Israel Occupation Quotes

ليس وطني دائماً على حق. ولكنني لا استطيع ان امارس حقاً حقيقياً الا في وطني .

Israeli occupation exposes us very young to the extremes of our emotions, until we cannot feel except in the extreme.

There's a Palestine that dwells inside all of us, a Palestine that needs to be rescued: a free Palestine where all people regardless of color, religion, or race coexist; a Palestine where the meaning of the word "occupation" is only restricted to what the dictionary says rather than those plenty of meanings and connotations of death, destruction, pain, suffering, deprivation, isolation and restrictions that Israel has injected the word with.

Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim underlay not just 'the occupation' but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant for the Holy Land and where were you, and what were you? Just another land-thief like the Turks or the British, except that in this case you wanted the land without the people. And the original Zionist slogan—'a land without a people for a people without a land'—disclosed its own negation when I saw the densely populated Arab towns dwelling sullenly under Jewish tutelage. You want irony? How about Jews becoming colonizers at just the moment when other Europeans had given up on the idea?

You can't have occupation and human rights.

Toughness found fertile soil in the hearts of Palestinians, and the grains of resistance embedded themselves in their skin. Endurance evolved as a hallmark of refugee society. But the price they paid was the subduing of tender vulnerability. They learned to celebrate martyrdom. Only martyrdom offered freedom. Only in death were they at last invulnerable to Israel. Martyrdom became the ultimate defiance of Israeli occupation. "Never let them know they hurt you" was their creed

But blaming Islam is a simple answer, easier and less controversial than re-examining the core political issues and grievances that resonate in much of the Muslim world: the failures of many Muslim governments and societies, some aspects of U.S. foreign policy representing intervention and dominance, Western support for authoritarian regimes, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, or support for Israel's military battles with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. (p. 136-137)

Ethnonationalist ideology grows when accountable democracy withers. Israel is the ultimate model and goal.

Half the published articles on Gaza contain a standard reference to its resemblance to a vast open-air prison (and when I last saw it under Israeli occupation it certainly did deserve this metaphor). The problem is that, given its ideology and its allies, Hamas qualifies rather too well in the capacity of guard and warder.

I always have believed that we should not call it an Arab-Israeli issue or a Palestinian-Arab dispute or a peace negotiation. I think we should call it what it is: an occupation of Palestine, full stop. This is not a popular position in mixed company.

Israelis like to believe, and tell the world, that they were running an “enlightened” or “benign” occupation, qualitatively different from other military occupations the world had seen. The truth was radically different. Like all occupations, Israel’s was founded on brute force, repression and fear, collaboration and treachery, beatings and torture chambers, and daily intimidation, humiliation, and manipulation.

Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the same thing, as I failed at first to see) had been 'sold' to me as an essentially secular and democratic one. The idea was a haven for the persecuted and the survivors, a democracy in a region where the idea was poorly understood, and a place where—as Philip Roth had put it in a one-handed novel that I read when I was about nineteen—even the traffic cops and soldiers were Jews. This, like the other emphases of that novel, I could grasp. Indeed, my first visit was sponsored by a group in London called the Friends of Israel. They offered to pay my expenses, that is, if on my return I would come and speak to one of their meetings. I still haven't submitted that expenses claim. The misgivings I had were of two types, both of them ineradicable. The first and the simplest was the encounter with everyday injustice: by all means the traffic cops were Jews but so, it turned out, were the colonists and ethnic cleansers and even the torturers. It was Jewish leftist friends who insisted that I go and see towns and villages under occupation, and sit down with Palestinian Arabs who were living under house arrest—if they were lucky—or who were squatting in the ruins of their demolished homes if they were less fortunate. In Ramallah I spent the day with the beguiling Raimonda Tawil, confined to her home for committing no known crime save that of expressing her opinions. (For some reason, what I most remember is a sudden exclamation from her very restrained and respectable husband, a manager of the local bank: 'I would prefer living under a Bedouin muktar to another day of Israeli rule!' He had obviously spent some time thinking about the most revolting possible Arab alternative.) In Jerusalem I visited the Tutungi family, who could produce title deeds going back generations but who were being evicted from their apartment in the old city to make way for an expansion of the Jewish quarter. Jerusalem: that place of blood since remote antiquity. Jerusalem, over which the British and French and Russians had fought a foul war in the Crimea, and in the mid-nineteenth century, on the matter of which Christian Church could command the keys to some 'holy sepulcher.' Jerusalem, where the anti-Semite Balfour had tried to bribe the Jews with the territory of another people in order to seduce them from Bolshevism and continue the diplomacy of the Great War. Jerusalem: that pest-house in whose environs all zealots hope that an even greater and final war can be provoked. It certainly made a warped appeal to my sense of history.

The seventh myth was that Israel intended to conduct a benevolent occupation but was forced to take a tougher attitude because of Palestinian violence. Israel regarded from the very beginning any wish to end the occupation—whether expressed peacefully or through struggle—as terrorism. From the beginning, it reacted brutally by collectively punishing the population for any demonstration of resistance.

History will remember this war on Palestinian civilians and their displacement as the moment the world woke up to the Zionist plans of occupation and expansion.

