Middle East Critique

ISSN: 1943-6149 (Print) 1943-6157 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccri20

Settler Colonialism, Neoliberalism and Cyber

Surveillance: The Case of Israel

Elia Zureik

To cite this article: Elia Zureik (2020): Settler Colonialism, Neoliberalism and Cyber Surveillance:
The Case of Israel, Middle East Critique, DOI: 10.1080/19436149.2020.1732043

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2020.1732043

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Middle East Critique, 2020
https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2020.1732043

Settler Colonialism, Neoliberalism and

Cyber Surveillance: The Case of Israel
ELIA ZUREIK
Queens University, Kingston, Canada

ABSTRACT Cyber technology gradually is becoming an important dimension of globalisation

involving state and non-state actors. The diffusion of cyber technology has occurred in tandem
with political and economic transformations resulting from the transition to neoliberalism and
its associated features of privatisation and deregulation. This process of transformation is not
uniform across the globe. The article analyzes how Israel’s role in the Middle East and beyond
relies heavily on its private high-tech sector to recruit private companies to carry out the
colonial functions of its military rule over the Palestinians, and in reshaping its relationship
with some of the Arab Gulf states in their attempts to confront Iran. While at the economic
level, private securitization is reaping tremendous profits, the Israeli state remains in control of
the core military and political aspects of contracting out and privatising such services.
However, with weak international oversight for the deployment of surveillance technology,
privatisation is wreaking havoc by disrupting democratic norms and threatening civil society.
KEY WORDS: Iran; Israel; Neoliberalism; Palestinians; Saudi Arabia; Settler Colonialism;
Surveillance; UAE; West Bank

The growth of sophisticated Israeli surveillance technologies, dubbed in the tech litera-
ture as the ‘start-up nation,’ has captured the imaginations of many commentators, on
account of the fact that a small country like Israel has managed to join the club of glo-
bally advanced countries in cyber technology.1 Israel boasts the highest per capita con-
centration of cyber companies reaching 0.33 per 100,000 people, compared to 0.04
and 0.16 for the US and the UK, respectively. Privacy International pointed out in its
2016 annual report that, while Israel garners 10 per cent of the global security market,
its exports of cyber security equipment exceeded in 2014 its military hardware exports
for the first time.2 Several factors contributed to this growth. First, there is Israel’s
continued state of war with its neighboring Arab states and the Palestinians in the
occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, although it should be pointed out this character-
ization is changing on account of the confrontation with Iran over which Israel and

Correspondence address: Elia Zureik, Professor Emeritus, Sociology, Queen’s University, Kingston,
Canada. Email: zureike@queensu.ca
1
Katia Moskvitch (2011) How Israel Turned Itself into a High-Tech Hub. BBC News, Nov. 22.
According to the same BBC report, Israel has around 4000 technology start-ups ‘more than any other
country outside the U.S.’ Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-15797257, accessed February
2, 2020; and Alex Kane (2016) How Israel Became a Hub for Surveillance Technology. The Intercept, 17
October.
2
Privacy International (2016), pp. 23–26.
ß 2020 Editors of Middle East Critique
2 E. Zureik

certain Arab Gulf states are cooperating. Israel argues that surveillance has become a
necessary tool for its security. In the name of security, Israel continues to justify the
expansion of its military-industrial- complex and colonization of Palestinian lands. As
one commentator declared, security in Israel is tantamount to theology – it has
semi-sacred status.3 Second, Israel has succeeded in carving out a place for itself that
relies on science and technology knowhow, with its army signals intelligence Unit
8200 performing the task of recruiting and training technical personnel for such com-
panies.4 Third, Israel’s close association with the US and other western countries
which possess advanced surveillance capabilities allowed it to borrow and at times
appropriate freely if illegally advanced surveillance knowledge.5 Fourth, as the Israeli
documentary film The Lab demonstrates, in using the occupied Palestinian territories
and its Arab population as guinea pigs, the Israeli military has succeeded in presenting
itself to the outside world as the master of successful laboratory experiments for test-
ing home-grown surveillance technologies and eventually marketing them globally.6
Fifth, for financial and political reasons, Israel is willing to sell its espionage and sur-
veillance equipment to undemocratic and dictatorial regimes around the globe that are
intent on monitoring activists, dissidents and gays in their midst.7 Finally, lacking the
technological prowess that Israel possesses, Arab countries, particularly those endowed
with financial means such as the Gulf states, do not hesitate to spend inordinate sums
of money to purchase the most advanced products of surveillance technologies to deal
with their domestic critics and neighbouring enemies.
Of the above factors, the origins of Israel’s plans to secure and maintain dominance
in the area of surveillance technology lie in its desire to remain in control of the colon-
ized Palestinian population and the territory they inhabit. In this context, as I have
argued elsewhere,8 Israel resembles a late nineteenth century settler-colonial state.
After more than 100 years of Zionist settler settlement in Palestine, the conflict with
the native Palestinian population shows no signs of abating. On the contrary, Israel has
stepped up its territorial expansion and lately talks of annexing the occupied territories
by means of further land confiscation and displacement of the Palestinians. In so
doing, Israel has been emboldened by the Trump administration’s Middle East policies,
on one side, and its regional hegemony reflected in its plans vis-a-vis Iran and some
Arab Gulf countries whose policies toward Iran converge with those of Israel’s even
though Israel and the Arab Gulf countries do not have formal diplomatic relationships.

