Strategies of Surveillance: The Israeli Gaze

 

As a feature of power, surveillance in everyday life is involved in the constitution of subjectivities at the level of desire, fear, security, trust, and risk – all of which ultimately impact human dignity and individual autonomy. It is broadly accepted that surveillance refers to “the focused, systematic and routine attention to personal details for purposes of influence, management, protection or direction.”[1] The assumption underlying this view of surveillance is that organizations, be they public or private, are engaged foremost in the collection of data for the sake of population management, national security, and financial transactions, among other objectives. In the process, however, there is the danger of privacy violations. Most commentators agree that surveillance implies intrusiveness into one’s private domain and, indeed, personal autonomy and dignity.

 

Though privacy and surveillance are usually considered nemeses, philosopher Lucas Introna argues that they are co-constitutive of each other. Moreover, privacy is a requisite to autonomy, for “without privacy there would be no self.”[2] Greater privacy requires greater trust, but, paradoxically, surveillance is required to produce trust.[3] The contingent relationship between surveillance, trust, privacy, and risk must be underscored. Privacy laws are essential to regulating the protection of personal information and safeguarding against state and other forms of intrusion. These matters become especially problematic in conflict zones where security and risk are correlated in a particular way. In times of ethnic conflicts, governments are able to rule by capitalizing on citizens’ fear, and surveillance of all kinds in everyday life is promoted as necessary to reducing fear and risk. Paradoxically, however, intensive surveillance is shown to correlate with feelings of paranoia and psychosis.[4] As Spurgeon Thompson states, paranoia “is the inevitable result of living with intensive state surveillance.”[5]

 

Immediately after the attack of 11 September 2001, fear for personal and national security figured prominently in the debate about the “war on terror.” In fact, according to public opinion data in the West, to question the introduction of intrusive surveillance techniques as a deterrent to terrorism was tantamount to compromising state security.[6] In time, the public has moved away from unquestioning acceptance of limitations on personal freedom and privacy in the name of national security. So pervasive has the discourse of security-cum-fear become that, according to Mike Davis, “the globalization of fear became a self-fulfilling prophecy.”[7]

 

In recent years, with the rise of the political right under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership, this “globalization of fear” has been reflected in the passage of a slew of bills in the Knesset that disproportionately target the Arab minority, although some have a wider scope and affect individual rights in general.[8] In March 2011, the Knesset passed a contentious bill commonly identified as the “Nakba Bill,” which empowers the finance minister to withhold financial support from associations, organizations, and local councils that commemorate the Palestinian Nakba on Israel’s Independence Day. That same month, the Knesset also approved the amendment to the Citizenship Law in its third reading – permitting revocation of the citizenship of anyone convicted of “terrorism,” espionage, or any other act that harms state sovereignty – and passed an amendment to the Communal Societies Law that empowered local “admissions committees” for small communities in the Naqab and the Galilee to effectively bar Arabs from homogenous Jewish towns.[9] A law currently under consideration demands a loyalty oath to confirm the allegiance of non-Jews seeking to obtain official Israeli documents such as an identity card through marriage, immigration, or residency. The Loyalty Oath Law would make it possible to deny or strip individuals of their citizenship for alleged “disloyalty” to the state. This pending law stipulates that Israel is a “Jewish, Zionist and democratic state,” something that Palestinian citizens and some secular Jews object to because the law overrides the ethnic and national feelings of one-fifth of the population of Israel. [10] (Yisrael Beiteinu, the party of Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, has led these efforts.)[11] These are examples of a number of “anti-democratic bills,” whether enacted or pending, according to the Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI).[12]

 

Israeli writer Seth Freedman points out that the Jewish history of suffering is used callously by the State of Israel to create a permanent “culture of fear” in order to justify its brutal security measures toward the Palestinians. In 2008, Freedman described the transformation that he underwent after deciding to take a stroll in the Palestinian town of Bethlehem dressed in civilian clothes rather than in a military uniform:

 

 

 

I gazed casually at the same windows and doors at which I’d previously had to stare, hawk-like, in case a gunman or bomber should burst out and attack our squad. I looked calmly at the same gangs of youths who, when I was in uniform, I’d had to judge in an instant – whether they were benignly intentioned or baying for my blood.

 

       The fear instilled in me by the army all but dissipated once I was simply a tourist strolling through the town. Conversely, the more weaponry and protective gear I carried, the more terrifying the place became which, it dawned on me, was a distillation of Israel’s core and eternal paradox – one that has dogged it since the moment the state was created.[13]

 

 

 

Throughout the passage, Freedman’s emphasis on the Israeli gaze is notable. The gaze metaphor in surveillance studies owes its origin to Jacques Lacan’s “mirror stage” theory, in which the gaze of colonial power “corresponds to the ‘gaze of the grande-autre’ [i.e., the Other].”[14] Surveillance, then, is intimately linked to the process of Othering, whereby the colonizer’s self-affirmation and identity construction are configured on the basis of stigmatizing and denigrating the identity of the Other, the colonized. Through surveillance, “the identification, objectification and subjection of the subject are simultaneously enacted: the imperial gaze defines the identity of the subject, objectifies it within the identifying system of power relations and confirms its subalterneity and powerlessness.”[15] Indeed, a key feature of colonial surveillance, of which Israel/Palestine proves no exception, is its racialization of the colonized.[16]

 

Palestinians experience a generalized feeling of being watched and surveilled.[17] Body searches, identity documentation, standing in line for hours awaiting a signal from Israeli soldiers to either proceed or be turned away are emblematic of the checkpoint experience, which is characterized by dehumanization, lack of sovereignty, and overall limitation on free movement. Population registration – including the census and the permit regimes governing the movement of people that Israel introduced in the pre- and post-1967 periods in the name of state security – was crafted in such a way as to further spatial control and the expansion of Jewish colonies, restrict mobility, and stunt economic development of the Arab sector.[18] With walls and fences, checkpoints, watchtowers, and segregation barriers in the background, not to mention the panoply of high-technology surveillance machinery, researchers point out that the permit regime is best viewed as the intersection of carceral (body) control, mobility, and biopolitics.[19] The following article will address the development of Israeli surveillance practices within their colonial contexts.