1. Bangladesh.... In 1971 ... Kissinger overrode all advice in order to support the Pakistani generals in both their civilian massacre policy in East Bengal and their armed attack on India from West Pakistan.... This led to a moral and political catastrophe the effects of which are still sorely felt. Kissinger’s undisclosed reason for the ‘tilt’ was the supposed but never materialised ‘brokerage’ offered by the dictator Yahya Khan in the course of secret diplomacy between Nixon and China.... Of the new state of Bangladesh, Kissinger remarked coldly that it was ‘a basket case’ before turning his unsolicited expertise elsewhere. 2. Chile.... Kissinger had direct personal knowledge of the CIA’s plan to kidnap and murder General René Schneider, the head of the Chilean Armed Forces ... who refused to countenance military intervention in politics. In his hatred for the Allende Government, Kissinger even outdid Richard Helms ... who warned him that a coup in such a stable democracy would be hard to procure. The murder of Schneider nonetheless went ahead, at Kissinger’s urging and with American financing, just between Allende’s election and his confirmation.... This was one of the relatively few times that Mr Kissinger (his success in getting people to call him ‘Doctor’ is greater than that of most PhDs) involved himself in the assassination of a single named individual rather than the slaughter of anonymous thousands. His jocular remark on this occasion—‘I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible’—suggests he may have been having the best of times.... 3. Cyprus.... Kissinger approved of the preparations by Greek Cypriot fascists for the murder of President Makarios, and sanctioned the coup which tried to extend the rule of the Athens junta (a favoured client of his) to the island. When despite great waste of life this coup failed in its objective, which was also Kissinger’s, of enforced partition, Kissinger promiscuously switched sides to support an even bloodier intervention by Turkey. Thomas Boyatt ... went to Kissinger in advance of the anti-Makarios putsch and warned him that it could lead to a civil war. ‘Spare me the civics lecture,’ replied Kissinger, who as you can readily see had an aphorism for all occasions. 4. Kurdistan. Having endorsed the covert policy of supporting a Kurdish revolt in northern Iraq between 1974 and 1975, with ‘deniable’ assistance also provided by Israel and the Shah of Iran, Kissinger made it plain to his subordinates that the Kurds were not to be allowed to win, but were to be employed for their nuisance value alone. They were not to be told that this was the case, but soon found out when the Shah and Saddam Hussein composed their differences, and American aid to Kurdistan was cut off. Hardened CIA hands went to Kissinger ... for an aid programme for the many thousands of Kurdish refugees who were thus abruptly created.... The apercu of the day was: ‘foreign policy should not he confused with missionary work.’ Saddam Hussein heartily concurred. 5. East Timor. The day after Kissinger left Djakarta in 1975, the Armed Forces of Indonesia employed American weapons to invade and subjugate the independent former Portuguese colony of East Timor. Isaacson gives a figure of 100,000 deaths resulting from the occupation, or one-seventh of the population, and there are good judges who put this estimate on the low side. Kissinger was furious when news of his own collusion was leaked, because as well as breaking international law the Indonesians were also violating an agreement with the United States.... Monroe Leigh ... pointed out this awkward latter fact. Kissinger snapped: ‘The Israelis when they go into Lebanon—when was the last time we protested that?’ A good question, even if it did not and does not lie especially well in his mouth. It goes on and on and on until one cannot eat enough to vomit enough.

the Occupation. It was a common enemy. It was destroying both sides. He didn’t hate Jews, he said, he didn’t hate Israel. What he hated was being occupied, the humiliation of it, the strangulation,

We would do well to remember that the success of any struggle depends on the determination of its leaders and the clarity of its purpose, not the doubts of naysayers.

[Israel's military occupation is] in gross violation of international law and has been from the outset. And that much, at least, is fully recognized, even by the United States, which has overwhelming and, as I said, unilateral responsibility for these crimes. So George Bush No. 1, when he was the U.N. ambassador, back in 1971, he officially reiterated Washington's condemnation of Israel's actions in the occupied territories. He happened to be referring specifically to occupied Jerusalem. In his words, actions in violation of the provisions of international law governing the obligations of an occupying power, namely Israel. He criticized Israel's failure "to acknowledge its obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention as well as its actions which are contrary to the letter and spirit of this Convention." [...] However, by that time, late 1971, a divergence was developing, between official policy and practice. The fact of the matter is that by then, by late 1971, the United States was already providing the means to implement the violations that Ambassador Bush deplored. [...] on December 5th [2001], there had been an important international conference, called in Switzerland, on the 4th Geneva Convention. Switzerland is the state that's responsible for monitoring and controlling the implementation of them. The European Union all attended, even Britain, which is virtually a U.S. attack dog these days. They attended. A hundred and fourteen countries all together, the parties to the Geneva Convention. They had an official declaration, which condemned the settlements in the occupied territories as illegal, urged Israel to end its breaches of the Geneva Convention, some "grave breaches," including willful killing, torture, unlawful deportation, unlawful depriving of the rights of fair and regular trial, extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly. Grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, that's a serious term, that means serious war crimes. The United States is one of the high contracting parties to the Geneva Convention, therefore it is obligated, by its domestic law and highest commitments, to prosecute the perpetrators of grave breaches of the conventions. That includes its own leaders. Until the United States prosecutes its own leaders, it is guilty of grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, that means war crimes. And it's worth remembering the context. It is not any old convention. These are the conventions established to criminalize the practices of the Nazis, right after the Second World War. What was the U.S. reaction to the meeting in Geneva? The U.S. boycotted the meeting [..] and that has the usual consequence, it means the meeting is null and void, silence in the media.

The driving forces of this [defense] industry is that they want the conflict with the Palestinians to go forever. Moral considerations are never considered when Israel aids dictatorships. It’s about money and being a powerful nation.

Only a few years ago did it suddenly dawn on me that my existential fear regarding my nation’s future and my moral outrage regarding my nation’s occupation policy are not unconnected. On the one hand, Israel is the only nation in the West that is occupying another people. On the other hand, Israel is the only nation in the West that is existentially threatened. Both occupation and intimidation make the Israeli condition unique. Intimidation and occupation have become the two pillars of our condition.

Existence has taught me that a man can live on love and fresh water, on crumbs and promises, but he can never survive insults. And insults are all I've known since I came into the world. Every morning. Every evening. That's all I've seen for my whole life.

We’re not citizens of Israel; nor do we have a say or any political rights in the state that controls every aspect of our lives. We’re stuck with the inability to plan for our futures, to travel freely, or even to move about our territories from city to city without having to cross military checkpoints. We need permission to build our homes, to travel, to work—all the basic rights and freedoms you might take for granted living in a civil society simply don’t exist when you’re living under military occupation. It’s not an easy life, and yet, it’s the only one I’ve ever known.

We started it. We started it with the occupation, and we are duty-bound to end it—a real and complete ending. We started the violence. There is no violence worse than the violence of the occupier, using force on an entire nation, so the question about who fired first is therefore an evasion meant to distort the picture.

I don’t care what the Gentiles do with the arms. The main thing is that the Jews profit. Israeli advisor in Guatemala from the 1980s

Leftist university professors in Western Europe and the United States have also been agitated about one other country’s wars—Israel’s. Hence the numerous attempts by Leftist professors at Western universities to boycott Israeli professors and universities. But, of course, Chinese professors and universities are not only exempt from boycotts; they are enthusiastically sought after despite the lack of elementary freedoms in China, the Chinese government’s incarceration of dissidents in psychiatric wards, the decimation of much of Tibetan culture, and the increasing Chinese occupation of that ancient country.

