Gaza in Arizona
How Israeli High-Tech Firms Will Up-Armor
the U.S.-Mexican Border
By Todd Miller and Gabriel M. Schivone
February 02, 2015 "ICH"
- It was October 2012. Roei Elkabetz, a
brigadier general for the Israel Defense
Forces (IDF), was explaining his country’s
border policing strategies. In his
PowerPoint presentation, a photo of the
enclosure wall that isolates the Gaza Strip
from Israel clicked onscreen. “We have
learned lots from Gaza,” he told the
audience. “It’s a great laboratory.”
Elkabetz was speaking at a
border technology conference and fair
surrounded by a dazzling display of
technology -- the components of his
boundary-building lab. There were
surveillance balloons with high-powered
cameras floating over a desert-camouflaged
armored vehicle made by Lockheed Martin.
There were seismic sensor systems used to
detect the movement of people and other
wonders of the modern border-policing world.
Around Elkabetz, you could see vivid
examples of where the future of such
policing was heading, as imagined not by a
dystopian science fiction writer but by some
of the top corporate techno-innovators on
the planet.
Swimming in a sea of
border security, the brigadier general was,
however, not surrounded by the Mediterranean
but by a parched West Texas landscape. He
was in El Paso, a 10-minute walk from the
wall that separates the United States from
Mexico.
Just a few more minutes on
foot and Elkabetz could have watched
green-striped U.S. Border Patrol vehicles
inching along the trickling Rio Grande in
front of Ciudad Juarez, one of Mexico’s
largest cities filled with U.S. factories
and the dead of that country’s drug wars.
The Border Patrol agents whom the general
might have spotted were then being
up-armored with a lethal combination of
surveillance technologies, military
hardware, assault rifles, helicopters, and
drones. This once-peaceful place was being
transformed into what Timothy Dunn, in his
book
The Militarization of the U.S. Mexico
Border, terms a state of
“low-intensity warfare.”
The Border Surge
On November 20, 2014,
President Obama
announced a series of executive actions
on immigration reform. Addressing the
American people, he referred to bipartisan
immigration legislation
passed by the Senate in June 2013 that
would, among other things, further up-armor
the same landscape in what’s been termed --
in language adopted from recent U.S. war
zones -- a “border surge.” The president
bemoaned the fact that the bill had been
stalled in the House of Representatives,
hailing it as a “compromise” that “reflected
common sense.” It would, he pointed out,
“have doubled the number of Border Patrol
agents, while giving undocumented immigrants
a pathway to citizenship.”
In the wake of his
announcement, including executive actions
that would protect five to six million of
those immigrants from future deportation,
the national debate was quickly framed as a
conflict between Republicans and Democrats.
Missed in this partisan war of words was one
thing: the initial executive action that
Obama announced involved a further
militarization of the border supported by
both parties.
“First,” the president
said, “we’ll build on our progress at the
border with additional resources for our law
enforcement personnel so that they can stem
the flow of illegal crossings and speed the
return of those who do cross over.” Without
further elaboration, he then moved on to
other matters.
If, however, the United
States follows the “common sense” of the
border-surge bill, the result could add more
than $40 billion dollars
worth of agents, advanced technologies,
walls, and other barriers to an already
unparalleled border enforcement apparatus.
And a crucial signal would be sent to the
private sector that, as the trade magazine
Homeland Security Today puts it,
another “treasure
trove” of profit is on the way for a
border control market already, according to
the latest forecasts, in an “unprecedented
boom period.”
Like the Gaza Strip for
the Israelis, the U.S. borderlands, dubbed a
“constitution-free
zone” by the ACLU, are becoming a vast
open-air laboratory for tech companies.
There, almost any form of surveillance and
“security” can be developed, tested, and
showcased, as if in a militarized shopping
mall, for other nations across the planet to
consider. In this fashion, border security
is becoming a global industry and few
corporate complexes can be more pleased by
this than the one that has developed in
Elkabetz’s Israel.
The
Palestine-Mexico Border
Consider the IDF brigadier
general’s presence in El Paso two years ago
an omen. After all, in February 2014,
Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agency
in charge of policing our borders,
contracted with Israel’s giant private
military manufacturer
Elbit Systems to build a “virtual wall,”
a technological barrier set back from the
actual international divide in the Arizona
desert. That company, whose U.S.-traded
stock shot up by 6% during Israel’s massive
military operation against Gaza in the
summer of 2014, will bring the same databank
of technology used in Israel’s borderlands
-- Gaza and the West Bank -- to Southern
Arizona through its subsidiary
Elbit Systems of America.