 

 

 

Colonial Practices of Surveillance

 

 

 

As declassified official documents become available to researchers, it is possible to piece together the surveillance methods used by colonial regimes in ruling over their colonies.[20] Two features are central to colonial surveillance as an essential instruments of ruling and state formation: the production of objects of colonial surveillance and the quotidian context of people watching people; and the formal aspect of colonial policies that are embodied in bureaucratic, enumerative, and legal measures aimed at controlling territory by classifying and categorizing the population through what Martha Kaplan calls “panopticism.”[21] It is significant that the basic tools of surveillance as we know them today (i.e., fingerprinting, census taking, mapmaking, and profiling), which include the forerunners of present-day biometrics, were refined and implemented in colonial settings, notably by the Dutch in Southeast Asia, the French in Africa, and the British in India and North America.[22] Even the panopticon itself, the Foucauldian icon of surveillance par excellence, was, as Timothy Mitchell notes, “a colonial invention. The panoptic principle was devised on Europe’s colonial frontier with the Ottoman Empire, and examples of the panopticon were built for the most part not in northern Europe, but in places like colonial India.”[23]

 

“Ruling by records,” as Richard Saumarez Smith calls it, is a cornerstone of colonialism, as it is of any modern administrative body.[24] The important distinction in the case of colonialism is that the classification criteria of land, population, and other forms of recordkeeping have serious implications for governing and dispossessing indigenous populations.[25] From the perspective of surveillance as well as administration, counting people is not an objective, neutral exercise. Both who does the counting and how people are counted have ramifications for biopolitics and governance, as does their categorization. As Ann Laura Stoler writes, “the power of categories rests in their capacity to impose the realities they ostensibly only describe. Classification here is not a benign cultural act but a potent political one.”[26] It should be noted that from the mid-eighteenth century onward, for example, the British cultivated “colonial knowledge” that was embedded in a corpus of Orientalist tropes. As Edward Said astutely noted: “To divide, deploy, schematize, tabulate, index, and record everything in sight (and out of sight) . . . are the features of Orientalist projections.”[27]

 

The power of counting and categorization can be seen not only when governments target specific vulnerable groups, usually on the basis of race or ethnicity,[28] but also through the refusal to count or record. Since in modern nation-states censuses are associated with citizenship rights, the exclusion of certain groups from enumeration has negative consequences, such as the denial of citizenship rights and their associated social benefits.

 

As pointed out above, the constructivist aspect of surveillance takes on special meaning in colonial and postcolonial regimes. The recording of census data involves interpretation and identity construction, according to which censuses and other population data are grouped, sorted, and labeled in ways that reflect the administrative needs of those in power. In his masterful work on colonial India, however, C. A. Bayly shows how the gathering of information involved not only census and survey data about the population and territory but also information gathered through informal surveillance by astrologers, physicians, marriage brokers, and holy men.[29] Likewise in Palestine, the British were not able to rule by records alone and had to rely on “local knowledge” and the appointment of village leaders who facilitated the collection of population and land ownership data. Taking this into consideration, Michael Fischbach asks, “beyond the obvious degree to which data and information helped Britain rule Palestine, did such surveillance transform the basic nature of Arab life in Palestine as a result?”[30] He answers that “the record would suggest that they did not, not because of any weakness in the transformative power of the data, but because of Palestinian resistance to the Mandate itself and the Zionist project, and because the British need to work with the Palestinians in implementing certain policies forced them to temper their outside, unilateral decision making.”[31]

 

The following article will address both of these aspects of colonial surveillance – the construction of objects of surveillance and the practices of people watching people – as they pertain to Israel/Palestine. It will do so by looking at how surveillance produces space, both in maps on and on the ground; how it counts and categorizes people, particularly by issuing identity documents; and how these documents are used to limit the mobility of the Palestinian population, to slow down and even freeze their lives. It will examine the construction of networks of informants and how the control of space, time, and mobility abet that process. Finally, it will turn to the “cutting edge” of surveillance – biometrics – and discuss briefly the application of technologies of surveillance developed for colonized populations to the colonizer’s society, while locating some current and potential avenues for resistance to Israel’s surveillance.

 

 

 

Spaces of Surveillance

 

 

 

In Palestine, the Zionist focus on territorial control resulted in an obsession with mapmaking and the mastery of cartography for military and colonizing purposes. Efrat Ben-Ze’ev shows how the British role was essential in training the fledgling Israeli army and providing it with cartographic and mapmaking knowledge that was brought to bear in 1948 in capturing Arab territory and eventually driving the Palestinian population out of the country.[32] Of particular interest here is the way Zionist strategists utilized British cartographic knowledge and resources to acquire maps about Palestine (stolen in some cases) and to learn the art of mapmaking.[33] A key Zionist organization that compiled maps of Palestine and comprehensive lists of Palestinian villages and landholdings for military and settlement purposes was Shai, the intelligence arm of the Haganah. Rona Sela’s investigative report about the Haganah’s aerial surveillance and spying activities in the 1940s demonstrates that they were instrumental in preparing the so-called village files as a prelude to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948.[34] These files, which included maps, aerial photographs, textual surveys, and socioeconomic data about the villages, were meant to serve military and intelligence purposes. The data compiled were instrumental during the 1948 war and the ensuing mass expulsion of Palestinians; after the establishment of the state, the information was utilized to provide demographic data on the Palestinians remaining in Israel, who were then subjected to nearly two decades of military rule.[35] After 1948, including the post-1967 period, map production was also overtly tied to the expansion of Jewish settlements.

