products and services, private entities also have clear legal obligations to comply with domestic law, including privacy and human rights legislation. Technologists, developers, and engineers responsible for building this technology also have special ethical obligations to ensure that their work does not facilitate human rights violations.31<\/sup><\/a> But there is an overall lack of institutional capacity to effectively regulate technology, as well as a disjuncture between those who develop migration-related technology in the private sector and those in the public sector who deploy it on specific populations. The so-called AI divide, or the gap between those who are able to design AI and those who do not, is broadening and highlights problematic power dynamics in participation and agency when it comes to the rollout of new technologies.<\/p>\n

The private sector is not the only major player in these demarcations of power and privilege. Non-state actors, such as the UN, perform this role as well. The United Nations, too, can easily succumb to the Israeli security sector\u2019s siren call as the number one expert in surveillance technology, announcing in 2020 that Mer Security, Elbit, and Israel Aerospace Industries had won contracts to provide security for UN bases in Mali, including the installation of CCTV cameras, drones, and threat detection systems. The UN was lobbied aggressively by Israeli companies to secure similar work at the forty peacekeeping bases throughout the world.32<\/sup><\/a> Much of migration management is also practiced and enacted by international organizations such as UNHCR, IOM, and various other bodies, who have a profound influence in shaping decisions concerning technology. As they are often the first on the ground following a humanitarian disaster, they also set the agenda in terms of prioritization when it comes to humanitarian innovation and technological development.33<\/sup><\/a> But as non-state actors operating under various legal and quasi-legal authorities and regulations globally, international organizations are \u201carenas for acting out power relationships\u201d without being beholden to the responsibilities that states have to protect human rights.34<\/sup><\/a> States that operate through international organizations can also \u201claunder\u201d their legal responsibility, as they do vis-\u00e0-vis private corporations, by attributing acts or omissions to the organization instead of themselves or other states.35<\/sup><\/a> International organizations are thus overly empowered to administer technology without being beholden to rights-protecting laws and principles.36<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

For example, international organizations such as UNHCR are taking the lead on the identification and tracking of migrants and refugees. At first glance, digital identity technologies would seem to meet a pressing need: UNHCR states that in today\u2019s modern world, lacking proof of identity can limit a person\u2019s socioeconomic participation and access to services, including employment opportunities, housing, a mobile phone, and a bank account. But there is inadequate attention to the possibility that technologies, because they rely on identity data, may exacerbate existing biases, discrimination, or power imbalances.37<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Israel is also turning on its own people. In the spring 2023, vast reforms by the Netanyahu administration threatened to allow Israel\u2019s parliament, the Knesset, to overrule any decisions made by Israel\u2019s Supreme Court. This administration is the most far right in Israel\u2019s history, with close ties to the settler movement and Israel\u2019s ultra-religious community. In a never-before-seen show of opposition, thousands took to the streets in Israel, including moderate Israelis flying in from Canada and other countries. Ongoing protests risk an ever-widening split in Israel between the growing power of Zionism and a more liberal secularism. All the while, pogroms by Jewish settlers continue in the West Bank, including the February 2023 burning of Huwara, a small village close to Nablus. Stopped by an armed checkpoint and unable to visit Huwara, Florian and I pulled over on the side of the road in Ramallah to pick up some strawberries, one of the only exports allowed from Gaza. I stuck their little round red label that says \u201c\u0641\u0644\u0633\u0637\u064a\u0646 \u060c \u063a\u0632\u0629 \u0627\u0644\u0625\u0646\u062a\u0627\u062c (Palestine, Gaza Production)\u201d on the back of my phone. Many things still grow under occupation.<\/p>\n

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But will these strawberries survive Israel\u2019s systematic onslaught of Gaza? After the attacks and incursion outside the Gaza strip by Hamas on October 7, 2023, Israel\u2019s complete siege of Gaza, including the targeting of hospitals and humanitarian corridors, showed a level of violence so unprecedented that it may meet the international legal definition of a genocide, or at the very least a war crime and ethnic cleansing.38<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