3
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2018) Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
4
See Idan Tendler (2015) From the Israeli Amy Unit 8200 to Silicon Valley. Available at: https://
techcrunch.com/2015/03/20/from-the-8200-to-silicon-valley/, accessed December 23, 2018.
5
Asa Winstanley (2018) Israeli Innovation Is Based on Theft, Middle East Monitor, 28 June. Available
at: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20180628-israeli-innovation-is-based-on-theft/, accessed February
6, 2020.
6
Kersten Knipp (2013) The Lab, Deutsche Welle, 12 December. The Israeli activist-lawyer Yotam
Feldman prepared this documentary film.
7
Hagar Shazaf & Jonathan Jacobson (2018) Revealed: Israel’s Cyber-Spy Industry Helps World Dictators
Hunt Dissidents and Gays, in Haaretz, 20 October. Available at: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.
premium.MAGAZINE-israel-s-cyber-spy-industry-aids-dictators-hunt-dissidents-and-gays-1.6573027, accessed
February 2, 2020.
8
Elia Zureik (2016) Israel’s Colonial Project in Palestine: Brutal Pursuit (Milton Park: Routledge); and
Elia Zureik, David Lyon and Yasmeen Abu Laban (eds.) (2011) Surveillance and Control in Israel/
Palestine: Population, Territory and Power (Milton Park: Routledge).
 The Case of Israel 3

It can not be emphasized enough that colonialism, in its direct and indirect forms,
contributed immensely to the development of specific surveillance technologies to
manage populations and territory under colonial rule. Colonial and post-colonial nation
states amplified and innovated in the deployment of surveillance technologies.9
Briefly, it suffices to mention the following innovations to which colonialism contrib-
uted historically: Use of identification cards, finger printing, classification and census
taking, incarceration and prison management, cartography, and control of movement
by means of checkpoints, curfews, enclosures, and the building of walls and watch
towers.10 Wars and violence in general added to the modern methods of control
reflected in the development of biometrics (facial features and iris scanning), drones,
cross referencing by means of big data, artificial intelligence, computer hacking, and
social media.
It is no accident that the proliferation of private surveillance companies is taking
place at a time when neoliberalism as an ideology of weakened government regulation
and oversight is in ascendancy. With cyber technology increasingly available in the
open market,11 such a development threatens democratic norms and opens the door for
strengthening the grip of dictators and authoritarian rulers regionally and domestically.
Our case study demonstrates that the intersection of neoliberalism and colonialism
sends ominous signals for the future of peace between Israel and the colonized
Palestinian population. The article discusses Israel’s cyber technology sector and its
ramifications for military, political, economic and regional dominance. Special atten-
tion will be devoted to analyzing the matrix of cyber control that Israel exercises
vis-a-vis the Palestinians, and in forging new relationships with certain Arab Gulf
countries in their confrontation with Iran.

The Colonial-Neoliberal Factor

In reading an extended review of four books by senior Israeli political scientists and
economists on the state of neoliberalism in Israel, I was struck by the total absence of
any mention of the colonial factor.12 There was reference by some to the occupied ter-
ritories and to the oppressive conditions under which the Palestinian population live,
but no mention of the genesis of the Zionist project going back to the late 1880s, and
the impact Zionism has had on the native population. It is as if the encounter between
the Palestinians and the settlers commenced in the aftermath of the 1967 War. For
example, Ze’ev Sternhell, a historian at the Hebrew University and vocal critic of the
government, highlighted the conditions of life in the West Bank and decried the settle-
ment movement, comparing the far-right in Israel to the fascists of Europe - past and

9
Jay Stanley (2004) The Surveillance-Industrial Complex: How the American Government Is
Conscripting Businesses and Individuals in the Construction of a Surveillance Society (New York:
American Civil Liberties Union). Available at: www.aclu.org, accessed February 2, 2019.
10
The development of mapping techniques by colonial regimes was highly instrumental in facilitating the
illegal acquisition of territory and displacement of indigenous populations. Israel was no exception, as I
show in Israel’s Colonial Project in Palestine, pp. 103–106.
11
Bill Priestap (2019) in an opinion essay on the privatisation of the security industries that, ‘ … it is not
just government spy agencies. We are also witnessing the democratization of spy tools and techniques
that used to be the sole purview of a highly select group of intelligence services. Less sophisticated
services in other countries are now getting into the act.’ The New York Times, 20 July.
12
Asher Shechter (2019), Illiberal Neoliberalism. Tel Aviv Book Review, Winter.
4 E. Zureik

present. As seen by critics such Ahmad Sa’di, a political scientist at Ben Gurion
University, the liberal Zionist narrative assumes that the sin of Israel starts with the
1967 occupation of the West Bank and not with the original sin of ethnic cleansing
during the 1948 Nakba.13
Two recent books addressed the implications of neoliberalism for Israel’s occupation
of the Palestinian territories. First, sociologist Andy Clarno labours hard to untangle
the relationship between neoliberal capitalism and settler colonialism (which he calls
‘neoliberal colonization’) with special reference to the West Bank after the Oslo agree-
ments and to South Africa after apartheid in the early 1990s. He concludes that in
spite different outcomes, with South Africa having succeeded in shedding the yoke of
apartheid while Palestine remained under Israeli military rule for more than half a cen-
tury, both case studies exhibit similar features accompanying the transition to neo-
liberalism. Mindful of the fact that neoliberalism comes with various levels of state
intervention and participation in globalization, the Israeli case demonstrates the transi-
tion to neoliberalism was accompanied with adherence to ultra nationalism reflected in
the recently passed legislation of the new nationality law, that further degraded the sta-
tus of the Palestinian Arab minority in its midst. According to Andy Clarno, the gen-
eral contour of the neoliberal project includes ‘free trade, privatisation, deregulation,
corporate tax breaks, and cuts in social spending; attacks on unions, welfare and
affirmative action; and the promotion of individualism, self-responsibility and entrepre-
neurism.’14 Yet, the Israeli experience with neoliberalism included the expansion of
settlements (made possible by government financial and political backing), ethnic seg-
mentation of the West Bank, and the adoption of a series of ruthless military cam-
paigns against the Palestinian population. Inequality in Israel became pronounced
during the neoliberal transition. Among industrialized countries, Israel ranked second
on the measure of inequality after the United States. Compared to other OECD coun-
tries, Israel spends proportionately the least on its social safety net.15 Neoliberalism
has affected the Palestinians adversely in the West Bank with inequality visible in
urban areas where the concentration of wealth and conspicuous consumption of luxury
goods have become a status marker. The rural West Bank experienced loss of land and
rise in unemployment as a result of Jewish settler expansion in the territories.
A primary function of surveillance is to induce fear among the surveilled and even-
tually to create a self-surveilled population.16 Israel justifies a pervasive and intrusive
surveillance of the Palestinian population as part of its counterinsurgency to protect
state security and contain violent resistance on the part of the Palestinians. In making
use of Jeff Halper’s ‘matrix of control’ concept, Clarno notes Israel’s five-fold meas-
ures of control:17 enclosure and fragmentation of the Palestinian population through
the deployment of checkpoints, walls, fences and bypass roads; control of movement
by means of the permit system, enclosures, and checkpoints; gathering of information
through the use of informers, and high tech surveillance by means of satellites and