 

Mark Neocleous’s observation that maps embody ideological assumptions that reflect power relations among contesting parties is supported by other writers, notably the eminent geographer John Harley, who views maps as texts to be subjected to discourse analysis, and Mark Monmonier, who warns that “maps lie” while at the same time performing a surveillance function.[36] Although a number of scholars have explored the possibilities of “counter-mapping” as a tool of resistance,[37] according to Harley, “Maps are preeminently a language of power, not of protest.”[38] It is important not to lose sight of the dialectics of power relations in the Palestinian case.[39]

 

Beyond mapping, Israeli strategies for control of Palestinian space also have their roots in the British Mandate period. Laleh Khalili, who has explored the “horizontal circuits through which colonial policing or ‘security’ practices have been transmitted across time or from one location to another, with Palestine as either a point of origin or an intermediary node of transmission,”[40] notes that the geographic containment of the Palestinian population – through land expropriation, application of curfews, and restrictions of mobility through the deployment of permit regimes and checkpoints – is key to surveillance, policing, and counter-insurgency. Thus: “Although Israeli settler colonialism is predicated on expulsion, carceral methods are used throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) via encirclement and enclavization of vast terrains.”[41] While the British constructed watchtowers and “security fences” to cope with the Arab Revolt (hiring a Zionist construction company and Jewish personnel to build them), Israel has constructed the separation wall to contain the Palestinian population.[42]

 

Glenn Bowman uses encystation and entombment as metaphors to describe the effects of the wall’s encirclement of the Palestinian populations in the towns of Bethlehem, Qalqiliya, and Tulkarm. He points out that the objective is to put the Palestinians beyond the sight and reach of the Israeli Jewish population, to effectively quarantine the Palestinians, who (in the Israeli view) put the “surrounding social body at risk.”[43] Ron Smith, meanwhile, has explored the Palestinian subaltern experience in coping with Israeli imposed “graduated incarceration” in the occupied Palestinian territories.[44]

 

The architect Eyal Weizman has provided a substantial spatially-focused analysis of Israeli monitoring of the Palestinians in the occupied territories. In Hollow Land, which was preceded by A Civilian Occupation and by a series of articles on the “politics of verticality,” Weizman describes in detail how Israel has not only transformed the landscape of the West Bank through zoning and the construction of Jewish settlements, but has asserted (civilian and military) control over the movement of people, water resources, airspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum.[45] These form part of Israel’s panoply of surveillance measures, which also encompasses “electronic techniques of demarcation, population control, identity cards, inspection, currency control,” among others.[46] What distinguishes the occupation of the West Bank, according to Weizman, is not the ideology of occupation itself, which is still driven by a desire to dispossess the colonized population and suppress their national aspirations, but its implementation, its architectural contours, and the contradictions that arise therein.[47] Settlements, he points out, are:

 

 

 

constructed according to a geometric system that unites the effectiveness of sight with spatial order, producing “panoptic fortresses,” generating gazes to many different ends. Control – in the overlooking of Arab towns and villages; strategy – in the overlooking of main traffic arteries; self-defence – in the overlooking of the immediate surroundings and approach roads. Settlements could be seen as urban optical devices for surveillance and the exercise of power.[48]

 

 

 

Weizman argues that the co-existence of direct discipline and indirect forms of control does not fit a theoretical narrative that presupposes an evolution from “disciplinary societies” to “control societies.”[49] In doing so, Weizman joins Achille Mbembe and others in seeking to go beyond Michel Foucault’s binary framework of power, which juxtaposes the spectacle of the pre-modern against the disciplinary power of the modern.[50]

 

The intersection of spatiality and surveillance that characterizes Weizman’s approach has been applied with valuable results outside the West Bank as well. Haim Yacobi, for example, analyzes what he calls “urban panopticism” in the city of Lydda/Lod, an Arab-Jewish mixed city that witnessed a significant Palestinian population expulsion in 1948 and subsequent segregation between the Palestinian and Jewish parts of the city. Segregation is explained as an outcome of urban planning designed to retain power for the majority. According to Yacobi, “The built environment in Lod cannot be seen as merely a technical division of organizing space. Rather, similar to other cultural representations it expresses, produces and reproduces power relations.”[51] The basic premise of this approach is to view the production of space as part of a control project that defines space in accordance with a political agenda.

 

 

 

Counting and Categorizing

 

 

 

Although cartography is intimately linked to the symbolic and real control of territory, Yael Berda singles out surveillance in the colonial state as signifying a shift from controlling the territory to managing the population.[52] As a colonial occupying power, Israel is interested less in the management of the population and its wellbeing (in the Foucauldian sense) than in controlling, excluding, and appropriating the territory in which the population resides. This priority, however, does not minimize the importance that the colonial state attaches to the collection, control, and categorization of population data. This is how exclusion acquires its inclusive character.[53] This “inclusive exclusion” can be seen in the example of the Israeli censuses of 1948 and 1967.