As for terror against Israelis, Palestinian Muslim terror emanates from a desire to destroy Israel, not from Israel’s conduct regarding Palestinians, whether occupation, settlements, or checkpoints. One proof is that the greatest amount of Palestinian terror against Israel was unleashed after Israel agreed to give up nearly all of the West Bank to the Palestinians at the end of 2000. Islamist terror against Israel is the result of Muslim, especially Arab Muslim, desires to annihilate the one non-Muslim state in the midst of the Arab world. For most Arab Muslims and for all Islamists, the Middle East is supposed to be under Muslim rule. There is no place for a Christian Lebanon or for a Jewish Israel, no matter what its borders. That Israel is Jewish is all the more an affront to many Muslims. Jews are supposed to have dhimmi status under Muslim rule, and no Muslim should be under Jewish rule.

By banning books, the Israeli occupation deprives Palestinians of seeing beyond Gaza to the outside world and learning about that world. So, not only have Palestinians been expelled from their homes and ancestral land, not only have they been thrown into prisons, not only have their trees been cut and burned, not only have they been subject to daily killing and humiliation, not only have they been denied the right to return to their homes, but they are also denied access to knowledge and literature, besieged even inside their homes during curfews and random air raids. They are not allowed to travel freely, even through books. If one doesn’t get killed by Israel, then life must be made unbearable.

The question of paying taxes is a valid one today, particularly for people living under occupation or under an unjust regime. It was a valid one in ancient Israel as well—how much does one go along with the emperor, and when must one resist?

Israel maintains its pressure on the Palestinian population not simply for its own security, then, but because such pressure has for four decades enabled it to maintain control over the territories- and, quite simply, because it encourages Palestinians to leave.

There are currently some five thousand Palestinian prisoners and we know that since 1967, eight hundred thousand Palestinians—40 percent of the male population—have been imprisoned by Israel. The demand to free all Palestinian political prisoners is a key ingredient of the demand to end the occupation.

There is, of course, another anniversary that will follow our Independence Day: your day of mourning, Nakba Day. The Palestinian catastrophe of 1948. Not of 1967, not of the occupation and the West Bank settlements, but of the founding of Israel. That is the heart of the Palestinian grievance against me. My national existence.

This kind of dehumanization is the inevitable result of endless occupation. It is also an export asset. What’s appealing to growing numbers of regimes globally is learning how Israel gets away with politicide. That term was adapted to Israel/Palestine by the late Israeli scholar and professor of sociology Baruch Kimmerling, who argued in 2003 that Israel’s domestic and foreign policy is “largely oriented towards one major goal: the politicide of the Palestinian people. By politicide I mean a process that has, as its ultimate goal, the dissolution of the Palestinian people’s existence as a legitimate social, political, and economic entity. This process may also but not necessarily include their partial or complete ethnic cleansing from the territory known as the Land of Israel.

A book was published in 2021 that had received financial backing from Elbit. The Bulgarian Army and the Rescue of Bulgaria’s Jews, 1941–1944 is a revisionist history that falsely claims that the Bulgarian state saved Jews during World War Two. Elbit wanted to get a foothold in the Bulgarian arms market. Raz Segal and Amos Goldberg, “Distorting the Holocaust to Boost the International Arms Trade,” Nation, July 26, 2022.

The PLO was founded three years before the Israelis ever occupied Gaza and the West Bank, and that the PLO wanted Israel wiped off the map. But in a ninety-second story, who has time to remind viewers that when the PLO was founded, Gaza was illegally occupied by Egypt, and the West Bank by Jordan, but Yasser Arafat did not mind those occupations? Where were the voices of the Palestinians then for their independent state?

A lot of Israelis have begun to talk of ‘two Jewish societies’ in Israel, some even talk about ‘two Jewish peoples’ within the Israeli Jewish nation. What holds them together? The conflict, of course. The occupation. The perpetual state of war … It is not that the Israeli–Arab conflict has been forced on Israel. Rather, it’s the other way around: Israel keeps up the conflict, because it needs the conflict for its very existence.

The extent of the carnage inflicted on the Palestinian population was incalculable. Between 1947 and 1949, at least 750,000 civilians out of a population of 1.9 million were forcibly expelled and made refugees beyond the borders of the new state. Palestinians call it the Nakba, the catastrophe. Over seven months, 531 villages were destroyed and 15,000 people were killed. The remaining Palestinians suffered beatings, rape, and internment.

One of those prominent Jewish dissidents was Ronnie Kasrils, who served as the minister for intelligence between 2004 and 2008 under an ANC government. He told the Guardian that the comparison between the two nations wasn’t accidental. “Israelis claim that they are the chosen people, the elect of God, and find a biblical justification for their racism and Zionist exclusivity,” he said. “This is just like the Afrikaners of apartheid South Africa, who also had the biblical notion that the land was their God-given right. Like the Zionists who claimed that Palestine in the 1940s was ‘a land without people for a people without land,’ so the Afrikaner settlers spread the myth that there were no black people in South Africa when they first settled in the 17th century. They conquered by force of arms and terror and the provocation of a series of bloody colonial wars of conquest.

The Israeli government publicly claims that this extraordinary violence - its army fired over a million bullets in the first few days of the intifada alone - was directed against what it called "the terrorist Infrastructure." But, again, various Israeli officials privately acknowledged what was really at stake in dealing with the intifada, and that Israel's response to the uprising was directed not at armed groups but rather against the entire population.

Yonatan declared after the event. “I am also thinking about the delegations of young Israelis that are coming to see the history of our people but also are subjected to militaristic and nationalistic brainwashing on a daily basis. Maybe if they see what we wrote here today they will remember that oppression is oppression, occupation is occupation, and crimes against humanity are crimes against humanity, whether they have been committed here in Warsaw or in Gaza.

You might look back at the Zionist movement—there were plenty of Jews killed by other Jews. They killed collaborators, traitors and people they thought were traitors. And they weren’t under anything like the harsh conditions of the Palestinian occupation. As plenty of Israelis have pointed out, the British weren’t nice, but they were gentlemen compared with us. The Labor-based defense force Haganah had torture chambers and assassins. I once looked up their first recorded assassination in the official Haganah history. It’s described there straight. It was in 1921. A Dutch Jew named Jacob de Haan had to be killed, because he was trying to approach local Palestinians to see if things could be worked out between them and the new Jewish settlers. His murderer was assumed to be the woman who later became the wife of the first president of Israel. They said that another reason for assassinating him was that he was a homosexual.

