Technopolitics of counter-insurgency, coloniality and open-air control: notes from resistance in the Palestinian-Israeli context 

Preliminary note: This bulletin derives from LASInTec’s online panel A última “guerra” colonial? (tecno)políticas de segurança e o caso palestino-israelense (The last colonial “war”? (techno)security policies and the Palestinian-Israeli case), from the series Contemporary Problems in International Security Studies, of June 14, 2021.

On May 6, 2021, the vertiginous escalation of tensions in Sheikh Jarrah – a neighborhood in East Jerusalem – foreshadowed the latest episode in one of the most persistent international issues since the end of World War II. The Israeli intervention that month left more than 300 Palestinians wounded and more than 200 dead in the Gaza Strip, following Hamas’ reaction to increasing police violence against Palestinians in Jerusalem. The case is far from exceptional in a territory that until then had not offered any major clashes. Sheikh Jarrah is an exemplary microcosm of the perennial exception that, in fact, represents Israel’s management of the Palestinian population for more than seventy years – perfected, ostensibly, in the form of the military occupation of the territories of the West Bank and Gaza since 1967.

Forced displacement, expropriation and demolition of homes, administrative detentions, in addition to the non-negotiable prohibition of the right of return¹ and the policies of expansion of settlements in occupied territory, constitute the systematics of the colonial project in contemporary Palestine. Although it has been going on since the second half of the 20th century, in recent decades the project has experimented with and improved devices for maintaining a subtle balance between maximum control over the territory and minimum responsibility towards the Palestinian people. These devices increasingly animate the practices and imagination of public and private sector security agents and agencies around the world who are looking for solutions for their respective killable populations, and whose efficiency has been duly proven: tested in combat.

Reinvention and innovation in the control regime 

Two milestones in the recent history of the Occupation provide elements for understanding the current configuration of Israel’s regime of control: the end of the peace processes of the 1990s and the subsequent Gaza Withdrawal Plan of 2005. Both express responses to the perception of the unsustainability of some of the recurring practices in the management of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) until the outbreak of the First Intifada in 1987. If until then there was a prevailing confidence – on the part of Israeli civil society – in Moshe Dayan’s promise of an invisible, temporary and frictionless occupation², the truculent reaction to the Palestinian uprising exposed the violence intrinsic to Israel’s colonial enterprise. This violence is expressed in the unforgettable statement by Yitzhak Rabin, then Prime Minister and later winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, that it was necessary to break the bones of the Palestinians if the Intifada was to be contained – and so the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) did. Dayan’s policy of normalization³, built on supposed principles of non-intervention, and projecting Israel as a civilizing force over a Palestine portrayed as savage and incapable of governing itself, fell apart as these so-called ungovernable savages brought the skeletons of the disobedient bodies of colonization into Israeli cities. In short, the Oslo Accords⁴, in this context, concretized the perception that the sustainability of the Occupation was possible, as long as adjustments were made to its control regime, consolidating the expansion of a policy of imminent catastrophe, or a policy of interdiction, restriction and death. 

In the same direction, Ariel Sharon’s Gaza Withdrawal Implementation Law (2005), which ordered the withdrawal of the Israeli civilian and military presence from the territory, created the ideal conditions for the technopolitics of the balance between control and unaccountability to be brought to its maximum expression. Gaza was then set up as a testing ground for population management and counter-insurgency practices and policies, which were then disseminated by the Israeli government.

Occupied Palestine and, since then, the entire planet

Throughout the 1990s, a second set of ongoing processes led to the rise of Israel as the most technology-dependent economy on the planet – this claim was supported by the fable about a small territory surrounded by enemies that found strategic investment and technological development to be the guarantee of its regional superiority. Through heavy state investment in the areas of high technology, telecommunications and cybernetics, Tel Aviv and Haifa came to be recognized as Silicon Valley outposts in the Middle East, in the context of what is known as the dot-com bubble, which went into crisis in the early 2000s. Along with the bankruptcy of more than 500 technology companies around the world, the Israeli economy entered a scenario of intense recession, in which the state opted to direct the experience and know-how of this nascent industry into the niche of national security and electronic surveillance. Israel thus invested in military spending and in hundreds of information technology companies, which responded to the government’s encouragement, configuring itself as a military complex. This new arrangement quickly became a solution to the double crisis: the economic crisis and the political crisis, which concerned government costs and the sustainability of the Occupation. 