 

In the words of Nadia Abu-Zahra and Adah Kay, “the censuses for 1948 and 1967 were used for denationalization and dispossession.”[54] As they point out, the purpose of these censuses was to under-register the Palestinian population, gather information about property ownership, and document the extent of family separation due to expulsion. In the case of the first Israeli census in 1948, calculated plans to exclude some of the remaining Palestinian citizens from being counted had serious ramifications, such as the denial of access to their homes and property.[55] To this day, they are referred to as the “present absentees” (present in the country but absent for census purposes) and their descendants continue to reside in unrecognized localities with no access to their original homes. Furthermore, Israel used the label “infiltrator” to criminalize Palestinian refugees who risked being shot at upon returning to their homes. The snap census Israel carried out after it occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 repeated the 1948 process by undercounting the resident population of the occupied territories. It then denied the right of return to Palestinian residents who were displaced during the fighting or absent from their abodes for study, work, travel, or other reasons when the census was undertaken.[56] Human Rights Watch estimates the total number of Palestinians displaced from the West Bank and Gaza at this time as 270,000, while the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) places its estimate at about 390,000.[57]

 

Beyond the census, the Israeli bureaucracy has extended its claims to “inclusive exclusion” to all areas of Palestinian life. As one Israeli human writes activist writes:

 

 

 

Who was born and who died and who wants to change address and who wants to get a passport and who wants to go here or there . . . all of this – you have to register . . . in the Civil Administration. One mustn’t forget that the entire registration of citizens, including in Gaza, is held by Israel. The one who registers the citizens is the one in control . . . Bureaucracy reigns supreme.[58]

 

 

 

Perhaps nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in Palestinian identity documents. Plans to introduce national identity cards in Western countries have triggered heated debates on the grounds that, in the hands of governments, the cards carrying personal information could become a tool of “ubiquitous surveillance” over people’s lives.[59] In colonial and postcolonial countries characterized by histories of foreign occupation and ethnic conflict and cleansing, however, the use of national identity cards as markers of group membership predates the current debate about privacy violations and identity theft in Western countries.

 

 

 

The Ever-Present Identity Conundrum

 

                       

 

Write down!

 

I am an Arab

 

My identity card number is fifty thousand

 

I have eight children

 

And the ninth will come after a summer

 

Will you be angry?

 

                       

 

Written in prison more than fifty years ago, these stanzas are from the well-known poem “Identity Card” by the late Mahmoud Darwish, considered to be the Palestinian national poet.[60] In this poem, Darwish refers to the identity card number to remind the police interrogators that he is a citizen of the country and to protest, as the New York Times obituary mildly put it, “Israel’s desire to overlook the presence of Arabs on its land.”[61] From a sociological perspective, however, the poem captures a more encompassing Palestinian experience of displacement and monitoring both inside and outside Israel. It tells the story of how Palestinians assert their claims of belonging to the land by having large families, by attesting to their continuous majority presence in historical Palestine, and by resisting Israeli policies.

 

Moreover, the poem demonstrates the dual function of the identity card, as both a representation of colonial rule and an affirmation of existence. Indeed, identity documentation demonstrates the complex relationship of surveillance with desire, fear, security, trust, and risk: When asked what they fear most, many Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza cite the loss or confiscation of their identity cards, without which they are under the threat of expulsion or loss of residency rights.[62] Thus the identity card acts like a double-edged sword: it facilitates their monitoring, but without it they are liable to be expelled.

 

Permits and identity cards are not new inventions, but were experimented with and perfected in colonial situations. They are used in times of war and by settler regimes, as seen in apartheid South Africa, in British colonies like Egypt and India, and during the two world wars.[63] In Palestine, taking their cues from their experience in India, the British introduced identity cards during the Arab Revolt of 1936–1939 as part of their campaign to suppress Palestinian opposition to colonial rule and illegal Zionist immigration.[64] What is unique about the Israeli case is the longevity of the system and the fact that it is accompanied by policies of displacement, spatial segregation, and denationalisation.

 

In Israel, mandatory identity cards were introduced in 1949 following the establishment of the state. The ethnic background of citizens comprised a key marker of identification on these cards. Sixty years later, the old identity cards were replaced with biometric ones that will be cross-referenced with existing government databases.[65] The regime of identity cards in the OPT is drastically different from the one used in Israel. In Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza, identity cards are the product of three political environments: Israel’s administrative and military rule; the Oslo agreement, which transferred the day-to-day running of the territories to the Palestinian Authority, which issued its own identity cards applicable in zones under its administrative jurisdiction; and the fact that Palestinians living in Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem are governed by a third system according to which Israel issues identity cards to the Arab residents that differ from those issued to Israeli citizens.

 

These various identity cards in the occupied Palestinian territories regulate mobility and residency but do not bestow any citizenship rights. For Helga Tawil-Souri, the identity card is an instrument of colonial power: “at every checkpoint exists an under-theorized manifestation of a low-tech, visible, physical and tactile means of power: the ID card.”[66] Usama Halabi, who considers the identity card an instrument of surveillance, notes that, although starting in 2002 the nationality designation (i.e., Arab, Jew, or Druze) was removed from the identity cards, other codes have been instituted as ethnic markers.[67] In the case of Israeli citizens, eight coded stars have replaced the old nationality identification. Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem are issued identity cards whose serial number starts with the digits “08,” whereas those who reside in the occupied territories are assigned a serial number starting with “09.” Further, the children of so-called “mixed marriages” – between Palestinians who hold Jerusalem identity cards and those who do not – are given a code “086.” Identity cards are also issued in different colors: identity cards for East Jerusalem are blue, and for Gaza and the West Bank they are orange (although the Palestinian Authority replaced these with blue covers after the Oslo agreement).

