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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: September 17, 2007 12:48:59 AM PDT
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Subject: Fwd: How War Was Turned Into A Brand
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From: "Jim S." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: September 17, 2007 12:31:56 AM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: How War Was Turned Into A Brand
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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18400.htm
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
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2104440,00.html
"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 -- U.S.-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 I.D.s, 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 (S.D.S.),
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, S.D.S. 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 U.S.
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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