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href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/gaza-laboratory-boosts-profits-israels-war-industry/25636">https://electronicintifada.net/content/gaza-laboratory-boosts-profits-israels-war-industry/25636</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">Gaza "laboratory" boosts profits of
Israel's war industry</h1>
<p class="node__submitted">
<span class="field field-author"><a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/people/gabriel-schivone">Gabriel
Schivone</a></span> <span class="field field-publisher">-</span>
<span class="field field-publication-date"><span
class="date-display-single"
content="2018-10-05T09:11:00+00:00">5 October 2018</span></span>
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<figure id="file-70166"><source media="(min-width:
72rem)"><figcaption><small><span></span></small></figcaption></figure>
<p>After exploring the vast surveillance regime along
the US-Mexico border and finding Israeli systems
installed at every turn, the author <a
href="http://toddmillerwriter.com/">Todd Miller</a>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Several days later, we sat down with Keren in iHLS’s
then brand new headquarters in the Mediterranean
coastal city of <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/raanana">Raanana</a>,
known for its high-tech industrial park. We spoke to
him in the fishbowl conference room above his
company’s computer lab.</p>
<p>Below us, gaggles of junior technologists clacked
eagerly at their keyboards. This <a
href="https://i-hls.com/archives/70157">Lighthouse
complex</a>, Keren said, could host up to 150
startups.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>Human Petri dish</h2>
<p>We asked Keren why it is that Israel’s technology
industry performs at an astonishing level of
productivity, especially in the military sector.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>When Roei Elkabetz, a brigadier general in the
Israeli army, <a
href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/01/us-mexico-border-gaza-israeli-tech-wall/">addressed</a>
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.</p>
<p>“We have learned lots from Gaza,” he said. “It’s a
great laboratory.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<h2>Fine tuning in real time</h2>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-10/gaza-barrier-can-t-withstand-an-assault-by-mob-fencemaker-says">reported</a>
as having described Gaza as a “showroom” for the
company’s “smart fences” whose customers “appreciate
that the products are battle-tested.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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 <em>Bloomberg</em>.</p>
<p>And during the first month of Israel’s 2014 attack on
Gaza, the share price of Israel’s largest weapons
firm, Elbit Systems, <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/rania-khalek/stocks-rise-israeli-drone-maker-gaza-slaughter-continues">increased
by 6.1 percent</a>. More than 2,200 Palestinians
were killed in that attack.</p>
<h2>A never-ending experiment</h2>
<p>This year, since the <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/great-march-return">Great
March of Return</a> protests began on 30 March,
Israel’s <a
href="https://enhamushim.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/report-with-covers1.pdf">latest
line</a> 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 “<a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/patrick-strickland/israel-sprays-skunk-water-palestinian-homes">skunk
water</a>” on protesters.</p>
<p>The Gaza health ministry has observed over the past
six months the human effects of Israel’s <a
href="https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/palestinians-face-explosive-bullets-dangerous-gas-bombs-180501091514736.html">“butterfly
bullets”</a> – which explode on impact. These are
among the deadliest bullets Israel has ever used.</p>
<p>Doctors Without Borders personnel treated butterfly
bullet-like injuries in <a
href="https://www.msf.org/palestine-msf-teams-gaza-observe-unusually-severe-and-devastating-gunshot-injuries">50
percent</a> of the more than 500 patients they
treated during the protests.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://societyandspace.org/2018/05/15/11361/">practices</a>,
which Jasbir K. Puar details in her book, <em>The
Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability</em>.</p>
<p>As of 1 October, more than <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/bloody-friday-gaza-marks-six-months-protests">150
Palestinians</a> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><em>Gabriel M. Schivone is a visiting scholar at the
University of Arizona and author of the forthcoming
book</em> Making the New “Illegal”: How Decades of
US Involvement in Central America Triggered the Modern
Wave of Immigration <em>(Prometheus Books).</em></p>
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