The intersection between the political economic dimension and the technopolitical dimension of the response to the Palestinian “problem” for Israel is illustrated, for example, by the fact that, in 2014, the cyber-technology and security sector, linked to the graduates of the armed forces’ intelligence Unit 8200, surpassed, for the first time, the exports of the arms industry, a major driving force of the Israeli economy since the Six Day War. More recently, investments have predominated in the development of monitoring and geolocation technologies, electronic and biometric video and audio surveillance, Big Data analysis and, above all, monitoring telecommunications, cell phones and the Internet. As the Old Testament said: Israel’s watchman never sleeps or slumbers⁵. This translates today into devices such as unmanned aerial vehicles, integrated camera circuits with real-time facial recognition, biometric identity cards, automated checkpoints and predictive policing algorithms.

According to anthropologist Jeff Halper⁶, it is the investment in cutting-edge technology, driven by the Ministry of Trade and Industry, that allows Israel to develop its arms strategy and its security policy niche, in particular through the production of technologies with dual applicability, interesting for military and civilian markets, on a global scale. Examples range from the supply of weapons and monitoring technology to China, India and the European Union, including spy satellites and military nanotechnology, to cooperation with Russia on intelligence and security services, military and police training in Myanmar, Singapore, the United States, South Africa and Mexico, and strategic trade partnerships with South Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Egypt, Turkey and Jordan. Despite apparent diplomatic ideological disagreements, business prevails. Also among the privileged clients for the export of Israeli counter-insurgency tactics and doctrines are Latin America and, in particular, Brazil: Israel’s fifth largest arms importer, actively involved in joint initiatives to support policing for mega-events and pacification operations.

Merchants of repression: the occupation among us 

Latin America has historically been an ally when it comes to Israeli military imports and cooperation, given the affinity between the services and devices provided by Israel and the specificities of the region’s security tensions and conflicts⁷. In recent decades, however, against a backdrop of economic prosperity and the modernization of the armed forces, the Latin American market (Brazil in particular) for Occupation technologies has grown exponentially. In 2007, Israel was the first country from outside the continent to join Mercosur and therefore benefit directly from free trade practices between the countries of the bloc. Also in 2010, a security cooperation agreement was signed between the Brazilian and Israeli governments, which included Israel Aerospace Industries⁸ (IAI), Elbit Systems⁹ and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems¹⁰. Since then, Elbit has acquired three Brazilian arms and military equipment companies¹¹ and entered into partnerships with Embraer – one of the largest producers of commercial, military and executive aircraft on the planet – in order to expand the promotion of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) in the Brazilian armed forces and, subsequently, also established a partnership for the development of remote control weapons technology for Guarani armored vehicles (APC), produced by the Brazilian Iveco Veicular de Defesa. IAI, for its part, is said to have signed a $350 million contract to supply UAVs for policing the 2014 and 2016 mega-events. According to a report in Stop The Wall¹², sources claim that IAI is also involved in a partnership with Embraer to development of aircraft equipped with electronic intelligence devices. 

In 2019, Brazil and Israel signed five new agreements and a memorandum of understanding on cooperation in the areas of Defense, preventing and combating so-called “organized crime”, science and technology and cybersecurity, signaling the continued and updated commercial alliance, favored by Jair Bolsonaro since the beginning of his term as president. Carlos Bolsonaro’s connections to NSO Group – an Israeli company known for developing espionage software – was recently evidenced by the publication of a call for tenders for Pegasus spyware, known to be used in Mexico, Morocco, Bahrain, Kazakhstan, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia for political surveillance and police operations¹³. Founded in 2010, NSO is among the largest Israeli companies in the high-tech sector and exemplifies the close relationship between the development of the high-tech sector and the armed forces. Its board of directors includes a former director of the cyber division of the Ministry of Defense and a former member of the army’s council on Palestinian-Israeli relations and counter-terrorism operations¹⁴.

A process of Palestinianization of the world, of which Jeff Halper spoke, is evidently underway. And state and private institutions in Brazil have played an important role in its rapid spread across the continent¹⁵.

we'll stay here, on the heavy chest-wall 

hungry, defiant, naked 

reciting poems 

stirring up the streets with 

revolts and the prisons of pride 

We turn our children into a generation 

who will carry out our wrath 

- redoubled – 

as if we were twenty impossibilities 

(...) 