13
Ahmad Sa’di (2019) The Nation State of the Jewish People’s Basic Law: A Threshold of Elimination?,
The Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 18(2), November, pp. 163–177.
14
Andy Clarno (2017) Neoliberal Apartheid: Palestine/Israel and South Africa After 1993 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press), p. 11.
15
Ibid, p. 30.
16
See Barry Glassner (1999) The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things (New
York, NY: Basic Books).
17
Ibid, pp. 163–164.
 The Case of Israel 5

drones; military and police raids of Palestinian homes; and finally, Israel use of its
bureaucracy to control and keep tabs on the activities of Palestinians on both sides of
the Green Line, using the information it collects as a mechanism for blackmail.18
Overlooked in the list is the extensive monitoring of internet activity by the security
apparatus of the state in policing the Palestinian population, a practice that I will dis-
cuss in detail below.
Second, Israeli political economist Shir Hever offers a theoretical elaboration and
detailed case studies of the privatization of Israel’s military occupation of the
Palestinian territories.19 He concurs with Neve Gordon20 and others who noted that the
Palestinian Authority (PA) was entrusted by the occupation to implement the policy of
privatization. In Hever’s words, ‘the establishment of the PA is the largest act of pri-
vatization of security in the history of Israel.’21 Policing and operation of prisons and
checkpoints, and the issuing of travel permits to the local population, are considered
the so-called peripheral activities of the security sector (contrasted to core military
activities). An important consequence of this is that the Israeli military absolves itself
from having to face international criticism for its humiliating treatment of the
Palestinians. The blame for the brutal aspects of the occupation is directed at private
companies and the PA. Neoliberalism and privatization favour a shift from the liberal
practice of ‘diplomatic management’ of conflict to one that stresses ‘technological sol-
utions.’22 This led one observer to note that adopting the conflict management
approach of neoliberalism to Palestinian resistance means ‘perpetual conflict.’23 Time
and again Hever highlights the role of the security sector in facilitating upward social
mobility of ‘male, Ashkenazi Jews with high military ranks and strong personal con-
nections.’24 Paraphrasing the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, Hever remarks that
‘neoliberalism reduces the state to nothing more than a provider of security services to
safeguard the property rights of capital’s owners.’25 Furthermore, the German
Transparency International NGO gave Israel a score of Dþ, placing it in a group of
states mostly from the Third World with high risk for corruption. The discourse of
neoliberalism penetrated public discourse in its stress on the ‘culture of emergency.’26
With further entrenchment in the West Bank, Israel found itself with the ‘fourth largest
occupation force in the world.’27 The use of drones, electronic bracelets on prisoners,
voice and facial recognition technology, recording of telephone conversations, bureau-
cratic classification, the travel permit system, and the ‘control and distribution of

18
It is worth noting the work of Yael Berda on colonial bureaucracy. The bureaucracy in the West Bank
and Gaza ‘operates like the British bureaucracy that managed populations of subjects in the colonies.
The colonial model is based on the principle of racial hierarchy, in which there is one legal and
organizational system for the ethnic group in power and another one for the group that is under their
control.’ Quoted in Zureik, Israel’s Colonial Project, p. 120.
19
Shir Hever (2018) The Privatisation of Israeli Security (London: Pluto Press).
20
Neve Gordon (2008) Israel’s Occupation (Berkeley: University of California Press).
21
Hever, Privatisation, p. 117.
22
Ibid, p. 15.
23
Ibid, p. 19; See also Anna Leander (2005) The Market for Force and Public Security: The Destabilizing
Consequences of Private Military Companies, Journal of Peace Research, 42(5), pp. 605–622.
24
Hever, Privatisation, p. 16.
25
Ibid, p. 19.
26
Transparency International, p. 31.
27
Ibid, p. 42.
6 E. Zureik

space’ are the hallmark of the surveillance apparatus that Israel deploys in its occupa-
tion of the West Bank.