What will these seismic shifts mean for the future of Israel\u2014and the future of Palestine under occupation? With the shekel taking a nosedive, and investors pulling out from Tel Aviv, the surveillance and arms industry is going to have to work overtime to generate revenue. Luckily, the Israeli weapons and surveillance market has a long history of success in this area\u2014selling \u201cbattle tested\u201d weapons and state-of-the-art border surveillance after thoroughly testing them out on Palestinians in the laboratory of the West Bank and Gaza.<\/p>\n

Notes and Sources:<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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    \n
  1. \u201cFarid Esack Open Letter to the Palestinian People,\u201d Justice for Palestine, 2009, http:\/\/justiceforpalestine.org\/farid-esack-open-letter-to-the-palestini\u2026<\/a>. In 2009, Palestinian artists Faris Arouri and Yousef Nijem, painted the entirety of Esack\u2019s letter on a section of Israel\u2019s border wall in the West Bank town of Aram, on the outskirts of Jerusalem.<\/li>\n
  2. \u201cThe Harvard of counterterrorism\u201d is a quote from Terrance William Gainer, a former law enforcement officer and the 38th Sergeant at Arms of the U.S. Senate. Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World<\/em> (Verso, 2023), 14.<\/li>\n
  3. Daniel Boffey, \u201cJamal Khashoggi\u2019s Wife to Sue NSO Group over Pegasus Spyware,\u201d The Guardian<\/em>, September 22, 2022.<\/li>\n
  4. \u201cDevices of Palestinian Human Rights Defenders Hacked with NSO Group\u2019s Pegasus Spyware,\u201d Amnesty International, November 8, 2021, www.amnesty.org\/en\/latest\/research\/2021\/11\/devices-of-palestinian-human\u2026<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  5. Privacy International, \u201cSurveillance Company Cellebrite Finds a New Exploit: Spying on Asylum Seekers,\u201d April 3, 2019, https:\/\/privacyinternational.org\/long-read\/2776\/surveillance-company-ce\u2026<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  6. https:\/\/www.whoprofits.org\/publications\/report\/45?in-deep-water-more-wa\u2026<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  7. Will Parrish, \u201cThe U.S. Border Patrol and an Israeli Military Contractor Are Putting a Native American Reservation Under \u2018Persistent Surveillance,\u2019\u201d The Intercept<\/em>, August 25, 2019.<\/li>\n
  8. Parrish, \u201cThe U.S. Border Patrol and an Israeli Military Contractor.\u201d<\/li>\n
  9. Sam Biddle, \u201cDocuments Reveal Advanced AI Tools Google Is Selling to Israel,\u201d The Intercept<\/em>, July 24, 2022.<\/li>\n
  10. Amanda Silberling, Google Workers Protest $1.2B Project Nimbus Contract with Israeli Military,\u201d TechCrunch<\/em>, September 1, 2022, https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2022\/09\/01\/google-workers-protest-1-2b-project-n\u2026<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  11. Raluca Csernatoni, \u201cConstructing the EU\u2019s High-Tech Borders: FRONTEX and Dual-Use Drones for Border Management,\u201d European Security<\/em> 27, no. 2 (2018): 175.<\/li>\n
  12. Ayelet Shachar, The Shifting Border: Legal Cartographies of Migration and Mobility <\/em>(Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000), 4.<\/li>\n
  13. Edward Said, Orientalism<\/em> (Pantheon Books 1978); Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory<\/em>.<\/li>\n
  14. Mark Akkerman, Expanding the Fortress: The Policies, the Profiteers and the People Shaped by EU\u2019s Border Externalisation Programme<\/em>, The Transnational Institute, May 2018, www.tni.org\/en\/publication\/expanding-the-fortress<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  15. Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory<\/em>.<\/li>\n
  16. Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory<\/em>, 53, 81.<\/li>\n
  17. Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory<\/em>, 12.<\/li>\n
  18. Stuart Hall, \u201c1980 Popular-Democratic Versus Authoritarian Populism,\u201d in Marxism and Democracy<\/em>, ed. Alan Hunt (London: Laurence and Wishart), 157\u201387.<\/li>\n
  19. Todd Miller, \u201cWhy Climate Action Needs to Target the Border Industrial Complex,\u201d Al Jazeera, November 1, 2018.<\/li>\n
  20. Higgins, \u201cHow the $68 Billion Border Surveillance Industrial Complex Affects Us All.\u201d<\/li>\n
  21. Privacy International, \u201cChallenging the Drivers of Surveillance,\u201d 2020, https:\/\/privacyinternational.org\/challenging-drivers-surveillance<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  22. Petra Molnar, Technological Testing Grounds<\/em>: Migration Management Experiments from the Ground Up<\/em>, EDRi and Refugee Law Lab, November 2020, https:\/\/edri.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/Technological-Testing-Groun\u2026<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  23. Eyal Benvenisti, \u201cUpholding Democracy amid the Challenges of New Technology: What Role for the Law of Global Governance?,\u201d European Journal of International Law <\/em>29, no. 1 (2018): 9\u201382. See also Mirca Madianou, \u201cTechnocolonialism: Digital Innovation and Data Practices in the Humanitarian Response to Refugee Crises,\u201d Social Media and Society<\/em> 5, no. 3 (2019): 1\u201313.<\/li>\n