With approximately 12,000
employees and, as it boasts, “10+ years
securing the world’s most challenging
borders,” Elbit produces an arsenal of
“homeland security systems.” These include
surveillance land vehicles, mini-unmanned
aerial systems, and “smart fences,” highly
fortified steel barriers that have the
ability to sense a person’s touch or
movement. In its role as lead system
integrator for Israel’s border technology
plan, the company has already installed
smart fences in the West Bank and the Golan
Heights.
In Arizona, with up to a
billion dollars potentially at its disposal,
CBP has tasked Elbit with creating a “wall”
of “integrated fixed towers” containing the
latest in cameras, radar, motion sensors,
and control rooms. Construction will start
in the rugged, desert canyons around
Nogales. Once a DHS evaluation deems that
part of the project effective, the rest will
be built to monitor the full length of the
state’s borderlands with Mexico. Keep in
mind, however, that these towers are only
one part of a broader operation, the
Arizona Border Surveillance Technology Plan.
At this stage, it’s essentially a blueprint
for an unprecedented infrastructure of
high-tech border fortifications that has
attracted the attention of many companies.
This is not the first time
Israeli companies have been involved in a
U.S. border build-up. In fact, in 2004,
Elbit’s Hermes drones were the first
unmanned aerial vehicles to take to the
skies to
patrol the southern border. In 2007,
according to Naomi Klein in
The Shock Doctrine, the Golan
Group, an Israeli consulting company made up
of former IDF Special Forces officers,
provided an intensive eight-day course
for special DHS immigration agents covering
“everything from hand-to-hand combat to
target practice to ‘getting proactive with
their SUV.’” The Israeli company NICE
Systems even
supplied Arizona’s
Joe Arpaio,“America’s
toughest sheriff,” with a surveillance
system to watch one of his jails.
As such border cooperation
intensified, journalist Jimmy Johnson
coined the apt phrase “Palestine-Mexico
border” to catch what was happening. In
2012, Arizona state legislators,
sensing the potential economic benefit
of this growing collaboration, declared
their desert state and Israel to be natural
“trade partners,” adding that it was “a
relationship we seek to enhance.”
In this way, the doors
were opened to a new world order in which
the United States and Israel are to become
partners in the “laboratory” that is the
U.S.-Mexican borderlands. Its testing
grounds are to be in Arizona. There, largely
through a program known as
Global Advantage, American academic and
corporate knowhow and Mexican low-wage
manufacturing are to fuse with Israel’s
border and homeland security companies.
The Border: Open
for Business
No one may frame the
budding romance between Israel’s high-tech
companies and Arizona better than Tucson
Mayor Jonathan Rothschild. “If you go to
Israel and you come to Southern Arizona and
close your eyes and spin yourself a few
times,” he says, “you might not be able to
tell the difference.”
Global Advantage is a
business project based on a partnership
between the University of Arizona’s Tech
Parks Arizona and the Offshore Group, a
business advisory and housing firm which
offers “nearshore solutions for
manufacturers of any size” just across the
border in Mexico. Tech Parks Arizona has the
lawyers, accountants, and scholars, as well
as the technical knowhow, to help any
foreign company land softly and set up shop
in the state. It will aid that company in
addressing legal issues, achieving
regulatory compliance, and even finding
qualified employees -- and through a program
it’s called the Israel Business Initiative,
Global Advantage has identified its target
country.
Think of it as the perfect
example of a post-NAFTA world in which
companies dedicated to stopping border
crossers are ever freer to cross the same
borders themselves. In the spirit of free
trade that created the NAFTA treaty, the
latest border fortification programs are
designed to eliminate borders when it comes
to letting high-tech companies from across
the seas set up in the United States and
make use of Mexico’s manufacturing base to
create their products. While Israel and
Arizona may be separated by thousands of
miles, Rothschild assured TomDispatch
that in “economics, there are no borders.”
Of course, what the mayor
appreciates, above all, is the way new
border technology could bring money and jobs
into an area with a nearly 23% poverty rate.