Working with present-day genocidal regimes doesn’t bother Israel but it has also refused to publicly acknowledge past genocides. The Armenian genocide, formally recognized by US President Joe Biden in 2021, occurred in 1915 and 1916. Due to relations with Turkey, Israel has refused to recognize the Armenian genocide, and declassified documents prove that Israeli officials worked for decades to pressure countries and individuals around the world who wanted to do so.

There are moments chronicled in political history as pivotal in carving a new political path forward and this genocidal ‘defending of one’s state’ has become one of them. History will remember this war on Palestinian civilians and their displacement as the moment the world woke up to the Zionist plans of occupation and expansion. As a result, never again will the same rhetoric be sufficient in explaining the atrocities they are willing to perpetrate towards its attainment.

The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history, writes Henry Siegman, the former head of the American Jewish Congress. "Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel's interest in a peace process--other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo--has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land.

If Israel is to survive as a nation state, not a pariah, it will have to get Palestine off its back; otherwise, the prognosis for the two is mutual annihilation. There is no other alternative but to end the occupation, with a complete separation of the two states. For too long, Israel has depended on cheap Palestinian labour to build the very settlements they hate. What is created by this bizarre interaction of profitability and hate is two dysfunctional societies that have put a gun to each other’s heads.

Exact figures are impossible to obtain, since the state never releases them, but today there are over three hundred multinational companies and six thousand start-ups that employ hundreds of thousands of people. Sales are booming, with defense exports reaching an all-time high in 2021 of US$11.3 billion, having risen 55 percent in two years. Israel’s cybersecurity firms are also soaring, with US$8.8 billion raised in one hundred deals in 2021. In the same year, Israeli cyber companies took in 40 percent of the world’s funding in the sector.

Most observers and analysts deny the duality. The ones on the left address occupation and overlook intimidation, while the ones on the wight address intimidation and dismiss occupation. But the truth is that without incorporating both elements into one worldview, one cannot grasp Israel or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Any school of thought that does not relate to seriously to these two fundamental is bound to be flawed and futile. Only a third approach that internalizes both intimidation and occupation can be realistic and moral and get the Israel story right.

Most of the population of the Strip is not originally from there, but rather from a swath of villages in the southern regions of Israel, whose inhabitants were driven or fled there during the fighting of 1948–49, and who were never allowed to return to their homes. The Gaza Strip is thus not only a victim of a forty-year occupation that started in June 1967. Most of its 1.5 million people constitute the single largest concentration of the refugees produced as a direct, inevitable result of creating a Jewish state in 1948 in a country with a nearly two-thirds Arab majority.

Elbit, the biggest private arms manufacturer in Israel today. Established in 1966, it quickly became an essential supplier of equipment for Israeli tanks and aircraft. Years later it had become a major exporter of weapons to both democracies and despots, working closely with the US military and a host of other nations to develop a range of equipment, from drones to night vision googles and land surveillance systems to deadly high-tech munitions. Elbit is still today intimately tied to the Israeli security establishment, and has even moved into the book publishing industry.

The First Intifada, as it became known, erupted spontaneously all over the Occupied Territories, ignited when an Israeli army vehicle struck a truck in the Jabalya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, killing four Palestinians. The uprising spread very quickly, although Gaza was the crucible and remained the most difficult area for Israel to bring under control. The intifada generated extensive local organization in the villages, towns, cities, and refugee camps, and came to be led by a secret Unified National Leadership. The flexible and clandestine grassroots networks formed during the intifada proved impossible for the military occupation authorities to suppress.

I believe that it is impossible to understand the current situation in the Middle East if one thinks that there is a territorial Arab-Israeli conflict at hand, when in fact, it is clearly a war of religions that unfortunately has no end in sight. To think that this conflict is about land, occupation, racism, apartheid or any other nonsensical media-based and politically created jargon is to play into the hands of those who for so long have taken advantage of the prevalent ignorance of the majority of the world’s public. Make no mistake, this conflict is a religious one, and although Israel is a secular state, it is its ‘Jewish character’ that has the Muslim world up in arms.

Relations with the Palestinian village of Qaffin, however, have been more complicated. "Before 1967," explains Dov Avital, "it was a West Bank village annexed by Jordan. Since, 1967, it has been a Palestinian village of the West Bank occupied by Israel. We share the struggle of our neighbors in Meisar for their civil rights - in principle, our fellow citizens. But it is different with Qaffin. As Israelis on the Left, we are willing to fight against the occupation for peace and for the creation of a Palestinian State. But the people in Qaffin are also struggling for national rights. We support them, but because they are Palestinians and we are Israelis, we cannot really take part in that.

American Jewish organizations (as well as Israel) rallied behind the Bush administration’s criminal aggression against Iraq, with Elie Wiesel declaring that “the world faced a crisis similar to 1938” and “the choice is simple,” and with self-promoting “Nazi hunter” Simon Wiesenthal proclaiming that “you cannot wait indefinitely on dictators. Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, but for six years the world did not act.” Critics of the war stood accused of everything from Chamberlain-style “appeasement” to “an anti-Semitism of a type long thought dead in the West,” while even prominent American poets opposing the Iraqi war and Israel’s occupation were chastised for playing “on the edges of 1930s-style anti-Semitism.

between 1970 and 2001, Israel established twenty-one Jewish-only settlements in the Strip. This not only greatly aggravated the political situation, but also placed pressure on the available land and water resources, which the settlements, whose population never rose above some eight thousand Israeli Jews, used in quantities vastly disproportionate to their demographic representation.15 This was a predictable effect of an occupying power settling its citizens in a territory that it controlled through military rule—and in the midst of some 1.1 million Palestinians.16 It could be similarly anticipated that people living under such conditions would resist occupation, producing tension that would become more pronounced over time.

