Surveillance in the ‘war’ between Israel and Gaza 2023-2024
In this, the first blog post in our Palestine series, David Lyon shares his introduction to the Surveillance Studies Network 2024 Conference plenary ‘Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine’, also honouring the influence of Elia Zureik (1939–2023). Other contributions in this series come from fellow speakers on the panel: Neve Gordon and Muna Haddad, Mais Qandeel, and Ahmad H. Sa’di.
Honouring Elia Zureik
The plenary panel, ‘Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine’, hosted at the Surveillance Studies Network 2024 Conference, in Ljubljana, Slovenia, was prompted by two things: first, to honour the life of Elia Zureik (1939-2023). He was my colleague at Queen’s from 1990-2015. We also corresponded from 1985 and co-edited an article in 2022, making our relationship add up to 38 years; by far my longest collegial one. Second, to consider from a surveillance perspective the ongoing ‘war’ between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, from October 7 2023.
Elia was born in Akka, an ancient Palestinian town on the Mediterranean coast, and studied for a BA at San Francisco State University, an MA at Simon Fraser University in Canada and a PhD at Essex University in the UK. He got his first position at Queen’s University in 1971 and his first book, The Palestinians in Israel: A Study in Internal Colonialism, came out in 1979. He was also fascinated by the social aspects of new technologies which led him—as it did me—into researching surveillance. These were parallel pursuits for him and led, eventually, to his arguing in his magnum opus, Israel’s Colonial Project in Palestine: Brutal Pursuit that Israel’s building a surveillance-dependent occupation was crucial to its maintaining control over the indigenous population that was never given a serious opportunity to form its own state.
In between, he made many visits to Israel/Palestine and other neighbouring countries, teaching, researching and collaborating with others concerned about the future of Palestine. In the early 1990s he was involved in the negotiations for the ill-fated Oslo Accords and indeed, continued to research and write about Palestinian issues until his death, age 84. At his funeral, family members reflected on how their young lives included many visits to war zones and centres of tension and crisis—but they had no complaints! At the same time, Elia was concerned with research on e.g. workplace computers, and also on related questions of law and “privacy.” In 1993 we planned together for the first ever “surveillance studies” research workshop at Queen’s, that drew together two dozen researchers, most of whom we’d never met! They included Gary Marx, Priscilla Regan, Oscar Gandy (though he couldn’t attend in person), Colin Bennett, Judith Perrolle, Simon Davies, Mark Poster, Rob Kling, Ann Cavoukian and, importantly, the ‘father’ of Canadian computing, the wise Kelly Gotlieb. We continue to work—with those who are still alive—to this day!
Together with Yolande Chan, who then worked in Management Information Systems at the then Queen’s School of Business, Elia and I initiated the “Surveillance Project”. It became the Surveillance Studies Centre, obtaining increasingly large grants for collaborative and international research. During one project we included a focus on Israel/Palestine that culminated in the most thrilling and emotional research workshop in which I’ve ever been involved. Held in Cyprus, so that “Middle East/ North Africa” colleagues could easily attend, Israeli and Palestinian scholars met to discuss surveillance, in a palpable atmosphere of fear, uncertainty, anxiety and apprehension—some participants from Israel/Palestine had never met the Other! (Amazingly, after three days together, while there were still some disagreements—of course—much mutual understanding had been forged, and we all went for an after-dinner swim from the beach! [Did Elia join in? Hmm, I can’t recall!]) The consequent book we edited with Yasmeen Abu-Laban is Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine: Population, Territory, Power. I owe so much to Elia, for helping me understand Israel/Palestine, for advising me when I was invited to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, or to teach at Bir Zeit University in Ramallah, and for his warm collegiality—that was sometimes hidden behind a grumpy exterior!
Elia was held in high esteem by many graduate students, especially those who, like him, were displaced or marginal. He was respected by colleagues, not only in the social sciences, but also in computing, engineering, mathematics and so on. After retiring, he helped establish sociology at the new Doha Institute of Graduate Studies in Qatar. Appropriately, colleagues plotted together to make a festschrift for Elia, which came out last year: Decolonizing the Study of Palestine: Settler Colonialism after Elia Zureik. Elia’s primary interest, throughout, was born of his being a diaspora Palestinian. Once, when Edward Saïd gave a public lecture at Queen’s, Elia introduced him. Before starting his lecture, however, Saïd told the audience, (as I recall) “I hope you realize how lucky you are to have someone of the calibre of Elia Zureik here—he’s one of the most brilliant analysts of the so-called Palestinian problem alive today.” And he was always as open to discussing with Israelis as he was with Palestinians. His involvements with Oslo are a sign that he sought peaceful and just solutions.