Privatization of the Security Industries

High-tech surveillance technology, once the purview of sophisticated spy services
in wealthy countries, is now being offered by private contractors around the
world as part of a highly secretive multibillion-dollar industry.28

Shir Hever demonstrated that two Middle Eastern governments, Saudi Arabia, which
bought the Israeli spyware Pegasus that is manufactured by the NSO Group, and the
United Arab Emirates that relied on the NSO and its own DarkMatter company, used
surveillance technology to spy on their own dissidents with catastrophic results involv-
ing death in one case and long imprisonment in another. Such transaction in such
lethal technology is available on the open market and ‘is barely regulated.’ In 2017,
analysts estimated that there are close to 150 vendors who sell spy surveillance prod-
ucts.29 The market for privatised spyware is valued at $12 billion.30 Not only govern-
ments but also private entities have at their disposal affordable, sophisticated spyware
that allows them to monitor their workforce, competitors, and citizens.31 The overall
size of the private security sector, moreover, grew substantially between 2011 and
2018 from $96 billion to $128 billion.32 As shown in the following breakdown by
region, in 2011 it was $30 Billion for Europe; $15 billion for Asia; $18 billion for
North America; &$5 billion for the Middle East and Africa; and $10 billion for Latin
America. By 2018, it was $36 billion for Europe; $32 billion for Asia; $29 billion for
North America; $12 billion for the Middle East and Africa; and $19 billion for Latin
America. The Middle East and Africa registered the largest increase, 14 per cent.
Israel prides itself on being a successful start-up nation. Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu seized the opportunity in 2010 ‘to jump-start his country’s cyber industry,
unrolling a series of measures to allow veterans of Israel’s version of the National
Security Agency, known as Unit 8200, to create private businesses.’33 It did not take
long for the push toward privatization to spread to the military sector. As a sign of
expanding private acquisition of government-owned military industries, a year ago
Elbit Systems, the largest high-tech company, acquired the Israeli Military Industries
(IMI), a mammoth weapons manufacturer, for $500 million.34

28
Sharon Weinberger (2019), Private Surveillance is a Lethal Weapon Anybody Can Buy. The New York
Times, 19 July.
29
Ibid.
30
William Turton, Ryan Gallagher & Kartikay Mehrotra (2020), Spyware Is Getting So Smart Even the
Billionaires Aren’t Immune. 22 January 2020. Available at: Bloomberg.com, accessed February
2, 2020.
31
Nicole Perloth (2016) How Spy Tech Firms Let Governments See Everything on a Smartphone. The
New York Times, 2 September.
32
E. Mazareanu (ed.) (2019) Size of the Security Services Worldwide from 2011 from 2018, by Region
(in Billions of Dollars). Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/323113/distribution-of-the-
security-services-market-worldwide/, accessed February 2, 2020.
33
Ibid.
34
Steven Sheer & Tova Cohen (2018), Elbit Completes Purchase of Israel’s IMI after Government
Approval, 25 November. Available at: www.Reuters.com, accessed February 6, 2020.
 The Case of Israel 7

Privatizing occupation has two main rationales. First, it agrees with the neoliberal
transition in Israel. Second, as mentioned above, it is easier for the military in Israel to
use the shift to the private sector to evade accusations of human rights violations.
Privatization is introduced to ameliorate the overcrowded conditions at the checkpoints
and the slow processing of Palestinians. One reporter described the conditions at the
checkpoints as follows:

The warehouse-like checkpoint looks like a cattle pen on the inside: Metal bars
on either side and above form a narrow chute, enclosing and herding the
workers—many of whom have traveled from villages more than an hour away—
toward the point where their documents will be checked by Israeli officials. They
then wait on the Israeli side for transport from their employers.35

Between the West Bank and Gaza there are 30 crossing points, half of which have
been privatized since the mid-2000.36 The privatisation of security guards started in
January 2006; currently there are 12 checkpoints run by private guards in the West
Bank and two on the border with Gaza. There are plans to privatize additional check-
points. The Palestinians see no difference in the behaviour of the army and private
guards in their bad treatment of Palestinians. The largest contractor of private security
guards, Modi’in Ezrahi, regularly breaches labour laws with impunity. The Israeli
NGO Who Profits stated in its recent report that ‘private security is one of the fastest-
growing industries in Israel.’ It accounted for $200 million a year.37
A detailed report by Who Profits provides a picture of the extent of the military’s
plans in privatising the prison system in the occupied territories as well as within the
Green Line. The report identifies six prisons for profit, holding what the report cited
as 5,000 Palestinian political prisoners (Ppp), using the services of private companies
to manage the incarceration of Ppp, and equipping the prisoners with electronic
ankle tags.38

Dark Side of Israel’s Cyber Technology Sector

Although cyber technology is emerging as a major method of ubiquitous surveillance,
it is by no means the only or main tool used to collect personal information about peo-
ple. For example, Al Jazeera television network interviewed several Palestinians in
Israel who provided information about their experience at the hands of Israeli domestic
spy agencies such as the Shin Bet that involves extortion, blackmail and torture.39
There is substantial literature on surveillance of Palestinians in Israel that points to
such highly intrusive methods.40

35
Antony Loewenstein & Matt Kennard (2016), How Israel Privatised Its Occupation of Palestine. The
Nation, 14 November, accessed February 6, 2020.
36
Miriam Berger (2017) How Israel Is increasingly Privatising the Occupation of the West Bank.
Newsweek, 23 April.
37
Who Profits (2019) GI Secure Solutions (Petah Tikva: Israel).
38 38
Ibid.
39
Al Jazeera, Inside the Shin Bet, 24 October 2013.
40
Hillel Cohen (2006), Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and Israeli Arabs, 1948-1967
(Berekeley: University of California Press); and H. S. Sa’di (2016) Thorough Surveillance: The Genesis
of Israeli Policies of Population Management (Manchester: Manchester University Press).
8 E. Zureik