Mark appears to acknowledge the reality that “no one had the strength to subdue” the demon of Roman military occupation (5: 4)—including the Jewish rebels. Yet he makes his revolutionary stance clear by symbolically reenacting the exodus story through a “herd” of pigs. With the divine command, the imperial forces are drowned in the sea. It is no accident that in the aftermath of this action the crowd, like Pilate, responds with “wonder” (thaumazein; 5: 20). To invoke the great exodus liberation story was, as it has been subsequently throughout Western history, to fan the flames of revolutionary hope (Walzer, 1986). Yet Mark realized that the problem was much deeper than throwing off the yoke of yet another colonizer. After all, biblical history itself attested to the fact that Israel had always been squeezed, courted, or threatened by the great empires that surrounded it. And the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucids had only resulted in recycling oppressive power into the hands of a native dynasty, one that in turn became an early victim of a newly ascendent imperial power, Rome. Thus the meaning of Jesus’ struggle against the strong man is not reducible solely to his desire for the liberation of Palestine from colonial rule, though it certainly includes that. It is a struggle against the root “spirit” and politics of domination—which, Mark acknowledges matter of factly, is most clearly represented by the “great men” of the Hellenistic imperial sphere (10: 42).

Israel’s claim to be a thriving democracy in the heart of the Middle East is challenged by the facts. All media outlets in Israel, along with publishers and authors, must submit stories related to foreign affairs and security to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) chief military censor before publication. No other Western country has such a system. It’s an archaic regulation that began soon after Israel was born. The censor has the power to entirely block the story or partially redact it.3 What’s deemed valid is highly questionable, since the priorities of the national security establishment will be very different to what’s required for a healthy, democratic state. This contradiction was clear when Israel’s chief censor, Ariella Ben Avraham, left her position in 2020 and took a job with the country’s leading cyber-surveillance company, NSO Group.

The US was forced to withdraw troops from Iraq after an extremely costly decade-long military occupation, leaving in place a regime more closely allied to Iran, the US’ regional adversary. The Iraq war depleted the economy, deprived American corporations of oil wealth, greatly enlarged Washington’s budget and trade deficits, and reduced the living standards of US citizens. The Afghanistan war had a similar outcome, with high external costs, military retreat, fragile clients, domestic disaffection, and no short or medium term transfers of wealth (imperial pillage) to the US Treasury or private corporations. The Libyan war led to the total destruction of a modern, oil-rich economy in North Africa, the total dissolution of state and civil society, and the emergence of armed tribal, fundamentalist militias opposed to US and EU client regimes in North and sub-Sahara Africa and beyond. Instead

The Palestinian uprising, or intifada, which broke out in December 1987 was a perfect example of the law of unintended consequences.2 Ariel Sharon and Menachem Begin had launched the invasion of Lebanon to quash the power of the PLO, and thereby end Palestinian nationalist opposition in the occupied West Bank and Gaza to the absorption of those territories into Israel. This would complete the colonial task of historic Zionism, creating a Jewish state in all of Palestine. The 1982 war did succeed in weakening the PLO, but the paradoxical effect was to strengthen the Palestinian national movement in Palestine itself, shifting the focus of action from outside to inside the country. After two decades of a relatively manageable occupation, Begin and Sharon, two fervent partisans of the Greater Israel ideal, had inadvertently sparked a new level of resistance to the process of colonization. Opposition to Israel’s landgrab and military rule has erupted within Palestine repeatedly and in different forms ever since.

Europe was surrounded by borders of silence, and the space where the Grand March was occurring was now no more than a small platform in the middle of the planet. The crowds that had once pressed eagerly up to the platform had long since departed, and the Grand March went on in solitude, without spectators. Yes, said Franz to himself, the Grand March goes on, the world's indifference notwithstanding, but it is growing nervous and hectic: yesterday against the American occupation of Vietnam, today against the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia; yesterday for Israel, today for the Palestinians; yesterday for Cuba, tomorrow against Cuba—and always against America; at times against massacres and at times in support of other massacres; Europe marches on, and to keep up with events, to leave none of them out, its pace grows faster and faster, until finally the Grand March is a procession of rushing, galloping people and the platform is shrinking and shrinking until one day it will be reduced to a mere dimension-less dot.

It is over. The long Occupation that created Israeli generations born in Israel and not knowing another ‘homeland’ created at the same time generations of Palestinians strange to Palestine; born in exile and knowing nothing of the homeland except stories and news. Generations who posses an intimate knowledge of the streets of faraway exiles, but not of their own country. Generations that never planted or built or made their small human mistakes in their own country. Generations that never saw our grandmothers quarter in front of the ovens to present us with a loaf of bread to dip in olive oil, never saw the village preacher in his headdress and Azhari piety hiding in a cave to spy on the girls and the women of the village when they took of their clothes and bathed, naked, in the pool of ‘Ein al-Deir. The Occupation has created generations without a place whose colours, smell, and sounds they can remember; a first place that belongs to them, that they can return to in their memories in their cobbled-together exiles. There is no childhood bed for them to remember, a bed on which they forgot a soft cloth doll, or whose white pillows - once the adults had gone out of an evening were their weapons in a battle that had them shirking with delight. This is it. The Occupation has created generations of us that have to adore an unknown beloved; distant, difficult, surrounded by guards, by walls, by nuclear missiles, by sheer terror. The long Occupation has succeeded in changing us from children of Palestine to children of the idea of Palestine. I have always believed that it is in the interests of an occupation, any occupation, that the homeland should be transformed in the memory of its people into a bouquet of ’symbols’. Merely symbols, they will not allow us to develop our village so that it shares features with the city, or to move without city into a contemporary space. The Occupation forced us to remain with the old. That is its crime. It did not deprive us of the clay ovens of yesterday, but of the mystery of what we could invent tomorrow.

In their turn, since 2005 the settlers have become even more brutal and barbarous in their treatment of the people of the West Bank, culminating in the burning alive of a teenager and an entire family. The Palestinians’ steadfastness in the West Bank continues. Popular resistance is a daily occurrence but with limited resources it is easily quashed by the Israeli occupation. However, in its tenacity it suggests that the final chapter to what began in 1967 has yet to be written. Today there are nearly three million Palestinians in the West Bank and almost 400,000 settlers. Zionism as a settler colonial movement was able to colonize Palestine almost in its entirety regardless of its demographic minority. These settlers, however, are much more powerful than the early Zionists and it is unlikely that anyone will prevent them from taking over the rest of the West Bank, by one way or another. During that same period, Israel subjected the Gaza Strip to even harsher oppression and the most callous version of the maximum security prison to date.