We should stay here. 

The Impossible, Tawfiq Az-Zayyad

Despite the totalizing dimension to which the devices and doctrines of the colonial project in Palestine propose themselves, there are sparks in episodes like those that took place in May 2021. Even if they are one-off, these actions reaffirm the power of the Palestinian resistance to set fire to any lingering intentions of the Israeli establishment to sanitize its continued domination over the TPOs. 

The most recent bombardment of Gaza has prompted – as has not been seen for a long time – a unified response from the Palestinian people, despite efforts to systematically separate and fracture their territory. This reiterates the unity of Israeli control over the entire territory and, at the same time, the convergence of Palestinian resistance around the struggle for freedom. In a context of (even greater) radicalization of the Israeli far right and the formation of a new parliament (partly also motivated by the fear of a new intifada), Palestinian reunification in the demonstrations in solidarity with Gaza Palestinians in Israel and in every corner of the Occupied Territories represent the tireless possibility of a reinvented and organic movement of popular resistance whose totality overflows the inventiveness of the borders imposed by the technopolitics of the Occupation.

The growing technopolitical and military cooperation between the State of Israel and Latin America, especially Brazil, shows that the resistance to security devices and the fight to dismantle them must be as trans-territorial as the state and private connections that have forged a global police force at war with the people. This war today is called pacification and is being waged from battle tanks to skulls, from the construction of walls to georeferenced monitoring, from rifles in cities to databases. All this is beyond state governments and diplomatic treaties, because it’s around us everywhere, even while these lines are being written...

¹ The so-called Palestinian right of return refers to the principle that Palestinian refugees expelled from their homes in the context of the Nakba of 1948 (known as the first Arab-Israeli war, when around 85% of the Palestinian population of what is now Israeli territory was expelled) and the Six Day War, as well as their descendants, have the right to return to their original lands and properties.

² Israeli Minister of Defense from 1967 to 1974.

³ GORDON, Neve. Israel's Occupation, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008, p. 48.

⁴ Agreements brokered by then US President Bill Clinton between Rabin and Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) at the time, signed between 1993 and 1995, which established the current administrative configuration of the TPOs.

⁵ Psalm 121: 4-6

⁶ HALPER, Jeff. War Against the People: Israel, Palestinians and Global Pacification. London: Pluto Press, 2015.

⁷ HALLAHMI, B. The Israel Connection: Who Israel Arms and Why, 1987; BAHBAH, B; BUTLER, L. Israel and Latin America: The Military Connection, 1986.  

⁸ Accused of involvement in “extrajudicial killings” and “war crimes” by human rights organizations, IAI is one of the largest suppliers’ weapons for the IDF and surveillance technologies to monitor the West Bank Wall - the Apartheid Wall - and security devices for settlements in occupied territory. 

⁹ One of Israel’s largest military companies, specializing in electronic surveillance systems and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). It is among Israel’s main suppliers of equipment for monitoring of the Wall and war drones used in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. See: Stop the Wall. 

¹⁰ Founded in 1948 as part of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the main developer of the Iron Dome (an antiaircraft defense system for intercepting missiles and short-range bombs), it specializes in innovation, technology and defense, and is one of Israel’s oldest pioneers in the development of security solutions and in the international expansion of industrial-technological cooperation programs. 

¹¹ Aeroeletrônica Indústria de Componentes Aviônicos (AEL), from Porto Alegre, which provides maintenance services for avionics systems in Brazil and abroad. Latin America; Ares Aeroespacial e Defesa S/A and Periscópio Equipamentos Optrônicos S/A, from Rio de Janeiro, both of which specialize in Defence electronic systems and are also suppliers to other countries in the region. 

¹² Stop The Wall. Brazil's military relations with Israel, 2011. 

¹³ Marczak, B., Scott-Railton, J., McKune, S., Abdul Razzak, B., & Deibert, R. Hide and Seek: Tracking NSO Group's Pegasus Spyware to Operations in 45 Countries. Citizen Lab Research Report No. 113, University of Toronto, 2018. 

¹⁴ WHO PROFITS. Company Features: NSO Group - Technologies of Control, 2020. 

¹⁵ Stop The Wall. Brazil's military relations with Israel, 2011. available at: (accessed on: May 17, 2021).