West Bank Surveillance Echoes China, by Ben Tausz – 23 May 2023

In a development that echoes the Chinese state’s repressive methods against the Uyghur people, the Israeli military is monitoring Palestinians in the occupied territories with a vast and intrusive database of personal details. This database is connected to facial recognition cameras and smartphone apps that Israeli soldiers and settlers use to stop, scan, control and detain civilians.

The database and the apps have been described by former Israeli soldiers interviewed by the Washington Post and Breaking The Silence. BTS is an Israeli organisation of ex-soldiers campaigning against the occupation and the oppression of Palestinians; BTS leader Avner Gvaryahu has denounced the tools as “another instrument of oppression and subjugation of the Palestinian people.”

The so-called “Wolf Pack” database holds profiles and photographs of almost every Palestinian in the West Bank, and a security rating for each. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has highlighted the similarity to Xinjiang security services’ IJOP (Integrated Joint Operations Platform) that collates and integrates myriad data sources on the Uyghur and other Turkic populations, and produces “trustworthiness” scores.

Israeli occupation soldiers are equipped with the “Blue Wolf” smartphone app. Units compete for prizes to collect more photographs of Palestinian civilians. Consent from the subjects is, of course, not required. In these exercises, and at stops, the app’s facial recognition software matches individuals to the database, and flashes a colour alert to indicate whether the soldiers should allow them to pass, stop them, or arrest them.

Now, BTS has helped Amnesty International to expose the extremely dense networks of facial-recognition cameras in Hebron (dubbed “Red Wolf”) and East Jerusalem (“Mabat 2000”). These escalate the automatic recording of Palestinians in biometric databases without their knowledge or consent, and the control of their movements with automated judgements. Palestinians have even been blocked from reaching their own homes.

Similarly, Uyghurs in China stopped at checkpoints, or caught on CCTV, are digitally identified, and stopped or taken away based on the nebulous “trustworthiness” ratings. Amnesty even identified that the Israeli military is using cameras from the same manufacturer, Hikvision, as the Xinjiang surveillance regime.

Wolf Pack does not monitor Israeli Jewish settlers in the West Bank — it discriminatorily targets Palestinians, just as Han Chinese people in Xinjiang are not subject to the same repression as Uyghurs. Instead, the “White Wolf” app enables settler volunteers — who already harass, assault and kill Palestinians with relative impunity — to stop and check Palestinians.

Yaser Abu Markhyah, a Palestinian resident of Hebron interviewed by theWashington Post, explained the suffocating psychological and social effect of the surveillance regime: “We no longer feel comfortable socializing because cameras are always filming us”, and that relatives living in less-surveilled neighbourhoods no longer come to visit. Another Hebron resident, Eyad, told Amnesty how the crackdown has “killed all forms of social life” in their once-thriving neighbourhood.

HRW has highlighted the similarity between such testimony and those of interviewees from the Uyghur Region: “People didn’t visit each other… If someone… crosses the street to come to talk to me, I’d run away.”

It is consistent with other former soldiers’ reports to BTS about Israeli strategy in the West Bank. The euphemism “demonstrating presence” refers to practices designed to create a “feeling of persecution” or “of being chased” among the civilian population. Pop-up checkpoints, constant monitoring, night raids on the homes of civilians not suspected of any crime, are all meant to instil fear in the population and tell them that soldiers could be anywhere, at any moment.

Issa Amro, an activist and neighbour of Abu Markhyah, suggested another motivation — to create conditions so suffocating in certain neighbourhoods that Palestinians move out and settlers can move in. Indeed, many residents have already left that part of Hebron.

Connections between the methods of repression used against Palestinians, Uyghurs and other groups are not new. Chinese security services borrowed heavily from Israeli, US and European states’ “counter-terror” and “counter-insurgency” strategies both at home and in militarily occupied territories. The US tech giant Oracle, whose executives have close relationships with Trump, was exposed marketing intrusive surveillance and policing technology to unscrupulous cops around the world, from Chinese state security in Xinijiang to the Brazilian police terrorising favelas in Rio.

In the context of intensifying competition between geopolitical camps, these parallels expose the lies of both sides’ cheerleaders. The rhetorical game of “whataboutery”, played by both camps’ propagandists and useful idiots with Palestinian and Uyghur oppression, is cynical, hypocritical and destructive. It is also particularly patronising coming from western leftists when, for instance, most Palestinians polled are in solidarity with the Uyghur people (unlike the officials of the Palestinian Authority who defend Beijing’s policies, or Hamas and Hezbollah who stay quiet to maintain its favour).

The international rivalry is not about one camp championing “freedom” and “democracy” against a camp of tyrants. Nor is it about a bloc of “socialist” or “anti-imperialist” states against another of capitalists and imperialists.

And the duplication of repressive methods is not down to one state being the source of some sort of unique, original evil that is corrupting the others — as some opponents of either China or Israel imply, with sinophobic or antisemitic implications.

Rather, the copying, exchange and convergence of techniques reaffirms that all these states serve the interests of ruling classes that have much more in common with one another than they would like to admit, acting within the same global capitalist system.

Palestinians, Uyghurs, other oppressed peoples, and indeed the entire international working class, are caught under and between these ruling classes. Liberation will never be won by lining up behind one or other geopolitical bloc. The only way forward requires drawing the links between these struggles, and building working-class solidarity across borders.

Originally published by Workers Liberty.

West Bank Surveillance Echoes China, by Ben Tausz – 23 May 2023

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