  24. Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory<\/em>, 60.<\/li>\n
  25. Molnar, Technological Testing Grounds<\/em>.<\/li>\n
  26. See Petra Molnar and Lex Gill, Bots at the Gate: A Human Rights Analysis of Automated Decision-Making in Canada\u2019s Immigration and Refugee System<\/em>, University of Toronto International Human Rights Program and the Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, September 2018, https:\/\/citizenlab.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/IHRP-Automated-Systems\u2026<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  27. See, for example, Audrey Macklin, \u201cDisappearing Refugees: Reflections on the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement,\u201d Columbia Human Rights Law Review<\/em> 36 (2004): 101; Nicholas P. De Genova, \u201cMigrant \u2018Illegality\u2019 and Deportability in Everyday Life,\u201d Annual Review of Anthropology<\/em> 31, no. 1 (2002): 419; Jan Blommaert, \u201cLanguage, Asylum, and the National Order,\u201d Current Anthropology<\/em> 50, no. 4 (2009): 415; Jonathan Inda, Targeting Immigrants: Government, Technology, and Ethics<\/em> (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); Sara Ahmed, \u201cAffective Economies,\u201d Social Text <\/em>22, no. 2 (2004): 117\u201339; Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger<\/em> (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 49\u201385. See also Csernatoni, \u201cConstructing the EU\u2019s High-Tech Borders: FRONTEX and Dual-Use Drones for Border Management\u201d; and Martin Lemberg-Pedersen and Eman Haoity, \u201cRe-assembling the Surveillable Refugee Body in the Era of Data-Craving,\u201d Citizenship Studies<\/em> 24, no. 5 (2020): 607\u201324.<\/li>\n
  28. See Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence <\/em>(London: Verso Books, 2004).<\/li>\n
  29. See, for example, Alison Mountz, \u201cThe Enforcement Archipelago: Detention, Haunting, and Asylum on Islands,\u201d Political Geography<\/em> 30, no. 3 (2011): 118\u201328.<\/li>\n
  30. United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, Guiding Principles on Businesses and Human Rights: Implementing the United Nations \u201cProtect, Respect and Remedy\u201d Framework<\/em>, 2011, 13\u201316, www.ohchr.org\/Documents\/Publications\/GuidingPrinciplesBusinessHR_EN.pdf<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  31. Kirsten Martin, \u201cEthical Implications and Accountability of Algorithms,\u201d Journal of Business Ethics <\/em>160 (2019): 835\u201350.<\/li>\n
  32. \u201cAfrica Gives Israeli Firms IAI, Elbit and Mer a Backdoor into the Worldwide UN Base Security Market,\u201d Africa Intelligence<\/em>, November 9, 2020.<\/li>\n
  33. Dragana Kaurin, \u201cSpace and Imagination: Rethinking Refugees\u2019 Digital Access,\u201d UNHCR Innovation Service, April 2020, www.unhcr.org\/innovation\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/Space-and-imaginati\u2026<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  34. Tony Evans and Peter Wilson, \u201cRegime Theory and the English School of International Relations: A Comparison,\u201d Millennium <\/em>21, no. 3 (1992): 329, 330.<\/li>\n
  35. Benvenisti, \u201cUpholding Democracy amid the Challenges of New Technology.\u201d<\/li>\n
  36. See, for example, Kal Raustial and Anne-Marie Slaughter, \u201cInternational Law, International Relations and Compliance,\u201d in Handbook of International Relations<\/em>, ed. Walter Carlsnaes et al. (London: SAGE Publications, 2002), 538, 539; Jennifer Shkabatur, \u201cA Global Panopticon? The Changing Role of International Organizations in the Information Age,\u201d Michigan Journal of International Law<\/em> 33 (2011): 159.<\/li>\n
  37. Mark Latonero et al., Digital Identity in the Migration & Refugee Context: Italy Case Study<\/em>, 2019, datasociety.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/DataSociety_DigitalIdentity.pdf.<\/li>\n
  38. United Nations, UN expert warns of new instance of mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, calls for immediate ceasefire, UN Office of the Human Rights Commissioner, 14 October 2023; International Commission of Jurists, \u201cGaza\/Palestine: States have a Duty to Prevent Genocide,\u201dICJ, 17 November, 2023<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    ____________________________________________________<\/p>\n