How those jobs might be created matters far
less to him. According to Molly Gilbert, the
director of community engagement for the
Tech Parks Arizona, “It’s really about
development, and we want to create
technology jobs in our borderlands.”
So consider it anything
but an irony that, in this developing global
set of boundary-busting partnerships, the
factories that will produce the border
fortresses designed by Elbit and other
Israeli and U.S. high-tech firms will mainly
be located in Mexico. Ill-paid Mexican
blue-collar workers will, then, manufacture
the very components of a future surveillance
regime, which may well help locate, detain,
arrest, incarcerate, and expel some of them
if they try to cross into the United States.
Think of Global Advantage
as a multinational assembly line, a place
where homeland security meets NAFTA. Right
now there are reportedly 10 to 20 Israeli
companies in active discussion about joining
the program. Bruce Wright, the CEO of Tech
Parks Arizona, tells TomDispatch
that his organization has a “nondisclosure”
agreement with any companies that sign on
and so cannot reveal their names.
Though cautious about
officially claiming success for Global
Advantage’s Israel Business Initiative,
Wright brims with optimism about his
organization’s cross-national planning. As
he talks in a conference room located on the
1,345-acre park on the southern outskirts of
Tucson, it’s apparent that he's buoyed by
predictions that the Homeland Security
market will grow from a $51 billion annual
business in 2012 to
$81 billion in the United States alone
by 2020, and
$544 billion worldwide by 2018.
Wright knows as well that
submarkets for border-related products like
video surveillance, non-lethal weaponry, and
people-screening technologies are all
advancing rapidly and that the U.S. market
for drones is poised to create 70,000 new
jobs by 2016. Partially fueling this growth
is what the Associated Press calls
an
“unheralded shift” to drone surveillance
on the U.S. southern divide. More than
10,000 drone flights have been launched into
border air space since March 2013, with
plans for many more, especially after the
Border Patrol doubles its fleet.
When Wright speaks, it’s
clear he knows that his park sits atop a
twenty-first-century gold mine. As he sees
it, Southern Arizona, aided by his tech
park, will become the perfect laboratory for
the first cluster of border security
companies in North America. He’s not only
thinking about the 57 southern Arizona
companies already identified as working in
border security and management, but similar
companies nationwide and across the globe,
especially in Israel.
In fact, Wright's aim is
to follow Israel’s lead, as it is now the
number-one place for such groupings. In his
case, the Mexican border would simply
replace that country’s highly marketed
Palestinian testing grounds. The 18,000
linear feet that surround the tech park’s
solar panel farm would, for example, be a
perfect spot to test out motion sensors.
Companies could also deploy, evaluate, and
test their products “in the field,” as he
likes to say -- that is, where real people
are crossing real borders -- just as Elbit
Systems did before CBP gave it the contract.
“If we’re going to be in
bed with the border on a day-to-day basis,
with all of its problems and issues, and
there’s a solution to it,” Wright said in a
2012 interview, “why shouldn’t we be the
place where the issue is solved and we get
the commercial benefit from it?”
From the
Battlefield to the Border
When Naomi Weiner, project
coordinator for the Israel Business
Initiative, returned from a trip to that
country with University of Arizona
researchers in tow, she couldn’t have been
more enthusiastic about the possibilities
for collaboration. She arrived back in
November, just a day before Obama announced
his new executive actions -- a promising
declaration for those, like her, in the
business of bolstering border defenses.
“We’ve chosen areas where
Israel is very strong and Southern Arizona
is very strong,” Weiner explained to
TomDispatch, pointing to the
surveillance industry “synergy” between the
two places. For example, one firm her team
met with in Israel was
Brightway Vision, a subsidiary of Elbit
Systems. If it decides to set up shop in
Arizona, it could use tech park expertise to
further develop and refine its thermal
imaging cameras and goggles, while exploring
ways to repurpose those military products
for border surveillance applications. The
Offshore Group would then manufacture the
cameras and goggles in Mexico.
Arizona, as Weiner puts
it, possesses the “complete package” for
such Israeli companies. “We’re sitting right
on the border, close to Fort Huachuca,” a
nearby military base where, among other
things, technicians control the drones
surveilling the borderlands. “We have the
relationship with Customs and Border
Protection, so there’s a lot going on here.
And we’re also the Center of Excellence on
Homeland Security.”