 

Ultimately, the proliferation of identity documents is mirrored in the proliferation of the checking of these documents by Israeli authorities. The temporality of space is thus shaped by a daily routine of occupation in which Palestinians are subjected to endless waiting and detours, whether on the road, at work, or in establishing stable relations – so much so that as the Israeli journalist Amira Hass has remarked, it amounts to a “theft of time.”[68] Similarly, Allison Brown notes the random, if not chaotic, nature of the surveillance system: “checkpoints and roadblocks are often unpredictable in terms of the time it will take to pass, and because ‘flying’ points could be set up at any time.”[69] Ultimately, as Nurhan Abujidi writes, “The intended effect of the Israeli military surveillance network, together with the long-practiced strategies it implemented, is to fragment time and space in such a way that it becomes impossible to lead a normal life.”[70]

 

 

 

Racialized Time

 

 

 

One ontological feature of surveillance that is overlooked in current studies, especially those conducted in colonial settings, is its ability to inject racialism and affect one’s mastery and use of time. This is evident in detentions and searches at airports, borders, and checkpoints where monitoring is not carried out strictly in a random fashion and does not affect all people to the same degree. In the case of Palestine, it is mainly carried out to deter certain travellers from visiting the occupied territories, especially foreign residents who sympathize with the Palestinians and those who are of Arab origin.[71] The Association of Civil Rights in Israel has challenged this practice, arguing that these searches are illegal according to Israeli law, but the domestic security agency Shin Bet has continued its practice of surveillance and seizure of personal material such as computers.[72]

 

Colonization, anthropologist Julie Peteet points out, extracts its toll from Palestinians along the two important dimensions of space and time: “Palestinian space shrinks, time slows, and mobility is constrained,” whereas the Israeli occupiers have “freedom of movement and expansion through space and control of time.”[73] It is worth pondering the meaning of time in the current Zionist colonizing experience. Political scientist Amal Jamal introduces the concept of “racialized time” to examine Israel’s differential treatment of its Palestinian citizens and those who live in the occupied territories.[74] His point of departure is to argue, through recourse to Martin Heidegger’s work, that control over one’s time is an essential human requisite; it distinguishes humans from animals. Relegating Palestinians to the margins of society by seizing control of their time, Jamal argues, places them in what Agamben calls a “state of exception.”[75] The Zionist narrative depicts time as dynamic and eternal in the Jewish experience and as empty, static, and discontinuous in the Palestinian experience. Moreover, Israeli “Jewish time is distinguished from Palestinian time by adopting methods whose objective is to suppress, block, delay or keep still the flow of Palestinian time.”[76] According to Peteet, “in general, colonial regimes tend to fashion the native as occupying a different, timeless and motionless zone, distinct from the settlers’ modernity and civilization.”[77]

 

Livia Wick, whose attention to carceral analysis and the impact of closures and curfews on women in particular she describes as the examination of “practices of living, waiting and making do every day in specific political and economic circumstances,”[78] addresses the intersection of time and space in the context of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank through the borrowed neologism zamkaniyah.[79] Such ethnographic studies decode patterns of resistance that are not acknowledged as such to reveal how Palestinians negotiate their way through contradictory positioning and liminality, researchers configure subjectivities instead of situating our understanding of Palestinian refugees in the framework of “recognition and rights.” Yet Nasser Abourahme succinctly states the dilemma facing researchers in such settings:

 

                         

 

In other words, people are using the different constitutive nodes of the present – even the checkpoint – to reproduce their lives in ways that do not correspond to anything we might recognize as resistance or anything we can reduce to survivalism. How do we interpret the colonial subject that is neither in revolt nor in open crisis? What kinds of languages of signification do we read, if any, in her/his quotidian practices? How to avoid reading or ascribing intent? Such questions seemingly need to be premised on a more fundamental query: what kind of time is this curious present? And whose temporality are we talking about?[80]

 

 

 

People Watching People

 

 

 

Israel has made a name for itself in international politics and diplomacy as the invincible spy state that infiltrates foreign agencies in pursuit of its enemies. Israel has advanced this image as a unique form of state branding. In popular culture such as films and novels and in diplomatic circles, Israel is presented as a model of how to carry out espionage and cloak and dagger operations in order to apprehend or assassinate its enemies pre-emptively – and at times mistakenly. The Israeli surveillance system is also a formidable domestic spy network aimed primarily at the Palestinians under its control in Israel and the occupied territories, although it does not hesitate to go after Jewish and non-Arab targets if state security is at stake. To make its state surveillance system as efficient as possible, especially during the early decades when it confiscated Palestinian land, Israel created an institutional structure that monitored the Palestinian population bureaucratically with the aid of separate divisions in various government departments and agencies (e.g., education, police, military, statistics bureau, intelligence agencies, and land registration).