In the quarter century since the Oslo agreements, the situation in Palestine and Israel has often been falsely described as a clash between two near-equals, between the state of Israel and the quasi-state of the Palestinian Authority. This depiction masks the unequal, unchanged colonial reality. The PA has no sovereignty, no jurisdiction, and no authority except that allowed it by Israel, which even controls a major part of its revenues in the form of customs duties and some taxes. Its primary function, to which much of its budget is devoted, is security, but not for its people: it is mandated by US and Israeli dictates to provide security for Israel’s settlers and occupation forces against the resistance, violent and otherwise, of other Palestinians. Since 1967, there has been one state authority in all of the territory of Mandatory Palestine: that of Israel. The creation of the PA did nothing to change that reality, rearranging the deckchairs on the Palestinian Titanic, while providing Israeli colonization and occupation with an indispensable Palestinian shield.

Israel’s constant drone surveillance over Gaza also impressed President Vladimir Putin. Moscow needed reliable surveillance drones after it lost many planes during its war in 2008 against Georgia in South Ossetia. Tbilisi had used Israeli drones, and years later Moscow decided to follow suit. Having seen Israeli operations over Gaza, Russia licensed the Israeli Aerospace Industries Searcher II, renamed “Forpost” by its new owners, and it became a key asset in Russian support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.33 Israel trained Russian pilots to operate the drones. Russia and Israel maintained a close relationship during the Syrian civil war despite the former supporting Assad and the latter worrying about the growing presence of Russian allies Iran and Hizbollah in the country. This led Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (and Naftali Bennett) to routinely attack Iranian and Syrian military positions in Syria to stop the transfer of weapons to Hizbollah. However, Moscow usually turned a blind eye to these attacks, assisted by a de-escalation hotline between the two governments.

He was moved by the monologue of a soldier who wrote in his kibbutz journal (every kibbutz in Israel has a kind of ‘village voice’) of what he had seen and done in the occupied West Bank. The soldier told how he and his comrades entered a Palestinian school, locked about twenty eight-year-old boys in a classroom, threw in some gas grenades and kept the children in there for quite a while, causing such panic that at least half of them jumped out of the windows, breaking their legs in the fall. This was a punishment for stone throwing by students from a nearby college, who were not caught. What drew Evron’s attention was not so much the horrific story itself, but the fact that the soldier who published the story in a kibbutz publication seemed to believe that telling the story absolved him and his friends from his actions. The same applied to a group of soldiers in a famous publication, soon after the June 1967 war, entitled Conversations Between Soldiers. The uneasiness Evron felt in 1967 became a review of liberal Zionism and its role in sanitizing and disguising the horrors of Zionist colonization and occupation since 1882

The more the State of Israel relied on force to manage the occupation, the more compelled it was to deploy hasbara. And the more Western media consumers encountered hasbara, the more likely they became to measure Israel’s grandiose talking points against the routine and petty violence, shocking acts of humiliation, and repression that defined its relationship with the Palestinians. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a professional explainer who spent the early years of his political career as a frequent guest on prime time American news programs perfecting the slickness of the Beltway pundit class, the Israeli government invested unprecedented resources into hasbara. Once the sole responsibility of the Israeli foreign ministry, the task of disseminating hasbara fell to a special Ministry of Public Diplomacy led by Yuli Edelstein, a rightist settler and government minister who called Arabs a “despicable nation.” Edelstein’s ministry boasted an advanced “situation room,” a paid media team, and coordination of a volunteer force that claimed to include thousands of volunteer bloggers, tweeters, and Facebook commenters fed with talking points and who flood social media with hasbara in five languages. The exploits of the propaganda soldiers conscripted into Israel’s online army have helped give rise to the phenomenon of the “hasbara troll,” an often faceless, shrill and relentless nuisance deployed on Twitter and Facebook to harass public figures who expressed skepticism of official Israeli policy or sympathy for the Palestinians.

As Hamas’s rocket stockpiles dwindled, it reduced the number of rockets launched nightly but increased the range to Tel Aviv and beyond. Several of my conversations with Obama were interrupted by sirens. “Sorry, Barack,” I’d say. “I’m afraid we’ll have to resume our conversation in a few minutes.” With the rest of the staff I had forty-five seconds to go into underground shelters, returning after getting the all-clear sign. These live interruptions strengthened my argument for taking increasingly powerful actions against Hamas. And so we did. The IAF destroyed more and more enemy targets. Hamas panicked and became careless. Our intelligence identified the locations of their commanders. We targeted them and delivered painful blows to their hierarchy. Hamas then shifted their command posts to high-rises, believing they would be immune to our strikes. Using a technique called “knock on roof,” the air force fired nonlethal warning shots on the roofs of the buildings. Along with phone calls to the building occupants, these warnings enabled them to leave the premises unharmed. The IDF flattened several high-rise buildings with no civilian casualties. The sight of these collapsing towers sent Hamas a powerful message of demoralization and fear. This was literally “you can climb but you can’t hide.” Desperation was seeping through Hamas ranks. Arguments began to flare between Mashal in Qatar and the ground command in Gaza, which was suffering the brunt of our attacks. Eventually they caved. In the talks with Egypt they rescinded all their demands and agreed to an unconditional cease-fire that went into effect on August 26, 2014. After fifty days, Protective Edge was over. Sixty-seven IDF soldiers, five Israeli civilians, including one child, and a Thai civilian working in Israel lost their lives in the war. There were 4,564 rockets and mortars fired at Israel from Gaza, nearly all from civilian neighborhoods. The Iron Dome system intercepted 86 percent of them.4 The IDF killed 2,125 Gazans,5 roughly two-thirds of whom were members of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian terrorist groups. A third were civilians who were often used by the terrorists as human shields. Colonel Richard Kemp, the commander of British forces in Afghanistan, said that “the IDF took measures to limit civilian casualties never taken by any Western army in similar situations.” At least twenty-three Palestinian civilians were executed by Hamas over false accusations of colluding with Israel. In reality many had simply criticized the devastation of Gaza brought about by Hamas’s aggression against Israel.6 Hamas leaders emerged from their bunkers. Surveying the rubble, they predictably declared victory. This is what all dictatorships do. They are not accountable to the facts or to their people. Less predictably, Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas admitted that Hamas was severely weakened and achieved none of its demands.7 With the

The Intifada shattered the illusion that the occupation was external to Israel’s “social system” and “democratic” political regime. A number of Zionist Left intellectuals gradually came to recognize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as central to Israeli history and the formation of Israeli society. The

The speeches, the small talk, the easy familiarity—it all felt too comfortable, almost ritualized, a performance that each of the four leaders had probably participated in dozens of times before, designed to placate the latest U.S. president who thought things could change. I imagined them shaking hands afterward, like actors taking off their costumes and makeup backstage, before returning to the world that they knew—a world in which Netanyahu could blame the absence of peace on Abbas’s weakness while doing everything he could to keep him weak, and Abbas could publicly accuse Israel of war crimes while quietly negotiating business contracts with the Israelis, and Arab leaders could bemoan the injustices endured by Palestinians under occupation while their own internal security forces ruthlessly ferreted out dissenters and malcontents who might threaten their grip on power. And I thought of all the children, whether in Gaza or in Israeli settlements or on the street corners of Cairo and Amman, who would continue to grow up knowing mainly violence, coercion, fear, and the nursing of hatred because, deep down, none of the leaders I’d met with believed anything else was possible.