Weiner is referring to the
fact that, in 2008, DHS designated the
University of Arizona the lead school for
the
Center of Excellence on Border Security
and Immigration. Thanks to that, it has
since received millions of dollars in
federal grants. Focusing on research and
development of border-policing technologies,
the center is a place where, among other
things, engineers are studying locust wings
in order to create miniature drones equipped
with cameras that can get into the tiniest
of spaces near ground level, while large
drones like the Predator B continue to buzz
over the borderlands at 30,000 feet (despite
the fact that a
recent audit by the inspector general of
homeland security found them a waste of
money).
Although the
Arizona-Israeli romance is still in the
courtship stage, excitement about its
possibilities is growing. Officials from
Tech Parks Arizona see Global Advantage as
the perfect way to strengthen the
U.S.-Israel “special relationship.” There is
no other place in the world with a higher
concentration of homeland security tech
companies than Israel. Six hundred tech
start-ups are launched in Tel Aviv alone
every year. During the Gaza offensive last
summer, Bloomberg
reported that investment in such
companies had “actually accelerated.”
However, despite the periodic military
operations in Gaza and the incessant
build-up of the Israeli homeland security
regime, there are serious limitations to the
local market.
The Israeli Ministry of
Economy is painfully aware of this. Its
officials know that the growth of the
Israeli economy is “largely
fueled by a steady increase in exports
and foreign investment.” The government
coddles, cultivates, and supports these
start-up tech companies until their products
are market-ready. Among them have been
innovations like the “skunk,” a liquid with
a putrid odor meant to stop unruly crowds in
their tracks. The ministry has also been
successful in taking such products to market
across the globe. In the decade following
9/11, sales of Israeli “security
exports” rose from $2 billion to $7
billion annually.
Israeli companies have
sold surveillance drones to Latin American
countries like
Mexico, Chile, and
Colombia, and massive security systems
to India and Brazil, where an electro-optic
surveillance system will be deployed along
the country’s borders with Paraguay and
Bolivia. They have also been involved in
preparations for policing the 2016 Olympics
in Brazil. The products of Elbit Systems and
its subsidiaries are now in use from the
Americas and Europe to Australia. Meanwhile,
that mammoth security firm is ever more
involved in finding “civilian applications”
for its war technologies. It is also ever
more dedicated to bringing the battlefield
to the world’s borderlands, including
southern Arizona.
As geographer Joseph
Nevins
notes, although there are many
differences between the political situations
of the U.S. and Israel, both
Israel-Palestine and Arizona share a focus
on keeping out “those deemed permanent
outsiders,” whether Palestinians,
undocumented Latin Americans, or indigenous
people.
Mohyeddin Abdulaziz has
seen this “special relationship” from both
sides, as a Palestinian refugee whose home
and village Israeli military forces
destroyed in 1967 and as a long-time
resident of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. A
founding member of the Southern Arizona BDS
Network, whose goal is to pressure U.S.
divestment from Israeli companies, Abdulaziz
opposes any program like Global Advantage
that will contribute to the further
militarization of the border, especially
when it also sanitizes Israel’s “violations
of human rights and international law.”
Such violations matter
little, of course, when there is money to be
made, as Brigadier General Elkabetz
indicated at that 2012 border technology
conference. Given the direction that both
the U.S. and Israel are taking when it comes
to their borderlands, the deals being
brokered at the University of Arizona look
increasingly like matches made in heaven (or
perhaps hell). As a result, there is truth
packed into journalist Dan Cohen’s comment
that “Arizona is the Israel of the United
States.”
Todd Miller, a
TomDispatch regular, is the
author of
Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches From the
Front Lines of Homeland Security. He
has written on border and immigration issues
for the New York Times, Al Jazeera
America, and NACLA Report on the
Americas and its blog Border Wars,
among other places. You can follow him on
twitter @memomiller and view more of his
work at toddwmiller.wordpress.com.
Gabriel M. Schivone, a
writer from Tucson, has worked as a
humanitarian volunteer in the Mexico-U.S.
borderlands for more than six years. He
blogs at
Electronic Intifada and Huffington
Post's "Latino Voices." His articles
have appeared in the Arizona Daily
Star, the Arizona Republic,
StudentNation, the Guardian,
and McClatchy Newspapers,
among other publications. You can follow him
on Twitter @GSchivone.
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Copyright 2015 Todd Miller
and Gabriel M. Schivone