[News] Gaza "laboratory" boosts profits of Israel's war industry

Fri Oct 5 16:42:59 EDT 2018

https://electronicintifada.net/content/gaza-laboratory-boosts-profits-israels-war-industry/25636 

  Gaza "laboratory" boosts profits of Israel's war industry

Gabriel Schivone 
<https://electronicintifada.net/people/gabriel-schivone> - 5 October 2018

------------------------------------------------------------------------

After exploring the vast surveillance regime along the US-Mexico border 
and finding Israeli systems installed at every turn, the author Todd 
Miller <http://toddmillerwriter.com/> and I were drawn to investigate 
Israel as the largest homeland security industry in the world. Israel’s 
arms industry is twice the size of its US counterpart in exports per 
capita and employs a percentage of the national workforce double that of 
the US or France, two of the top global arms exporters.

During our 2016 trip, it didn’t take us long to zero in on some of 
Israel’s most enterprising industrialists who told us how they do it 
while controlling an area roughly the size of New Jersey.

On our first day there, while attending an annual drone conference, we 
met Guy Keren, the middle-aged and charismatic CEO of an Israeli 
homeland security firm called iHLS. Keren’s iHLS had organized the drone 
conference.

Several days later, we sat down with Keren in iHLS’s then brand new 
headquarters in the Mediterranean coastal city of Raanana 
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/raanana>, known for its high-tech 
industrial park. We spoke to him in the fishbowl conference room above 
his company’s computer lab.

Below us, gaggles of junior technologists clacked eagerly at their 
keyboards. This Lighthouse complex <https://i-hls.com/archives/70157>, 
Keren said, could host up to 150 startups.

Keren explained how the Gaza Strip affords Israel – and iHLS – a 
competitive advantage over other countries because of the real-time 
opportunities to test new products year-round. Israel has earned the 
moniker of “start-up nation” among business elites around the world.

    Human Petri dish

We asked Keren why it is that Israel’s technology industry performs at 
an astonishing level of productivity, especially in the military sector.

“Because we are checking our systems live,” he said. “We are in a war 
situation all the time. If it’s not happening right now, it will happen 
in a month.”

“It’s not [just] about building the technology” and having to wait years 
to try out the systems, Keren told us. The secret of the Israeli tech 
sector’s success, he explained, lay in “operating the technology faster 
than any other country in live situations.”

Keren isn’t the first to make this connection. Gaza is widely perceived 
as a human Petri dish – to improve killing capacity and cultivate 
pacification methods – among the movers and shakers in the Israeli 
high-tech and military sectors.

When Roei Elkabetz, a brigadier general in the Israeli army, addressed 
<https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/01/us-mexico-border-gaza-israeli-tech-wall/> 
a 2012 convention of specialists in border control technology in El 
Paso, Texas, he clicked onscreen a photo of the wall, built by Magal 
Systems, that isolates Gaza from the outside world.

“We have learned lots from Gaza,” he said. “It’s a great laboratory.”

Leila Stockmarr, a Danish scholar, has attended the same kinds of 
Israeli security expos as Todd Miller and I. “As most of the company 
representatives I interviewed imparted, it is central to Israel’s 
cutting-edge military and policing capacities that new pieces of 
technology are developed and tested in a concrete situation of 
controlling a population, such as in the Gaza Strip,” she writes in her 
2016 essay, “Beyond the Laboratory Thesis: Gaza as Transmission Belt for 
War and Security Technology.”

    Fine tuning in real time

As one representative of a major security company told Stockmarr: “Once 
an order has been made by the Israeli military, and after initial 
deployment in the field, the company’s technical departments are often 
contacted with demands for corrections and tweaks based on experience. 
Thus every time the military uses Israeli HLS [homeland security] 
technology, it automatically tests it. Companies benefit greatly from 
this and every time a new order is placed, this feedback from the 
battlefield is injected to improve the process of tendering and 
guarantee quality and effectiveness.”

Unusually for a country’s arms industry, Israel has a laboratory in a 
territory it occupies – Gaza – very close to the production facilities 
for its weapons and surveillance technology. Engagement in the Gaza 
Strip, as Stockmarr noted in 2016, helps companies generate and refine 
new ideas and fine tune product lines.

In April 2018, Saar Koursh, then the CEO of Magal Systems – a contender 
for President Donald Trump’s proposed additions to surveillance 
infrastructure on the US-Mexico border – was even reported 
<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-10/gaza-barrier-can-t-withstand-an-assault-by-mob-fencemaker-says> 
as having described Gaza as a “showroom” for the company’s “smart 
fences” whose customers “appreciate that the products are battle-tested.”

Stockmarr notes that Palestinians in Gaza themselves play a role in the 
testing phase, performing a “crucial part” of this homeland security 
industry cycle: “In order to evaluate a given product, the systematic 
inclusion of the targeted populations’ responses to new security 
technologies are crucial for foreign buyers.”

Plenty of global customers are sold on the idea, at least if the profit 
margin is anything to go by. “Magal’s US traded shares jumped in late 
2016 as Trump talked about a Mexican border wall,” according to /Bloomberg/.

And during the first month of Israel’s 2014 attack on Gaza, the share 
price of Israel’s largest weapons firm, Elbit Systems, increased by 6.1 
percent 
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/rania-khalek/stocks-rise-israeli-drone-maker-gaza-slaughter-continues>. 
More than 2,200 Palestinians were killed in that attack.

    A never-ending experiment

This year, since the Great March of Return 
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/great-march-return> protests began 
on 30 March, Israel’s latest line 
<https://enhamushim.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/report-with-covers1.pdf> 
of crowd-control drones to make their Gaza debut include the 
appropriately named Sea of Tears drone – a commercially-produced Chinese 
camera drone modified by the Israeli police to discharge tear gas onto 
the human throngs below – and the Shocko Drone that unleashes “skunk 
water 
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/patrick-strickland/israel-sprays-skunk-water-palestinian-homes>” 
on protesters.

The Gaza health ministry has observed over the past six months the human 
effects of Israel’s “butterfly bullets” 
<https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/palestinians-face-explosive-bullets-dangerous-gas-bombs-180501091514736.html> 
– which explode on impact. These are among the deadliest bullets Israel 
has ever used.

Doctors Without Borders personnel treated butterfly bullet-like injuries 
in 50 percent 
<https://www.msf.org/palestine-msf-teams-gaza-observe-unusually-severe-and-devastating-gunshot-injuries> 
of the more than 500 patients they treated during the protests.

Many of the protesters who weren’t killed outright were severely 
injured, earning butterfly bullets a new place in the Israeli military’s 
long history of shoot-to-maim practices 
<http://societyandspace.org/2018/05/15/11361/>, which Jasbir K. Puar 
details in her book, /The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability/.

As of 1 October, more than 150 Palestinians 
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/bloody-friday-gaza-marks-six-months-protests> 
have been killed in the Great March of Return, including more than 30 
children. More than 10,000 have been injured, half of them by live fire.

Meanwhile, back at the Raanana industrial park, Keren and his staff in 
the air-conditioned offices of iHLS are busy developing the next players 
in Israel’s arms industry, updating their systems and expanding their 
profit margins.

/Gabriel M. Schivone is a visiting scholar at the University of Arizona 
and author of the forthcoming book/ Making the New “Illegal”: How 
Decades of US Involvement in Central America Triggered the Modern Wave 
of Immigration /(Prometheus Books)./

-- 
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