 

A dominant feature of early Israeli surveillance practices was the use of old-fashioned spy networks of people watching people, which were embedded in local Arab communities. These networks relied heavily on Palestinian collaborators and informers whose cooperation with Israel was the result more of personal and economic necessity than of any ideological identification with the state. At times of organized dissent and violent opposition to colonial rule, nontechnical surveillance involving people watching people also relied on special undercover units, the so-called mista‘ravim (“Arab pretenders” in Hebrew), to gather information and liquidate individuals deemed dangerous by the state. There was, of course, no recourse to due process. These units were widely used in the West Bank and Gaza during the first (1987–1993) and second (2000–2004) Palestinian uprisings, and their use continues. On many occasions, starting with the Second Intifada, the actions of these units involved extrajudicial killings of Palestinian activists, which resulted in the death of innocent civilians.[81] Israel’s police were eventually compelled to admit their deployment of the mista‘ravim units, usually used by the Israeli army and the Shin Bet in the occupied territories, to target Arab citizens of the state.[82] This admission prompted Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, to charge “that since the unit was designed explicitly to target Israeli Arab criminals, whereas other police units focus on particular types of crime and not populations, its very existence is liable to encourage discriminatory, racist policing.”[83]

 

The use of such undercover methods dates back to the pre-state period in the 1940s, if not earlier, when Jewish undercover units operated in Palestine and in neighboring Arab countries. At the time, the purpose of these special units (the Palmach) of the fledgling Israeli army (the Haganah) was to gather intelligence; to engage in acts of terror and sabotage, if necessary, in order to spread fear and spur Jewish immigration from Arab countries to Palestine; and to counter the activities of Palestinian nationalists who opposed Jewish immigration and the selling of land to Zionist settlers. Initially, local Jews who spoke Arabic and Jews who originated from Arab countries were recruited to these units in the pre-state period.[84] After 1948, Israel widened its domestic surveillance networks by recruiting Jewish immigrants from Arab countries, in addition to native Palestinian informants and collaborators, to gather information about the political activities of Palestinians; this first applied to Palestinian citizens of Israel and was later extended to residents of the West Bank and Gaza.[85]

 

Before 1948, Zionist surveillance activities centered on gathering political intelligence to secure land purchases in Palestine and overcome Palestinian resistance. Eventually, however, both before and after 1948, surveillance was aimed at confronting Palestinian violent opposition and frustrating Palestinian nationalism.[86] For land acquisitions, the informer’s task was to collect information about the availability of land and its location and then to entice landowners to sell to the Zionists.

 

When it became clear that mounting Palestinian opposition to Zionism could not be contained through political intelligence alone, surveillance tactics were widened: the target became information about Palestinian military organizations and guerrilla activities. At times, this information was shared with the British in Palestine. As part of its opposition to Zionism, Palestinian activists sought to block the flow of information from collaborators to the Zionists through economic boycotts and assassinations of collaborators or suspected collaborators.[87] Meanwhile, “the Zionists increasingly used manipulation and financial and material inducements to recruit Arabs.”[88] When voluntary land sales dried up – not more than 7 per cent of the land in Palestine had been legally sold through various means to the Zionists by 1948 – surveillance methods were developed to locate landowning Palestinians who were in financial distress. Offers would then be made to these individuals: in exchange for payment of their debts, they would sell their land to the Zionists. It would be an understatement to say that the result of collaboration caused divisions in Palestinian society and weakened its opposition to Zionist settlers.

 

Immediately after independence, Israel took measures to prevent, at all costs, Palestinian refugees from returning to their homes. Here too the state’s army of collaborators gathered information about what the state called infiltrators, many of whom were killed by the Israeli army, with others being forced to return to the refugee camps. From 1948 to 1966, Israel imposed military rule on the Arab population in Israel by extending the British Emergency Regulations in Palestine, which remain on the books to this day and are renewed annually. In the name of security, for eighteen years Israel imposed a permit system and curfews on the Palestinians within its 1948 borders while systematically confiscating Arab land. After 1967 the permit system was refined and implemented in the occupied territories in a more thorough fashion.

 

Failing in the first decade after the establishment of the state to transfer or encourage the remaining Palestinian minority to emigrate, Israel had to devise alternative control methods. These surveillance methods had several dimensions. First, they were bureaucratic. The state documented and stored detailed information about Palestinians’ lives. Second, they were economic. The state withheld economic and development projects from the Arab sector if its leaders did not cooperate with the state. To a very large extent, it controlled their life chances (employment, education, land ownership, travel, etc.). Second, surveillance led to the ghettoization of the Arab community by breaking up its spatial contiguity. By confining the Arabs to geographically designated areas, the state was able to implement its projects of land confiscation. Third, by means of “divide and rule,” the Arab community was treated not as a single national unit but as one divided into tribes and religious denominations, each of which was treated according to its willingness to cooperate with the state.

 

In a book covering the post-1948 period, Hillel Cohen demonstrates the continuity in Israeli surveillance practices across the pre- and post-1948 periods.[89] The networks of collaborators, established in the pre-state period, were subsequently expanded by adding new recruits – including those who at one time had resisted Israeli policies but found themselves compelled to cooperate in order to secure jobs and other favors from agents of the state.[90] Employment of Arab teachers, for example, was conditional upon approval of the security services.[91] Blacklists were established to penalize Palestinians who refused to cooperate with Israel’s colonial enterprise as informers or sell their land to the Zionists. The Israeli military kept so-called “village files” to keep track of land ownership, expulsion of Palestinians, and the social structure of the village.