News of the fighting soon reached high command. David Ben-Gurion, Yitzchak Rabin, and Yigal Allon were all unanimous in wanting to expel the population. In a report, Allon explained that by doing so they would relieve a long-term threat to Tel Aviv, clog the routes of any advance from the Arab Legion, and add the burden on the Arab economy of caring for forty-five thousand people.20 Allon refrained from issuing a direct order to expel the residents of the town to the brigade commander, however. Instead, an Arab delegation composed of residents, terrified after two days of fighting, occupation, and killing, requested that the town’s residents be allowed to leave. The military commander agreed, providing the people moved quickly.

If, for example, we in the United States could force the Obama administration to cease its $8 million-a-day support of Israel, this would go a long way toward pressuring Israel to end the occupation.

Despite this sentiment running through the Jewish community in most of the world, I soon became uncomfortable with both the explicit racism against Palestinians that I heard and knee-jerk support for all Israeli actions. It was like a cult where opposing voices were condemned and cast out. I remember my Jewish friends during my teenage years, who mouthed what they had heard from their parents and rabbis. Few of them had been to Israel, let alone Palestine, but the dominant narrative was based around fear; Jews were constantly under attack and Israel was the solution. No matter that Palestinians had to suffer to make Jews feel safe. This felt like a perverted lesson from the Holocaust.

Israel’s leading human rights group, B’Tselem, released a report in early 2021 that concluded that there is a “regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. This is apartheid.” Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International followed suit soon after.

Between 1947 and 1949, at least 750,000 civilians out of a population of 1.9 million were forcibly expelled and made refugees beyond the borders of the new state. Palestinians call it the Nakba, the catastrophe. Over seven months, 531 villages were destroyed and 15,000 people were killed. The remaining Palestinians suffered beatings, rape, and internment.

Israel captured even more Palestinian land in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. After swiftly defeating neighboring Arab armies in a matter of days, Israel seized Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem and began a military occupation of these Palestinian territories that, to this day, has no end in sight.

Middle East peace and even world peace depend on Israel's understanding and acceptance of its illegal and hegemonic occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967. Consequently, peace will be a fragrance, and Israel will receive the respect and recognition of the entire world. Unfortunately, the Israeli leadership and its masters don't want to see it.

Sales are booming, with defense exports reaching an all-time high in 2021 of US$11.3 billion, having risen 55 percent in two years. Israel’s cybersecurity firms are also soaring, with US$8.8 billion raised in one hundred deals in 2021. In the same year, Israeli cyber companies took in 40 percent of the world’s funding in the sector.

Both Israel and the US trained and armed death squads in Colombia well into the 2000s. The former drug trafficker Carlos Castaño, who ran a far-right paramilitary force, explains in his ghost-written autobiography, “I learned an infinite amount of things in Israel [in the 1980s], and to that country I owe part of my essence, my human and military achievements. I copied the concept of paramilitary forces from the Israelis.”23 He reportedly arrived in Israel in 2004 after fleeing his own country.

The Global South has been controlled and pacified with (principally) Israeli and US weapons.

The most notorious massacre occurred at the small village of Dos Erres on December 6, 1982, where around three hundred people were slaughtered. The brutality was shocking. Skulls were smashed with sledgehammers and bodies were thrown down a well. Israel had played its part in the Dos Erres massacre. The 1999 UN Truth Commission, after visiting the area to exhume the bodies, detailed in its forensics report that “all the ballistic evidence recovered corresponded to bullet fragments from firearms and pods of Galil rifles, made in Israel.”49

Then there are the less publicized horrors including the torture prison at Khiam run by Israel’s proxy, the South Lebanese Army (SLA), the IDF, and Shin Bet between 1985 and 2000. Some five thousand prisoners passed through the former French army barracks.

Mack was also behind a petition filed in the Israeli High Court in October 2020 for more evidence of Mossad’s support for the brutal Christian militias in Lebanon, who killed thousands of Palestinians between 1975 and 1982, including at Tel al-Zataar in August 1976 where up to three thousand Palestinians, mostly civilians, were massacred during a siege that lasted several weeks.

From Beirut to Jerusalem, the New York Times

Two targets in particular seemed to interest [Ariel] Sharon’s army. One was the PLO Research Center. There were no guns at the PLO Research Center, no ammunition and no fighters. But there was something more dangerous—books about Palestine, old records and land deeds belonging to Palestinian families, photographs about Arab life in Palestine, historical archives about the Arab life in Palestine and, most important, maps—maps of pre-1948 Palestine with every Arab village on it before the state of Israel came into being and erased many of them. The Research Center was like an ark containing the Palestinians’ heritage—some of their credentials as a nation. In a certain sense, this is what Sharon most wanted to take home from Beirut. You could read it in the graffiti the Israeli boys left behind on the Research Center walls: [/block]Palestinians? What’s that?[block] And [/block]Palestinians, fuck you[block], and [/block]Arafat, I will hump your mother[block]. (The PLO later forced Israel to return the entire archive as part of a November 1983 prisoner exchange.)

Israel remains the biggest recipient of US aid, although the Jewish state is now less reliant on that aid than it once was. While this is true financially, it’s protected diplomatically by the US from a tsunami of global condemnation after decades of occupation and frequent wars on Gaza. US backing remains vital to Israel’s relative strength. Nonetheless, in 1981 US aid was equivalent to roughly 10 percent of Israel’s economy, but by 2020, at close to US$4 billion annually, it was down to around 1 percent.2 For this reason, Israel cares far less about even the mildest American pressure to curtail illegal Jewish colonies in the West Bank, attacks on Gaza, or house demolitions in East Jerusalem.

Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle,

defense companies whose primary aim was to monetize the occupation and sell that experience in controlling another people to a global market.

Israeli technology was sold as the solution to unwanted populations at the US–Mexico border where the Israeli company Elbit was a major player in repelling migrants. European governments also wanted to monitor refugees, so Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) drones were employed for the task.

More than two decades after September 11, 2001, Israel’s gamble paid off with surging global interest in its defense and surveillance sectors. In 2020, Israel spent US$22 billion on its military and was the twelfth biggest military supplier in the world, with sales of more than US$345 million.

A survey in 2021 conducted by Jewish Electorate Institute, a group led by leading Jewish Democrats, found that 34 percent of Jews agreed that “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is similar to racism in the United States,” 25 percent agreed that “Israel is an apartheid state,” and 22 percent agreed that “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians.” A 2022 survey by the major pro-Israel lobby group, the American Jewish Committee, confirmed this trend. Nearly 44 percent of young Jewish Americans didn’t feel very connected to Israel and more than one in five millennial American Jews backed one democratic state in Israel and Palestine. Another study in the same year, conducted by Pew Research Center, found that young Americans under the age of thirty viewed both Israelis and Palestinians equally favorably.

Israel has thus fully embraced the “war on terror” and richly profited from it. One of the most successful though bloody counterinsurgency battles of the early twenty-first century was the Sri Lankan government’s destruction of the Tamil Tigers militant group. Israel played a key, though largely unpublicized, part in Colombo’s successful campaign in a civil war that killed and disappeared more than 200,000 people, mostly Tamils, over a quarter-century that ended in 2009. Israel sold Kfir fighter jets and trained the Special Task Force, a brutal unit of the Sri Lankan police.

This kind of IDF information war strategy is now routinely copied by the US military. The CIA launched a social media campaign, Humans of CIA, in 2021 that aimed to recruit from more diverse communities into its ranks. It felt deeply inspired by the IDF’s woke posturing. One of the most discussed (and mocked) campaigns, considering the CIA’s role in destabilizing and overthrowing governments since World War II, was the video of a Latina intelligence officer declaring: “I am a cisgender millennial, who has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. I am intersectional, but my existence is not a box-checking exercise. I used to struggle with imposter syndrome, but at 36 I refuse to internalize misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be.

Israel’s social media strategy is a sophisticated attempt to link the Jewish state’s operations with Western values, or at least those policies supporting a militarized response to terrorism (or resistance, depending on your perspective), hoping to engender it to global audiences. “Social media is a warzone for us here in Israel,” said Lt. Col. (Ret.) Avital Leibovich, creator of the IDF social media unit and director of the American Jewish Committee in Israel, during 2014’s Operation Protective Edge. It was a seven-week battle between Israel and Hamas that killed more than 2,250 Palestinians, many of them civilians, including 500 children, and 70 Israelis, most of whom were soldiers.

The unstated goal of the IDF information strategy is weaponizing Jewish trauma in the service of perpetuating occupation.

There is no doubt that global awareness of the occupation has soared, and that this has been partly assisted by the raw, unedited vision of Palestinians interacting with settlers or the Israeli army. Yet there is also a large body of evidence that hard, visual imagery has been co-opted by the Israeli state to deny the reality of what Palestinians say they are experiencing. The Israelis claim that Palestinians are lying about their circumstances despite what we’re all seeing. Being able to see Israeli atrocities against Palestinians doesn’t work with people who do not view Palestinians as human beings, a racial group who deserve punishment and death. As the Israeli population has moved to the right, moral discomfort is rare.

Israel’s social media warriors know that connecting its mission to Washington’s post-9/11 struggles is vital to eliciting sympathy and support. “The so-called threat of Palestinian terror constitutes a key component of Israeli trauma narratives—a quotidian threat layered on top of multigenerational trauma over exile and genocide,” Tramontano argued:

Israel’s social media warriors know that connecting its mission to Washington’s post-9/11 struggles is vital to eliciting sympathy and support. “The so-called threat of Palestinian terror constitutes a key component of Israeli trauma narratives—a quotidian threat layered on top of multigenerational trauma over exile and genocide,” Tramontano argued: More concretely, Israel’s actions are presented as moral and legal, and the state’s current plight is explained in light of Israel’s tragic past. Images of New York City burning then directly connect Israel’s military operations to the American military response to the “trauma” of 9/11. Conversely, Hamas is cast as a barbarous and irrational enemy with no legitimate claims to trauma, much like narrations about al Qaeda, the self-declared Islamic State, and the like.16

Israeli human rights group Yesh Gvul accused Galant of committing war crimes during this round of conflict, Operation Cast Lead.

US companies were directly profiting from Israel’s attack on Gaza and dead Palestinian civilians. US taxpayers were the purchaser of these munitions, which were then exported to the Jewish state.28

Battle-tested over Gaza” was a badge of honor. Canada under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau purchased Elbit-made Hermes 900 drones worth US$28 million in late 2020. This drone was first tested during the 2014 Gaza war. Canada claimed that the drones would be used for surveillance purposes in the Arctic “to detect oil spills, survey ice and marine habitats.” The equipment would help “to keep our waters clean and safe.” The deployment of the Hermes was for civilian purposes, but a leading Israeli arms manufacturer benefitted from the deal.30

AnyVision is shy about admitting its true role in the West Bank, but digging by NBC News uncovered a project, called Google Ayosh, targeting all Palestinians with the use of big data. AnyVision continues to use the occupation as a vital source to train its systems in the mass surveillance of Palestinians, focusing, it says, on attempts to stop any Palestinian attackers.43 AnyVision is a global company that operates in over forty countries, including Russia, China (Hong Kong), and the US, and in countless locations such as casinos, manufacturing, and even fitness centers. The company changed its name to Oosto in late 2021, and raised US$235 million that year to further develop its AI-enabled surveillance tools. The former head of Mossad, Tamir Pardo, is an advisor and it is staffed by Israel’s intelligence Unit 8200 veterans. It promotes itself as building a world “safer through visual intelligence.

For example, both the 2004 Athens Olympic Games and 2008 Beijing Olympics Games used Israeli companies to secure the events because Israel had positioned itself as the one of the best and more reliable providers of crowd management techniques, command and control rooms, and urban security. Alongside protecting nuclear plants, airport security, and law enforcement, among many other areas where surveillance and tight security were viewed as essential, Israeli expertise or equipment were routinely the answers to almost any security question.