[rad-green] Global Israel

https://socialistproject.ca/2019/11/global-israel/

Global Israel

*INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
<https://socialistproject.ca/category/international/>  •  November 1, 2019
 •  Judith Deutsch <https://socialistproject.ca/author/judith-deutsch/>*
Securocratic War, Securocratic Borders, Securocratic Emissions

Globally, human societies are veering toward the precipice of a cascading
extinction event that is traceable to 20th century wars and to accelerated
dangers following the end of the Cold War. This pivotal time could have
seen the end of nuclear weapons and the near elimination of greenhouse gas
emissions. Instead, the major nuclear weapons states are modernizing their
arsenals, and greenhouse gas emissions since 1990 surpass cumulative
emissions since the beginning of the industrial revolution. From 1990,
transformations of global militarization have proven to be both a cause and
effect of interconnected crises. Israeli militarization, inflicted on
Palestinian people and territory, has been integral, and at times a
groundbreaking catalyst, facilitator, and collaborator in this global
disaster. Post-Cold War Israel put its so-called peace process in “
formaldehyde <https://www.haaretz.com/1.4710372>” (in the words of Dov
Weisglass).

Jeff Halper, a founding member of the Israeli Committee Against House
Demolitions, an anthropologist and activist, has long challenged spurious
representations of Israel as victim and as a “light unto nations.” He
describes Israel’s “matrix of control” and documents the revolution in
military affairs (RMA) and Israel’s carving out an indispensable global
niche in the sector of securocratic
<https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745334301/war-against-the-people/> technologies
and strategies. The battlescape encompasses the traditional spectrum of the
battlefield and also the new dimension of space and the “human terrain,”
the electromagnetic spectrum, cyber space and information space.
Conventional wars aimed to achieve regional or global hegemony;
securocratic wars aim to “securitize everything.” Israel positions itself
as indispensable in the areas of nuclear weapons, in securocratic and
conventional warfare, and in strategy and law.
21st Century Sovereignty

The end of the Cold War coincided with shifts in sovereignty and ideology.
Twentieth century sovereignty rested principally with nation states, with
influential political and economic power distributed unevenly within three
socio-economic classes in democratic, communist, and fascist regimes. In
contrast, 21st century sovereignty rests especially in a global NATO, in
national security bureaucracies, and in financial institutions that cause
unprecedented inequity and deprivation for the majority population.
Ideology is often reducible to a Manichaean
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism> battle between “good” and
“evil” in which anything and anyone, the “other,” is a “threat multiplier.”
In practice, the powerful are free to assault with disproportionality in
the name of security and self-defense.

Despite attempts to establish sovereignty at an international level to “end
the scourge of war” through the League of Nations (1920–1946) and the
United Nations (UN), the majority world population is still not served by
any universal institutions that are able to implement an end to the system
of nationalism, capitalism, fossil fuels, racism, and militarism. The very
structure of the UN entrenches authoritarianism and militarization: the
five permanent members of the Security Council, each with veto power, are
the original nuclear weapons states (China, France, Russia, the United
Kingdom, and the United States). Seven of nine nuclear weapons states are
not members of the International Criminal Court: USA, Russia, China,
Israel, India, North Korea and Pakistan.

Navi Pillay, former head of the UN Human Rights Council, spoke
<http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/8/21/pillay-slams-securitycouncil.html>
of
UN Security Council failures to bring peace and to save lives: “I firmly
believe that greater responsiveness by this council would have saved
hundreds of thousands of lives.” She cited conflicts in Afghanistan,
Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq,
Libya, Mali, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Ukraine, and Gaza. “These crises
hammer home the full cost of the international community’s failure to
prevent conflict. None of these crises erupted without warning.”
Nuclear Weapons

Israel’s nuclear weapon secrecy mirrors little children hiding in plain
sight, except little children innocently and charmingly believe that no one
can see them while Israel’s “secrecy” tauntingly communicates a sense of
entitlement to destroy. Israel’s arsenal is variously estimated
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_and_Israel> to be between 80
to 400 nuclear warheads. Israel is not a signatory to the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), yet Israel was allowed to participate and
determine the focus of the 2015 five-year UN NPT conference held during the
Ukraine/Crimea crisis. With fears of a nuclear conflagration between the
USA and Russia, the aim was to take nuclear weapons off high-alert status,
but Israel deflected attention to the purported threat of Iran, and the NPT
review conference was a failure as a result.
21st Century Securocratic War