Israel is applying predictive policing that relies on computer algorithms, in its

attempt to build profiles of suspected Palestinians through mining big data based on
the use of social media and other platforms. While this has been available to Israel for
some time in its dealing with the Palestinians, the PA now is using predictive policing
as well for arresting Palestinian dissenters in the West Bank. In 2017, Israeli and
Palestinian security agents arrested 800 Palestinians as a result of using predictive
computerized programs to evaluate the contents of their social media participation,
even though they had not committed any violent acts or engaged in protest activities.41
Between 2015 and 2018, Israel arrested more than 500 Palestinians on charges of
incitement. Sarah Brayne has pointed out that predictive policing is used in several
states in the US and has come under attack by civil liberties organizations, which
argue that the practice reinforces police bias by focusing on minorities and immi-
grants.42 Palestinians have complained that the Israeli government seems oblivious to
racist remarks and other incitements frequently made by right-wing Israeli Jews against
Palestinians. A crucial flaw in the use of predictive policing analytics is that it is based
on past activities of individuals and is probabilistic in nature.
One Palestinian organization, 7Amleh – The Arab Center for Social Media
Advancement, dedicated to tracking internet usage points out that ‘Israel has developed
a predictive policing system that identifies suspects based on algorithmic predictions
rather than evidence. This system also allows Israeli intelligence routinely to hack into
Palestinian accounts to obtain private information. All of this personal data then is
stored and in many cases used to extort or blackmail the person and turn them into a
collaborator.’43 The country’s large military-industrial complex, compounded with col-
laborative efforts between the Israeli government and Facebook, has enabled Israel to
monitor its occupied population on a massive and intrusive scale.’44 Amira Hass, a
reporter for Haaretz newspaper, discovered recently that the introduction of biometrics
in Israel is making its way to the checkpoints in the occupied territories. Personal data
is being collected and stored in a database on Palestinians above 50 years of age whose
mobility is monitored by the occupation forces in the West Bank.45
A study by ipoke.co of social media reveals that two-thirds of Palestinians in Gaza,
the West Bank and Israel subscribe to the internet. Based on internet data, the follow-
ing social media subscriptions among Palestinians for 2018 are: Facebook 88 percent;
WhatsApp 84 percent; Instagram 57 percent; YouTube 45 percent; Snapchat 34 per-
cent; and Twitter 23 percent.46

41
John Brown (2017) Arrest of Palestinians for Potential Terror Attacks Brings New Meaning to
‘Minority Report’, Haaretz, 24 April; and Nadim Nashif & Marwa Fatafta (2017), The Israeli
Algorithm Criminalizing Palestinians for Online Dissent, in Open Democracy, 4 October. For an
elaborate discussion of predictive policing pitfalls, see Leo Hickman (2013) How Algorithms Rule the
World. The Guardian, 1 July.
42
See Sarah Brayne (2017) Big Data Surveillance: The Case of Policing, American Sociological Review,
82(5), pp. 997–1008.
43
7amlehThe Arab Centre for Social Media Advancement (2018) Facebook and Palestinians: Biased or
Neutral Content Moderation Policies? Report, October, p. 4.
44
Ibid, p. 6.
45
Amira Hass (2019) Renovated Checkpoints Mean that Palestinians no Longer Feel Like Cows Being
Led to the Slaughter. Haaretz, 25 May.
46
Facebook and Palestinians, p. 11.
 The Case of Israel 9

While the Israeli government initially accused Facebook of being a ‘catalyst in vio-
lence against Israeli citizens,’47 eventually Facebook signed investment agreements
with Israeli cyber technology companies starting in March 2011, and in 2013
Facebook bought the Israeli start up company Onavo for $200 million. Not long after
this, Facebook reported earning $300 million from advertising in Israel. After initial
government attacks on Facebook’s activities in Israel for being pro-Palestinians,
Facebook took the step of appointing a senior advisor of Netanyahu as Head of its
Policy at the Facebook’s office in Tel Aviv. The Ministry of Justice established in
2015 the ‘cyberspace enforcement challenges’ unit. In 2017, 85 percent of Israeli com-
plaints to Facebook about Palestinian posts resulted in their removal or blocking their
participation. This occurred without resorting to the courts prior to their removal.
Close to three-hundred cases involved the shutting down of Palestinian accounts, and
in the first six months of 2018 a total of 83 pages, 62 accounts and 16 pieces of con-
tent were removed or suspended by Facebook.48 ‘As for Palestinians living under
Israeli military rule in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, 300 people were arrested by
the occupying forces in 2017 on charges related to Facebook posts.49 The Palestinian
NGO 7amleh reported that between October 2016 and April 2018, 150 Palestinian
arrests were made based on incitement, almost double that in previous years. Between
2015 and 2016, around 800 Palestinians were arrested according to Haaretz and
another 300 were arrested in 2017, all charged with incitement on Facebook.’50 The
success of the Israeli government in having Facebook comply with its requests to
remove pages by Palestinian subscribers is provided by The Arab Centre for the
Advancement of Social Media. Its records show that between 2014 and 2017,
Facebook agreed to remove more than 2,000 such pages, broken down as follows: 343
in 2014; 468 in 2015; 730 in 2016; and 837 in 2017.51
In contrast to accusing Palestinians of incitement, there is an increase in incitement
against Palestinians from the Jewish side. The Arab Centre for Social Media
Advancement revealed that 82 percent of Jewish incitements against Palestinians
appeared on Facebook, yet there are few repercussions for Jewish users. Using an
Index of Racism and Incitement, the report concludes ‘This index was developed by
monitoring violent and inciting rhetoric according to a list of 100 keywords of expres-
sions, names and personalities in Hebrew. The results were as follows; 445,000 calls
for incitement against Palestinians were published in 2017, on average there was one
inciting post every 71 seconds, and there are 50,000 active Israeli users who wrote at
least one violent post against Palestinians in 2017 and one out of nine posts about
Palestinians or Arabs contain a call to violence or a curse.’52 Yet, as Adalah, a
Palestinian NGO civil rights organization stated, ‘in 2016, 82 percent of incitement-
related arrests in Israel were of Palestinian citizens, compared to only 18 percent of
Israeli Jewish citizens.’53