 

In the realm of local politics, the government relied on traditional Arab social structures by appointing heads of loyal clans to deliver votes to Zionist parties and run the affairs of local councils. In particular, state surveillance agencies sought the cooperation of Palestinian notables and heads of clans in an effort to discredit the overwhelmingly Arab Communist Party. The Communist Party, in the early decades of the state, mounted an ideological and organizational campaign to mobilize Palestinian citizens in Israel against the dominant Zionist political parties and to expose Israeli policies of land confiscation and the military government. To counter these efforts, the domestic intelligence service (Shabak) used collaborators to intervene through threats and promises of favors in order to weaken the Communist Party’s hold on Arab voters and strengthen the position of so-called Arab political parties affiliated with the main Zionist parties, particularly Mapai, the ruling labor party at the time. Ultimately, opposition Zionist parties who competed for Arab votes, such as the left-wing Mapam (United Workers Party), exposed the close connection between the security services and the ruling Mapai for self-serving reasons.[92]

 

Usama Halabi and Ahmad Sa’di have provided clear examples of the invidious effects of collaboration and surveillance by the Israeli state on the daily lives of Palestinian citizens.[93] People’s livelihoods depend on the extent to which they are willing to collaborate with the authorities in collecting information about their fellow community members. It is not uncommon to come across cases where the state’s security agencies coerce Palestinians to work as collaborators in return for favors, such as access to medical treatment or release from prison.[94]  According to Chaim Levinson, for example, “the Shin Bet security service uses the permit system to recruit informers. Palestinians whose permit requests are rejected ‘for security reasons’ are often invited to meet with Shin Bet agents, who offer ‘assistance’ in obtaining the desired permits in exchange for information.”[95] This does not mean that the surveilled individuals are unaware of these activities, as Halabi points out.[96] Indeed, taking the city of Nablus as a case study, Nurhan Abujidi explores the matrix of surveillance that regulates time and the use of public spaces and violates private spaces such as the home (measures that comprise what one author has called an attempt at “colonization of the mind”)[97] and describes the development of daily resistance tactics rooted in counter-knowledge, commemoration, and schooling.[98]

 

 

 

Biometrics and the Boomerang Effect       

 

 

 

It is a common observation that methods of surveillance and control are frequently transferred from one colonial setting to another. An old hand in the business of surveillance, Israel uses its military power to market its military hardware, particularly drones, as field-tested technology. The colony becomes a laboratory for developing and testing surveillance technologies for home use and export. This is clearly the case with Israel, whose military officials and technologists tout the success of their surveillance and control technologies in putting down Palestinian opposition to its colonial practices to sell these technologies abroad. In The Lab, a 2013 Israeli documentary film directed by Yotam Feldman, retired government officials and Israeli officers who have become weapons manufactures and military-industrial entrepreneurs explain how they have profited worldwide from marketing their war technologies on account of their success in fighting the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.[99] (Like the United States, Israel has been immune from international legal sanctions against the use of such lethal weapons.)

 

Likewise, Stephen Graham has described the widespread adoption of Israeli surveillance and counter-insurgency tactics by the U.S. as the “Palestinianization of Iraq.”[100] Graham demonstrates the close connection between Israel and the United States in this regard, so much so that during Israel’s major incursion in the sprawling West Bank refugee camp of Jenin in 2002, an act that was roundly condemned by international human rights organizations, American military personnel were reported present to observe first-hand Israel’s operation. As well, there have been reports that the Israeli military visited the United States to train the Americans and were in Iraq to see the American conduct of urban warfare. Thus, Graham remarks, the “Israeli military and security experience in addressing these purported imperatives – as the ultimate surveillance-security state – is rapidly being exported around the world.”[101]

 

Beyond the circulation of technologies and strategies of surveillance from one colonial space to another, those methods adopted to monitor marginal and minority groups perceived to threaten the state are eventually extended to the majority, and those developed in the colonies make their way back to the metropole.[102] Foucault refers to this as the “boomerang” effect.[103] Witness, for example, the recent use of surveillance vehicles, first introduced by the military in the West Bank, at a Tel Aviv demonstration on behalf of social justice.[104] It has not escaped commentators that the police target Arab citizens for generalized surveillance, even when they join peaceful social justice demonstrations like the one held in Tel Aviv in 2012. But “unlike the directives about Jewish demonstrators, which focus on rioters and anarchists, the section about Arabs does not specify which type of demonstrators police should watch out for, referring only to Arabs in general.”[105] A telling example of the extent of routine, day-to-day surveillance of the Palestinian population is an incident involving beachgoers in Tel Aviv. The municipality of Tel Aviv employs inspectors to enforce city bylaws and maintain cleanliness of the beaches. The inspectors spotted what looked like Arab bathers and asked them for their identity cards. It turned out that these were Palestinian men from the occupied territories who had crossed the border without a permit (which is next to impossible to obtain) in search of employment. The inspectors turned the Palestinians over to the police. (The inspectors themselves do not have the authority to make arrests.) In the words of an Israeli activist, “Israel has become a nation of informers.”[106]

 

Israeli state surveillance is not confined to Palestinian citizens; it touches the lives of the Jewish majority as well, although it takes different forms and is not so bound up with nationalistic considerations.[107] Until 2004, the Israeli army tapped all outgoing international telephone calls. In the past decade, domestic wiretapping in Israel has also expanded. As reported by Andrew Stevens:

 

 

 

Between 2006 and 2007, wiretapping increased by over 100 per cent in drug investigations and by 172 per cent in the fight against ‘organized crime,’ according to figures submitted by the police to the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee. Electronic surveillance overall increased by 22 per cent from 1,128 instances in 2006 to 1,375 in 2007. As a comparison, authorities in the United States conducted a total of 1,839 wiretaps in all of 2006. Israeli courts refused only 11 surveillance requests by the police in 2007. In total, police eavesdropped on 778 suspects and witnesses on 1,205 telephone and cell phone lines.[108]

 

 

 

