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How war was turned into a brand
Political chaos means Israel is booming like it's 1999 - and the
boom is in defence exports field-tested on Palestinians
By Naomi Klein
09/16/07 "The
Guardian" -- -- 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 Hizbullah
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 hi-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-90s, when
the country was in the vanguard of the information revolution -
the most tech-dependent economy in the world. After the dotcom
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
24-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 $1.2bn in "defence"
products to the United States - up dramatically from $270m in
1999. In 2006, Israel exported $3.4bn in defence products - well
over a billion more than it received in American 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 $1.2bn, an increase of 20%. The key products and
services are hi-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 have been launched in Israel during 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
travellers 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 defence giant
Elbit, which plans to showcase its Hermes 450 and 900 unmanned
air vehicles. As recently as last month, 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 American
airport; and Elbit - also one of the companies behind Israel's
"security barrier" - has set up a deal with Boeing to construct
the Department of Homeland Security's $2.5bn "virtual" border
fence around the US.
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 explored in greater detail in my forthcoming
book, 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
Hamastan - 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's new book, The
Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, will be
published later this year by Picador; a version of this article
appears in the Nation,
www.thenation.com and
www.nologo.org
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