47
Ibid., p. 7
48
Ibid., p. 12.
49
Ibid., p. 28.
50
Ibid., p.14.
51
7amleh (2018) Connection Interrupted: Israel’s Control of the Palestinian ICT Infrastructure and Its
Impact on Digital Rights.
52
Ibid., p. 15.
53
Ibid., p. 17.
10 E. Zureik

Shining the Light on the NSO Group and Other Companies

The Israeli cyber spy manufacturer NSO Group, established in 2008, is among the
largest Israeli high-tech companies operating in the shadowy world of espionage and
spying to have penetrated civil society. In 2014, the company Francisco Partners
acquired a 70 percent stake in NSO for $120 million; as a sign of its success, NSO
bought back the company for close to one billion dollars.54 According to knowledge-
able sources, such as Citizen Lab, a privacy research group at the University of
Toronto, and Amnesty International, Israel’s NSO high-tech manufacturer played a
major role in selling its Pegasus spyware, designed to penetrate mobile phones, to
countries like Mexico, Myanmar, Saudi Arabi, United Arab Republic and many others.
Invariably, these countries used the spyware to monitor the activities of their dissidents
and foreign governments.55 Mexico bought the Israeli spyware and used it extensively
to detrimental effects among its dissident community. As of March 2019, there were
25 known cases involving the use of the Israeli spyware in Mexico.56 Similarly, it was
revealed that the UAE spied on one of its dissidents using the Israeli spyware to land
a UAE human rights activist in prison for a 10-year period.57 Citizen Lab discovered
that the usage of Pegasus has expanded significantly in the Gulf Cooperative Council
countries, and is used in 36 of the 45 countries it monitored. These are countries, the
report notes, of ‘dubious human rights records’ and have a history of using abusive
Pegasus spyware in civil society.58
The same New York Times article cited above also reported that a high-level Saudi
advisor told ‘employees from the company, NSO Group, … of grand plans to use its
surveillance tools throughout the Middle East and Europe, like Turkey and Qatar or
France and Britain.’59 The report took this to mean that ‘The Saudi government’s reli-
ance on a firm from Israel, an adversary for decades, offers a glimpse of a new age of
digital warfare governed by few rules and of a growing economy, now valued at $12
billion, of spies for hire.’60 The report also mentioned that The United Arab Emirates
was encouraging the manufacture and use of surveillance equipment by its private
company DarkMatter, thus signalling the emergence of so-called digital combat.
‘Privatised spying,’ the article claimed, emerges as a new form of warfare that is gov-
erned by few rules where cyber mercenaries operate freely in the neoliberal world.61
Black Cube, which is linked to the defunct Cambridge Analytica has a history of
spying on President Barak Obama, is another Israeli company that is run by former
Mossad and intelligence operatives. Their notoriety of the company is due to its having
worked for Harvey Weinstein to dig up information on his Hollywood accusers in the

54
Hager Shezaf & Jonathan Jacobson (2018) Revealed: Israel’s Cyber-spy Industry Helps World
Dictators Hunt Dissidents and Gays. 20 October. Available at: Haaretz.com, accessed February 2, 2020.
55
Ibid.
56
The Associated Press (2019) Israeli Spyware Used to Target Slain Mexican Journalist’s Widow, Report
Says. Haaretz, 21 March.
57
Mark Mazzetti, Adam Goldman, Ronen Bergman & Nicole Perlroth (2019) A New Age of Warfare:
How Internet Mercenaries do Battle for Authoritarian Governments. The New York Times, 21 March.
58
Bill Marczak, John Scott-Railton, Sarah McKune, Bahr Abdul Razzak, and Ron Deibert (2018). Hide
and Seek: Tracking NSO Group’s Pegasus Spyware to Operations in 45 Countries. Citizen Lab
Research Report No. 113, University of Toronto, September.
59
Mazzetti, Goldman, Bergman & Perlroth, ‘A New Age of Warfare’, p. 1.
60
Ibid.
61
Ibid.
 The Case of Israel 11

sex scandals.62 Psy-Group, known previously by the name Invop, was forced to liquid-
ate its activities after its officers were interviewed and its computers seized in connec-
tion with the Robert Mueller III investigation. It specialized in manipulating social
media, worked for Russian oligarchs and offered Donald Trump’s electoral campaign
assistance in 2016 to secure swing votes from Republican delegates in the primary
elections.63 It is significant to note that the now defunct Cambridge Analytica also per-
formed a similar role in influencing swing voters to support Donald Trump in the
2016 elections.64
The NSO and other private surveillance firms are quick to point out that their prod-
ucts are intended to fight terrorism and not violate individual privacy. However, after
extensive investigation into the NSO’s mode of operation in Mexico, a report con-
cluded there was no evidence that the use of Pegasus and other NSO products resulted
in positive outcomes. On the contrary, innocent civilians, journalists and human rights
activists suffered torture and death at the hands of government agents in Mexico and
other authoritarian regimes like Saudi Arabia and the UAE by using NSO surveil-
lance tools.
The NSO rejects claims that the application of its technology resulted in human
rights violations, and that it has evidence its technology is used to fight terrorism and
crime. Moreover, NSO claims that, before selling its products, it secures prior assur-
ance from government clients that its surveillance products will not be used in viola-
tions of human rights, and any misuse of its technology is carried out independently
by the governments concerned. The evidence on the negative side of the balance sheet
seems to outweigh significantly NSO positive claims. A landmark case is the com-
plaint by Amnesty International against NSO. In pursuing NSO in court seeking orders
to revoke its license, Amnesty’s program director in Israel made the following state-
ment in November 2018:

The mountain of evidence and reports about the NSO Group and the sale of its
spyware to violating human rights regimes is substantial proof that NSO has
gone rogue.65

The Israeli defense ministry rejected Amnesty International’s claim that Saudi
Arabian agents used Pegasus spyware in the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.66
The United Arab Emirates as early as 2011 was using Israeli spyware to surveill
human rights activists, in this case one citizen living in Canada, and has attempted to
poach employees of Unit 8200.67 The discovery of NSO Group involvement in

62
Ed Pilkington (2020) Harvey Weinstein Hired Black Cube to Block New York Times Article, Jury
Hears. The Guardian, 30 January, accessed February 6, 2020.
63
Amarelle Wenkert (2018) Israeli Company Investigated by Robert Mueller’s Team Shuts Down,
CTECH, 21.
64
Craig Timberg & Rosalind S. Helderman (2019) Brittany Kaiser’s Work with Cambridge Analytica
Helped Elect Donald Trump. She is Hoping the World will Forgive Her. Washington Post, 2 August;
See Also the Netflix documentary about the same subject with the title, The Great Hack, 2019.
65
Amnesty International (2018) Israel: ‘Rogue’ NSO Group must have License Revoked over
Controversial Surveillance Software. 23 November.
66
Lee Jay Walker (2019), Israel and NSO Group: Pegasus Spyware found in over 40 Nations Is Alarming
to Journalists. Modern Tokyo News, 8 March.
67
Amarelle Wenkert (2019) New York Times: Emirati Surveillance Firm Poached NSO Employees.
CTECH, 25 March.
12 E. Zureik

devising hacker attacks on WhatsApp and the link to the murder of the Saudi dissident
Jamal Khashoggi by the Canadian Citizen Lab team prompted NSO group agents on
two occasions to pose as investors to lure Citizen Lab research team members
for meetings.68
It should not be overlooked that Unit 8200 was implicated in the abuse of
Palestinian civil rights to the extent that dozens of its veterans protested in a letter
against spying and intrusive monitoring of Palestinians. The army dismissed the offi-
cers who signed the letter. According to the BBC:

Dozens of veterans of an elite Israeli military signals intelligence unit have

said they will no longer serve in operations against Palestinians. Forty-three
past and present reservists signed a letter about Unit 8200, which carries out
electronic surveillance said the intelligence it gathered - much of it concerning
innocent people - was used to ‘deepen military rule’ in the Occupied
Territories.69

It also has been revealed that AnyVision,70 a prominent start-up Israeli biometric
company that specializes in face, body and object recognition, and uses artificial intel-
ligence in its technology, has secured a large contract from the Israeli military to
monitor the crossing points into the West Bank, and to check the identity of
Palestinian residents by linking various cameras installed deep throughout the territo-
ries and accessing the captured images. It is precisely this activity that is behind the
current criticism by the ACLU and other human rights organizations of Microsoft for
joining several high-tech companies in funding further development of AnyVision’s
face recognition technology. The criticism is based on the claim that AnyVision uses
the technology to spy on Palestinians in the West Bank on behalf of the Israeli govern-
ment.71 The company boasts of 500 percent increase in its revenue, vouching ‘they
only sell to democracies with proper regimes.’ According to press coverage, its tech-
nology boasts 99.9% accuracy. The president of AnyVision is a former head of the
Israeli Defense Forces security establishment, and one of its advisors is a previous
Mossad chief. The company operates in 43 countries and in more than 350 ‘crowded’
sights such as stadiums, airports and casinos. Jay Stanley of the ACLU warned against
the use of videos as part of predictive analysis because they lead to criminalization
‘among other things on the basis of facial misdemeanors, skin color, clothing, voice
and more.’72

68
Raphael Satter (2019) Researchers who Found Israeli Link to Khashoggi Murder Face ‘Sinister’
Targeting. The Times of Israel, 26 January.
69
BBC (2014) Israeli Intelligence Veterans Refuse to Spy on Palestinians. 12 September. See also Peter
Beaumont (2014) Three Israeli intelligence Veterans Talk about Their Experience in the Palestinian
Territories. The Guardian, 12 September. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/12/
israeli-intelligence-reservists-refuse-serve-palestinian-territories/print, accessed February 6, 2020.
70
Amitai Ziv (2019) Revealed: The Intriguing Israeli Start-Up that Operates Secretly in the Territories.
The Marker, 14 July [in Hebrew].
71
Thomas Brewster (2019) Microsoft Slammed for Investment in Israeli Facial Recognition ‘Spying on
Palestinians’. Forbes Magazine, 1 August.
72
Jay Stanley (2019) The Dawn of Robot Surveillance, ACLU report, 17 June, available online at: https://
www.aclu.org/report/dawn-robot-surveillance, accessed February 6, 2020.
 The Case of Israel 13

For better or worse, the affordability of digital technology is having a level-

ling effect on access to cyber technology for surveillance purposes.73
Developing and advanced countries seem to be engaged in sinister spying
activities on civil society. A survey of international experts, which documented
a correlation between regime authoritarianism and digital repression, concluded:

Many repressive governments use digital means to monitor and silence

human rights defenders and political activists. For instance, Human Rights
Watch recently documented the cases of 140 individuals in Gulf states
who have been targeted by their governments for surveillance and
repression.74

Convergence of Interests
For those who follow the unfolding of relations between the GCC and Israel, it is not
surprising that, despite historical attempts to conceal any substantial cooperation in the
absence of any resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, the conflict with Iran and the
desire of the Gulf countries to beef up their military defenses has brought about import-
ant changes.75 As Ian Black, a seasoned researcher on the Middle East, remarked:

Israel’s publicly available foreign trade data does not show any direct trade in
recent years with countries such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE but an analysis of
goods flows via third countries suggest the true amount is ‘close to’ $1 billion
annually with the potential for growth of up to $25 billion.76

Israel coordinates its efforts with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to pre-
sent a united front in confronting Iran. As early as 2011 Israel sold military equipment
worth $300 million to UAE, and ‘Israel’s strengthened economic and security cooper-
ation with the GCC bloc is closely related to the GCC’s growing indifference to the
situation in Palestine, and Riyadh’s single-minded desire to undercut Iranian influence

73
It is instructive that spying is spreading to civil society organizations. For example, during the last
Israeli elections the Likud political party of Netanyahu used hidden body cameras on self-appointed
monitors of Arab polling stations. See Reuters (2019) Minority Arabs in Israel Object to Cameras at
Polling Centers. Available at: https://in.reuters.com/article/israel-election-cameras-idINKCN1RL1LD.
The elections committee finally banned the use of such cameras except when irregularities
are suspected.
74
Center for International Governance and Innovation (2017) With Authoritarianism and State
Surveillance on the Rise, How Can Civil Society be Protected from Digital Threats?
OpenCanada.Org, report. Available at: file:///G:/Sept.%202018/gulf%20spyware/With%
20authoritarianism%20and%20state%20surveillance%20on%20the%20rise,%20how%20can%
20civil%20society%20be%20protected%20from%20digital%20threats_.html, accessed February 6,
2020. See also the BBC (2017) Weapons of Mass Surveillance, a documentary that focuses on the
use of cyber technology, 7 July. Available online at: file://G:/Sept.%202018/gulf%20spyware/
Weapons%20Of%20Mass%20Surveillance%20-%20BBC%20News.html, accessed July 6, 2019.
75
Samuel Ramani (2017) Israel Is Strengthening Its Ties with the Gulf Monarchies. Huffpost,
13 September.
76
Ian Black (2019) Just Below the Surface: Israel, the Arab Gulf States and the Limits of Cooperation,
London School of Economics, March.
14 E. Zureik

in the Middle East.’77 Furthermore, ‘clandestine cooperation is thought to include

Israeli intelligence surveillance of Iran and the supply of drones used in Yemen. Israel
reportedly granted the UAE access to the Israeli-built Eros B satellite and its high-
resolution imagery.’78
It is thus natural to expect further cooperation between Israel and the UAE in the
area of cyber war. On 30 January 2017, the UAE complained about hacking of its
National Electronic Security Authority. Because of an on-going blockade of fellow
GCC member Qatar by the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and non-GCC member Egypt,
the finger was pointed at Qatar, as well as Turkey and Iran. A mini cyber war between
Saudi Arabia and UAE, on one side, and Qatar, on the other, ensued. During the same
period in May 2017, the Qatari News Agency and Al Jazeera were hacked. The sus-
pects were Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Four years earlier, the UAE had bought spy
software from the Israeli firm NSO, and used it to hack targets in Qatar, Amnesty
International, journalists, and human rights activists.79

Conclusions
This study of cyber technology situated its deployment in the political economy frame-
work whose focus for our purpose is the interplay between settler colonialism, regional
politics and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank for over half a century. As well, the
article documented the role Israel played in providing the Arab Gulf countries of
Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates with surveillance technology to accomplish
three objectives: (1) To assist these countries to withstand internal dissension by liqui-
dating domestic critics to protect the regime in question: (2) Israel hopes to foster
future diplomatic ties with these countries based on equipping them with cyber tech-
nology and other military aid; and (3) Israel will rely on military and logistical cooper-
ation with Saudi Arabia and UAE in any future war with Iran.
A neoliberal world with weak oversight over digital regulation, creates an atmos-
phere that encourages lawless behaviour by cyber spy corporations that are driven
mainly by the profit motive. Several examples where human rights have suffered as a
result were noted.80
Neoliberalism has a pernicious effect, particularly when examined in the context of
colonial rule, as the case of Israel’s behavior in the occupation of Palestine demon-
strates. Israel pursued the intersection of surveillance, in the form of cyber technology,
and neoliberalism in the implementation of its colonial project in Palestine.
Neoliberalism and privatisation have operated without meaningful safeguards for the
human rights of the Palestinians. This article has shown how Israel used discursive
surveillance in the form of monitoring the internet and social media participation to
criminalize the Palestinians.

77
Ramani, ‘Israel Strengthening Ties.’
78
Black, ’Below the Surface.’
79
Tech Boost Daily (2019) UAE Buys Its Way toward Supremacy in Gulf Cyberwar, Using US and
Israeli Experts. 1 February.
80
See Lior Volinz (2018) Governance through pluralization: Jerusalem’s modular security provision.
Security Dialogue, 49(6), pp. 438–456. Volinz points out that the adoption of ‘modular’ security
arrangements in East Jerusalem that relies on private and public actors, Israel was able to implement
punitive policies vis-a-vis the Palestinian population that evade ‘political and legal accountability.’
(p. 452).
 The Case of Israel 15

The use of a panoply of surveillance equipment, of which Israel is a major manufac-

turer, has made social control of the Palestinian population easier to attain. Contracting
the PA to do some of occupation’s dirty business has not helped to alleviate the harsh
living conditions that the Palestinian population faces. One should not rule out the pos-
sibility that if the situation remains as it is or worsens, a mass uprising also might tar-
get the Palestinian Authority.

Acknowledgments
The author is indebted to David Lyon and Andre Mazawi for their constructive comments.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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