Beyond the disproportionate rate of wiretapping compared to the United States, which has a population fifty times that of Israel, it is notable that the courts in Israel almost automatically approve police requests for wiretaps. Of 400 wiretaps analyzed in 2006, only 3 were not approved by the courts. The Electronic Privacy Information Center and Privacy International, nongovernmental watchdogs of privacy practices worldwide, commented that “[al]though the courts are supposed to weigh privacy concerns against law enforcement needs before authorizing wiretaps, authorization is, in practice, almost automatic upon request.”[109] By several accounts, “Israel’s omniscient ears,” as a report in Le Monde Diplomatique calls the Urim military base, make it one of the Western countries with the largest listening posts.[110] Situated in the Negev and unacknowledged until recently, this military base “has rows of satellite dishes that covertly intercept phone calls, emails and other communications from the Middle East, Europe, Africa and Asia. Its antennas monitor shipping and would have spied on the [the Gaza flotilla] aid ships in the days before they were seized” in 2009.[111]

 

The so-called “Big Brother Law” approved by the Knesset in 2007 allows the police to set up a database on citizens that contains telephone numbers (including unlisted ones), names of mobile telephone subscribers, serial numbers of mobile phones, and maps of antenna locations. The database has been described as the “biggest database in the West.”[112]

 

In 2009, Israel passed a law that would establish a biometric database, collecting and storing biometric data – that is, distinguishing biological traits such as fingerprints, retina and iris patterns, DNA, and other unique identifiers.[113]The driving force behind the biometric database, whose implementation was delayed following a two-year pilot project that started in August 2013, is the argument that it ensures security and protection against theft of personal information. The biometric campaign in Israel was opposed by human rights organizations for fear that it would compromise individual privacy and give governmental bodies wider access to personal information without securing adequate oversight.[114] Unlike European countries, for example, citizens in Israel are not the owners of biometric information about them stored in this database, which one report described as “the most expansive in the Western world.”[115]

 

As a suspect minority, it would seem reasonable that the Palestinians in Israel look with trepidation at any efforts to expand the system of population monitoring and registration in the name of efficiency, especially one that has the potential to track their movements more thoroughly and store personal information about them in real time. For example, whereas two-thirds of the Jewish Israeli public endorses the U.S. government’s practice of listening in on communications of world leaders, and 90 percent believe that the United States listens in on Israeli leaders as well, surveys reveal that two-thirds of the Palestinians in Israel are opposed to spying on foreign leaders.[116] With regard to the biometric database, two-thirds of Israeli Jews and Arabs said in a public opinion survey that they did not consider the biometric information stored by the Ministry of Interior immune to leaks and other infringements. However, 57 percent of Arabs and 42 percent of Jews agreed to the establishment of the database.[117]

 

In a worldwide ranking of surveillance societies based on thirteen privacy indicators, Privacy International assigned Israel a score of 2.2 on a scale from 1 (extensive surveillance) to 5 (minimal surveillance).[118] Israel was found to practice maximum surveillance with respect to three of the thirteen indicators: government access to data; surveillance of medical, financial, and movement; and border and trans-border issues. No doubt as a result of measures implemented after the attacks of 11 September 2001, the United States, United Kingdom, Spain, and Australia were ranked similarly. Since these are aggregate country data, the report does not deal with the differential application of surveillance to specific societal groups such as minorities. However, based on various reports by human rights organizations, there is no doubt that, compared to the Jewish population, the Palestinian minority in Israel is subjected to more intensive forms of surveillance.

 

Until recently, debates about privacy violations did not rank high on the public agenda in Israel, and even less prominent were concerns over Israeli policies in the occupied Palestinian territories that impinge on the privacy of the Palestinian population. However, as surveillance spreads from the colony to the metropole, and from the colonized population to the general population, resistance is gaining ground. National security arguments are being subjected to scrutiny, and there is more awareness of the role of surveillance in violating human rights. It is accurate to say that such awareness is more evident in the advanced countries, the originators of colonialism. Manifestations of resistance to surveillance can also be found among colonized populations, including the Palestinians.

 

For example, Allison Brown deploys a Foucauldian framework to examine productive power in encounters between soldiers and the Palestinian population at the checkpoints. She notes that “observation is in itself a form, perhaps the main form, of resistance.”[119] Cameras that are distributed freely to the local population by the human rights organization B’Tselem are used to document the abusive behavior of soldiers at the checkpoints. Wick, meanwhile, finds an empowering dimension to the Israeli-imposed regime of immobilization. Women form alliances locally and across class lines, while gender practices are transformed “by giving women greater influence in their affinal families.”[120]

 

Just as surveillance technologies can highlight the workings of colonialism from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries, so can the resistance to these practices. The stereotyping of the Other in Orientalist discourse, inasmuch as it is a basic staple of colonial knowledge and often a key component in the fear that drives increased surveillance, should not obscure its potential to failure and to trigger resistance by the colonized. Othering is inherently fragile: it must be constantly fed by the illusory inferiority of the Other – and is thus constantly at risk of being discredited. Indeed, India’s resistance to British rule shows how the colonized successfully used the same tools of information dissemination that were applied by the colonizer to control them, notably the print media. As Martha Kaplan remarks, “Clearly, the power of colonized people to articulate their own projects, to challenge colonial discourses, and to make their own histories constrains the projects of colonizers and – sometimes – remakes the panopticon into a constraint on its constructors.”[121] The vulnerability of the colonial security state, though, does not necessarily dictate an optimistic view of the future. In Giorgio Agamben’s words, “security reasoning entails an essential risk. A state which has security as its only task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to turn itself terroristic.”[122]

 

 

 

Elia Zureik is Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Doha Institute of Graduate Studies, Qatar. He is also Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada.

 

 

 

Endnotes