Surveillance in the ‘war’ between Israel and Gaza 2023-2024
Now let me introduce the second dimension: Settler colonialism in Israel is markedly different from its development in countries such as Australia, Canada and the US, argues anthropologist Patrick Wolfe. Zionism continues to eliminate, rather than, as in the other countries, assimilate the Indigenous population. Ian Lustick sees the process not as a deliberate ploy from the start, but as an unintended consequence of the Zionist regime’s experience of sudden statehood as “Israel” in 1948. Control and dispossession was the key from the beginning. Keeping Palestinians “quiet” or at least “quiescent” was and is achieved, says Zureik, by using the “…minutiae of the control and surveillance that the state exercises over the physical, socio-economic, and psychological well-being of the Palestinians under the umbrella of Zionism”.
That focus on “minutiae of surveillance and control” has grown steadily over the decades of Israeli colonialism, and its context is important. On the one hand is the massive growth of Israeli high-technology capacities and corporations, creating the surveillance tools for pacifying the Palestinian population, and, based on proffered evidence of their success, marketing them globally. On the other is the creation of a military machine under the IDF (Israel Defence Forces; since May 26 1948) to quell any actual disturbances or resistance raised by the controlled and in the case of Gaza, captive, Palestinian populations. Add to this the propaganda machine that constantly churns out negative comment about Palestinians as “terrorists” who “educate their children for terrorism” and wish to “destroy Israel,” and one can understand how many ordinary Israelis remain in the dark about what everyday life is actually like in East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank.
In their edited book on the work of Elia Zureik, Ahmad Sa’di and Nur Musalha agree that “Surveillance is a crucial tool for systematic ghettoization and the fragmentation of the Palestinians.” While spatial planning and management are part of the story, “…old orthodox and new digital means of surveillance” are also key. One of the “old orthodox” means of surveillance, in Israel/Palestine as elsewhere, is the use of identification papers or cards. However, more recently, use of the biometric database “Wolf Pack” has upgraded Israel’s identification practices, creating a new level of surveillance over the Palestinian population. Today, such extensive biometric databases have been added to the Israeli arsenal of every imaginable kind of long-term and all-inclusive record-keeping, geared to ‘security’ measures against ordinary residents of the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
This reflects an important feature of the Israeli business landscape through the 1990s-2020s in which the surveillance industry reputation of Israel grew tremendously. Israeli equipment and expertise became a major export (especially to more authoritarian countries). Companies such as the NSO Group with its “Pegasus” technology is a case in point. The death of Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018 is a prominent example of the use of remote means of access to smartphones, in this case, provided by Pegasus technology. Commercial spyware like this can allow an operator to surreptitiously—and without the phone-owner’s awareness—activate a target phone’s camera and microphone, which transforms the device into a spy-tool. It was Khasoggi’s friend Omar Abdulaziz whose phone was infected by the Pegasus spyware, which, it is believed, made the fatal connection with Khasoggi, leading to his murder. Citizen Lab (Toronto) has shown definitively how many new devices originating in Israel contravene basic rules and international law.
This is the backdrop to the conflict between Israel and Gaza that took on new shape on October 7 2023, in a surprise attack by Hamas militants that killed about 1200 Israelis and made hostages of a large number of others. The struggles began in 1948, of course, but what happened on October 7 was a new phase, because the high-tech surveillance on which Israel had prided itself on and relied on for so long was dramatically called in question. To put it bluntly, the Israelis were outwitted and blindsided by Hamas when the latter put a carefully devised plan into action, to disable the Gaza-Israel border security devices and fences and to launch a vicious attack on unsuspecting Israelis, including, ironically some peaceniks devoted to repairing Israeli-Palestinian relations. They also took nearly 200 hostages, some of whose fates are still unknown at the time of writing.
Hamas operatives targeted and disabled the remote sensing equipment, surveillance cameras, and automated machine guns placed along the perimeter, allowing squads of Hamas militants to fan out over a wide area, attacking families in buildings, young people enjoying a large rave party, young and old residents of a kibbutz and many others. The attack had clearly been planned for many months, but remained under the Israeli radar until it was too late. To the technology-dependent Israelis, the shock was tremendous and deeply embarrassing. Their amassed biometric databases, spyware and robotic machinery had been of no use against such an attack. It was also reported by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that IDF women operatives in intelligence gathering had in fact had an inkling of the impending attack, but the male officials within the IDF had chauvinistically dismissed their observations.