    All photos are from the author<\/em><\/p>\n

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    \n

    Petra Molnar is a lawyer and anthropologist specializing in technology, migration, and human rights. Petra is the\u00a0Associate Director of the Refugee Law Lab<\/span> (external link)<\/span><\/span><\/a>\u00a0at York University and a\u00a0Faculty Associate at Harvard\u2019s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society<\/span> (external link)<\/span><\/span><\/a>. She co-runs the\u00a0Migration and Technology Monitor<\/span> (external link)<\/span><\/span><\/a>, a multilingual archive of work that interrogates technological experiments at the border and incubates projects by refugees and people on the move on border surveillance. Petra\u2019s first book,<\/em>\u00a0The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence<\/span> (external link)<\/span><\/span><\/em><\/a>, is coming out in 2024 with<\/em> The New Press.<\/p>\n

    This piece is an adapted version of a chapter appearing in Molnar\u2019s<\/em> The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, to be published in May 2024 with <\/em>The New Press.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

    Go to Original – tni.org<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

     <\/p>\n

    FEATURED RESEARCH PAPER<\/em> STAYS POSTED FOR 2 WEEKS BEFORE BEING ARCHIVED<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    19 Dec 2023 – Hebron, a laboratory for both technology and violence, reflects the Israeli occupation’s impact on daily life, with sterilized roads, military checkpoints, and settler violence defining the landscape. This journey unveils the complex layers of trauma, dispossession, and dehumanization, challenging preconceptions and raising questions about freedom and oppression.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":251077,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[241],"tags":[2221,532,101,100,3199,88,2414,2415,2416,3120,599,427,99,1025],"class_list":["post-251074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-paper-of-the-week","tag-checkpoints","tag-colonialism","tag-cultural-violence","tag-direct-violence","tag-hebron","tag-israel","tag-israeli-apartheid","tag-israeli-army","tag-israeli-occupation","tag-jewish-settlers","tag-oppression","tag-palestine","tag-structural-violence","tag-west-bank"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=251074"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251074\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":251089,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251074\/revisions\/251089"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/251077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=251074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=251074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=251074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}