Post Cold War, Israel plays an indispensable part in the new global
securocratic shift from inter-state conflict to pacification of
“disrupters.” Described by forensic architect Eyal Weizman, the war on
terror is the backdrop that allows
<https://issuu.com/icosp74/docs/eyal_weizman_-_hollow_land> “the exchange
of technologies, mechanisms, doctrines, and spatial strategies between
various militaries and the organizations that they confront, as well as
between the civilian and military domains…”

Israel’s “operations” against Gaza involve the “limited use of unlimited
force”: a multilayered effort to inflict the greatest damage possible on
terrorists and their weapons systems, their infrastructure, support
networks, financial flows, and other means of support. Civilian villages
are treated as military bases.

Israel, using assaults on Palestinian territory as a lab, sells its
“battle-tested” high-tech cyber-security technology, drones, unmanned
aerial systems, missiles, radars, and electronic warfare systems. Under
“precision engagement,” Israel takes the lead in Unmanned Surface (naval)
Vehicles and Unmanned Ground Vehicles, Fighting Robots, and Directed-Energy
Weapons (lasers, high-powered microwaves, particle beams and advanced
optics). Scientific and “cute” terms for weapons systems that penetrate and
desecrate body boundaries are sold at the world’s arms fairs: biometric
templates for fingerprints and retinal and facial measurement; joy sticks
are remote killing devices used to “Spot and Shoot.” Killer and
surveillance drones are called BirdEye, Skylark, Ghost, Bat, and
Mini-Panther. Entomopters are bug-sized devices that carry out “precise,
deadly strikes without sending its own soldiers into danger”; the Mosquito,
weighing only 450 grams, can range up to two kilometers and can activate a
“hive” of three JUMPER canisters, each containing eight missiles that can
deliver several possible warhead options up to a range of 50 km. Snake
robots of varying sizes, equipped with cameras and occasionally explosives,
can be deployed in contested buildings for surveillance, “or potentially,
to implant poisons or debilitating devices in targeted individuals”
(Halper, p 131-33).

Securocratic expertise gives Israel a long reach. The Canadian-Israel
Public Safety Act signed in 2008 gives Israel access to Canada’s internal
security and police apparatus that cover border management and security
measures, including biometric applications, to correctional services and
prisons, crime prevention, critical infrastructure protection, emergency
management, illegal immigration, and law enforcement cooperation with
Israel.

The Israeli systems of civilian pacification and policing are used in
Central Asia and Latin America (particularly Brazil) for whom “militarized
homeland security fits domestic needs more than a military geared to
fighting inter-state wars… [to] pacify and control hundreds of thousands of
people from working class” and poor neighborhoods, to control crowds and
mass civilian demonstrations. Halper describes “wars of dystopia that
assume that ‘perfected’ liberal democracies are threatened by an invisible,
infiltrating menace…drug dealers, terrorists, asylum seekers, undocumented
immigrants and microbes.”

Israel’s arms exports have increased by 74 per cent since 2008. Some of
Israel’s joint projects are with Hindustan Aeronautics Limited and Rafael
and Israel Aerospace Industries IIAI) to build an integrated anti-missile
system to be deployed against Chinese nuclear and conventional missiles. A
Canada-Israel joint project is Frontline Robotics of Ottawa with IAI’s
LAHAV division and ODF Optronics of Tel Aviv, and the unmanned ground
vehicle Border Protector is a US-Israel project.
Securocratic Borders

Todd Miller, author of Empire of Borders, writes that “borders are
everywhere that the ruling classes meet the people, the rich meet the poor,
the powerful meet the dispossessed,” and that Israel is a microcosm of the
whole world. Israel is selling a security state. In 2014 Elbit Systems
received a prime contract from US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) for
surveillance along the US-Mexico border, including 53 towers equipped with
cameras that can see 7 miles away, ground-sweeping radar systems that feed
into command and control rooms, thousands of implanted motion sensors, and
a GPS system able to home in on exact coordinates of any border
transgression. Elbit Systems surveillance drones fly over US borderlands,
and Israel trains border officials and US law enforcement agents.

Securocratic Emissions

The military is exempt under the Kyoto Protocol, yet the military is the
largest single institutional emitter of greenhouse gases. An ignored source
of emissions are the massive data centres (server farms) for sending and
receiving information from weapons and surveillance systems.1
<https://socialistproject.ca/2019/11/global-israel/#easy-footnote-bottom-1-2623>
Laws and Institutions

Israel deflects criminal charges partly by formulating new laws
(“lawfare”). After removing Israeli settlers from Gaza, Israel continued to
control Gaza’s air, sea, and land borders but fabricated a legal category
“parastatal entity” to evade Geneva Convention obligations to occupied
peoples.