As Sophia Goodfriend and others have argued, the IDF assumed that the claims made for the impenetrable border were correct. The “technology-obsessed military,” was “swollen with arrogance” as retired Israeli military general Yitzhak Barik describes it. The former head of Shin Bet, Ami Ayalon, pointed out that if one relies entirely on SIGINT—electronic signals—you’ll be at a disadvantage if the “enemy” uses no digital communications. The IDF seems to have believed their own claims and this led to their being blindsided on October 7. But such faith-in-technology is not merely an Israeli failing. Such tech solutionism—as experts such as Evgeny Mozarov and Rob Kitchin call it, is a global curse that just happens also to be rampant in the Israeli surveillance industry.
This must surely raise questions about the accuracy of AI-supported targeting, too. Israel has been using AI to select military targets in Gaza, but as Branka Marijan asks, “If military AI systems are so advanced and precise, why have so many civilians been killed and maimed in Gaza?”. Even in 2021, Operation Guardian of the Walls,” described by the IDF as the “world’s first AI war” killed at least 243 Palestinians and wounded another 1,910. AI decision-support tools are not viewed as autonomous; a human being must approve the targets. Human analysts are supposed to discuss and jointly approve targets. But one IDF colonel noted that it is hard to know how decisions are actually made and went on: “I’m satisfied with traceability, not explainability.”
There’s an answer to Marijan’s question, however. The Israeli “killing machine” is also “assisted” by AI, which includes surveillance of targets—dwellings, hospitals and other facilities. Noa Limone writes of this in Haaretz, citing an investigative report, written by Yuval Avraham and published in +972 on April 3 2024. “Brigadier General Y.S.” (in fact, commander of Israel’s’ elite intelligence unit 8200) wrote a 2021 book on The Human-Machine Team on “world-revolutionary AI.” He describes a special machine that could rapidly process massive amounts of data to generate thousands of potential “targets” for military strikes in the heat of a war. Such technology, he writes, would resolve what he described as a “human bottleneck for both locating the new targets and decision-making to approve the targets.”
The machine, called Lavender, actually exists and was used extensively in the early days of the Gaza war, according to military sources, and each output was regarded “as if it were a human decision.” Thousands of Hamas/PIJ operatives—and their homes—were targeted this way. Human personnel seemed only to “rubber stamp” Lavender’s output, even though there was a 10% error leeway, and in any case, only 20 seconds would be devoted to any caution before firing. As it was easier to locate them in their homes, whole families would be wiped out. Also, for every junior operative targeted, collateral damage of 15-20 was acceptable, and for senior operatives, 100. Previously, only senior officials of Hamas were targeted but after October 7, more junior ones were permitted, by the senior IDF, to be targets.
Lavender holds details of 2.3M Gazans, obtained through mass surveillance, then assesses and ranks the likelihood that each of the whole population is involved in the military wing of Hamas. Several “incriminating features” will add up to a higher likelihood of assassination. There was no “zero error” policy and in fact even Lavender was overridden by mass-bombing and greater lethality. “Mistakes were treated statistically…” One tracking systems is called “Where’s Daddy?” and was supposed to ensure that targets were men. But even then, most attacks used dumb bombs, likely to cause maximum collateral damage.
And as Goodfriend also observes, “Human rights advocates say the Israeli government’s tech-heavy policies helped shield Israeli society from the violence and humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza”. “The situation in Gaza has been suppressed for so long by Israeli society,” said Miriam Marmur, the director of public advocacy at Gisha, an Israeli non-profit that promotes freedom of movement for Palestinians in Gaza. “Now we’re seeing it surface in horrifying and terrifying ways.”
“Operation Swords of Iron” was the Israeli answer to the Hamas attack, but it depended entirely on a brutal rampage of indiscriminate killing and the withdrawal of the basic means of life in Gaza, that has horrified the world. But “Swords of Iron” simply replicated previous Israeli attempts to pacify Palestinians and, as Ian Lustick suggests, will only be halted when the international community intervenes to proclaim definitively that what South Africa has declared to the UN Court of Justice to be genocide must stop.
There is so much to challenge Surveillance Studies scholars here, and I wish to give space to the following contributions in this blog series from Neve Gordon and Muna Haddad, Mais Qandeel, and Ahmad Sa’di, for their wonderfully relevant and incisive analyses and reflections.
From my perspective, I would just list one or two things that strike me:
What are some surveillance lessons from the aftermath of the Hamas attacks on Israel? One, the folly of over-reliance on hi-tech is demonstrated when nonchalant hubris seems to be the norm. Clearly, underfunded and underequipped systems can be used to undermine high-tech surveillance. With that, surveillance systems intended to maintain vastly different levels of power can break down. Of course, such breakdown may be salutary, but certainly not sufficient to the challenges of finding long-term solutions to this C21st apartheid system, that are now even more urgent and simultaneously more seemingly intractable.
My hope is that these very stark factors inject new energy into efforts to analyse and understand surveillance is this context, and to catalyze the process of seeking concrete long-term rapprochements in this long drawn-out struggle.