Israel signed but did not ratify the Chemical Weapons Convention and is not
a party to the Biological Weapons Convention. Israel violates the 1925
Geneva Protocol on Poisonous Gas and the 1993 Convention on the Prohibition
of the Development, Production, Stockpiling, and Use of Chemical Weapons.

Israel’s Dahiya Doctrine erases the distinction between civilians and
military and legalizes what is illegal under international law: the
Principle of Distinction (between civilian and military) and the Principle
of Disproportionality.

Richard Falk, previously UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the
Occupied Territories, writes that drone warfare and surveillance have
ushered in a new lawlessness; in the global battlefield, wars have no true
endpoint, and everyone, including citizens and residents, are potential
enemies. New fascistic trends include large investment in secret global
surveillance systems in which drones are a no-risk weapon deployed in the
name of “security.”
Morality

Eyal Weizman writes of a degraded moral category of “least possible evil,”
a permissible evil if it prevents an even greater crime. A grim irony is
the view that the Nazi genocide was the worst evil because it was uniquely
methodical, scientific, and technological, yet Israel’s proclaimed
cutting-edge precision methods of control and killing are morally
unquestioned. The military aim is full-spectrum dominance over all movement
on the ground, air, and sea, and inside body and mind. Most often, what
Israeli leaders say and do causes no moral discomfort. Former Israeli Prime
Minister Golda Meir’s was able to say, “We can forgive the Arabs for
killing our children. But we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill
their children. Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children
more than they hate us.” Shaul Mofaz is known as the “butcher of the Jenin
refugee camp” who “mowed the lawn” of humans, and [former Israeli justice
minister Ayelet] Shaked publicly called for the slaughter of Palestinian
mothers who give birth to “little snakes.” Canada allowed Mofaz to speak
and Ayelet to vacation in Canada but refused admission to Israel critic
former British M.P. George Galloway and to pro-BDS peace activist US
Colonel Ann Wright.

In 2004, over one hundred Israelis signed the Olga Document, expressing
shame and guilt: “We are talking of a road that has not been tried
hitherto: being honest with ourselves, with our neighbours and particularly
with the Palestinian people – our enemies who are our brothers and sisters.
If we muster within ourselves the appropriate honesty and requisite
courage, we will be able to take the first step in the long journey that
can extricate us from the tangle of denial, repression, distortion of
reality, loss of direction and forsaking of conscience, in which the people
of Israel have been trapped for generations.” Richard Falk speaks of a
global morality beyond the nation state: “We as species need urgently to
affirm the imperative of serving human interests and to recognize that this
can only begin to occur if people are able to create a vibrant global
political community that embraces the whole of humanity.” This would be
revolutionary but do-able. •
References

   - Noam Chomsky and Laray Polk (2013). Nuclear War and Environmental
   Catastrophe. Seven Stories Press, New York.
   - Norman Finkelstein. (2018). Gaza: An inquest into its Martyrdom.
University
   of California Press, Oakland.
   - Jeff Halper (2015). War Against the People. Israel, the Palestinians
   and global pacification
   <https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745334301/war-against-the-people/>.
   Pluto Press, London.
   - Seymour Hersh (1991). The Samson Option: Israel, America and the bomb.
   Faber and Faber, London.
   - Todd Miller (2019). Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the US Border
   around the World <https://www.versobooks.com/books/2908>. Verso, London
   - Ilan Pappe (2006). The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. One World Press,
   Oxford.
   - Eyal Weizman (2011). The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian
   violence from Arendt to Gaza. Verso, London.

Endnotes

   1. If the global IT industry were a country, only China and the United
   States would contribute more to climate change Greenpeace report
   <https://data-economy.com/data-centres-world-will-consume-1-5-earths-power-2025/>
   . Data Centres of The World Will Consume 1/5 Of Earth’s Power By 2025.
   <https://socialistproject.ca/2019/11/global-israel/#easy-footnote-1-2623>

Judith Deutsch is a member of Independent Jewish Voices, and president of
Science for Peace. She is a psychoanalyst in Toronto. She can be reached at
[email protected].
BDS <https://socialistproject.ca/tag/bds/>

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