Israel's automated occupation | The Listening Post

[Music] foreign the occupied West Bank [Music] the chatter on a soldiers radio tells us we're being watched [Music] Hebron is a place of religious significance which makes it a magnet for some of Israel's most extreme settlers Jewish communities who've illegally taken over Palestinian homes [Music] no [Music] [Applause] but what's unique about Hebron unlike any other Palestinian city is that the settlers are here in the hearts of the city [Music] today is the Jewish holiday pouring and the settlers are celebrating arm in arm with Israeli soldiers [Applause] thank you Palestinians in Hebron are some of the most heavily monitored and controlled people on the planet in the military surveillance laboratory that is the occupied territories Hebron is Ground Zero [Music] Hebron is the West Bank's largest city and it's being hollowed out from within the Israeli military enforces a policy of Separation here the city was divided into two sections in 1997. h-1 where the Palestinian Authority has nominal control and H2 which is under full Israeli control Israel's Authority in H2 is designed to protect 800 settlers living here illegally according to international law amongst around 40 000 Palestinians yeah [Applause] one of those settlers happens to be item who has been convicted of inciting anti-arab racism and supporting a terrorist group he is now Israel's minister of National Security [Music] to safeguard The Saturdays hebron's sacred old city is under military lockdown some parts of H2 have been designated sterile that's the official term areas where Palestinians are forbidden over the years the locals have seen the environments around them transformed inch by inch house by house checkpoint by checkpoint Hebron is full of what the Israeli military likes to call friction that lends itself to many new ways to innovate technologies that promise to reduce the so-called friction and make Israel's occupation more humanitarian for Palestinians this is what the Israeli military claims the streets are covered in CCTV cameras in facial recognition cameras that give the Israeli military in the intelligence forces a full 24 7 and encompassing view of Palestinian life in the city I think the best word for it is carceral the feeling that prison is not within a bounded space but it follows you wherever you go into the city's streets in your home into your bedroom and that there's no escaping it across the West Bank Palestinians are experiencing an explosion of military and settler violence in one week in February the Israeli military raided the city of Naples killing 11 people a few days later Palestinian gunmen shot and killed two settlers in Hawaii [Music] hundreds of Saturdays then marched into the town escorted and protected by Israeli soldiers and indulged in an hours-long Rampage by Sunrise hundreds of vehicles homes and shops had been torched [Music] over the last five years the number of settler attacks against Palestinians has risen by almost 200 percent in Hebron they happen almost every day [Music] the Israeli military likes to call Hebron a smart city it's a euphemism for the elaborate system of surveillance and facial recognition they are operating here on Palestinians if we count how many cameras we have here how many cameras we can see one two three four five six seven eight nine ten cameras with that said karaki lives in H2 he walked me through how the cameras and checkpoints shape his everyday routine we have 22 Israeli checkpoint as as the one you see what you have to know that this chick boy recognized me even before I get into the cheekbone sometime the soldier tell me is that give me your ID He Knows My Name already they know that I'm crossing the cheekbone 10 times per day but each time they have to check my body to let me get into my to my to my house not only that Palestinians are levels for them which is red yellow and green if you are Palestinian and you have been arrested by the Army you might be in the in the in the red level for example if you are known to them and they know you resist occupation you might be like you know in the yellow sometime when I want to cross the checkpoint the soldier can keep me three hours for no reason this is the Israel so if they want to kill your day they can easily do it they can keep you at the checkpoint for three hours after that nothing will happen they will not be accountable at all [Music] it's something you hear across Hebron an awareness that the All-Seeing gaze of the city's network of cameras are designed to protect the settlers not Palestinians it's not just the density of cameras in Palestinian neighborhoods that gives it away it's the direction they face often inwards towards people's homes invading their most intimate spaces Untamed lives in a neighborhood just outside the old city two years ago Israeli soldiers forced their way into her home and turned her roof into a surveillance post foreign foreign along with an investigation by Amnesty International have given us a more complete picture of the various systems of surveillance in use and how invasive they are Israeli authorities are trying to collate and create a database exclusively consisting of Palestinian faces so the idea is that when you're arriving at the checkpoint if that information exists on you such as who is related to you have you been here before are you due to be taken in for detention or questioning that is flacked on the system and a soldier is able to decide whether you can pass or not they can no longer count on the soldier perhaps recognizing them on knowing them because it's a computer system into which they have been conscripted without their knowledge or without their consent [Music] they now have to be processed through a machine learning algorithm before they get to live their lives whether it's by getting to access education work or medical services that's now governed by this AI system [Music] artificial intelligence has created what feels like a digitally mediated prison in Hebron the military recently installed this autonomous weapon a so-called smart shooter [Music] it's powered by AI which means it can shoot without human intervention amnesty has also documented the use of something called anomalies detection sensors and algorithms that flag the presence of individuals or objects that the Israeli military would consider out of the ordinary [Music] in addition soldiers use a number of overlapping programs that collate information on Palestinians to Monitor and govern their movement the first previously unreported system is Red Wolf that's the one used at permanent checkpoints where Palestinians are biometrically registered and assessed against information held on them soldiers teach Redwolf by pairing new faces with IDs and other biographical information then there's blue wolf a facial recognition app Israeli forces use in the field on raids or at temporary checkpoints to capture photos of Palestinians the third system is white wolf an app for settlers allowing them to check if Palestinian workers have the correct permits it gives the settlers access to confidential government data connecting all of this is wolf pack a database that aims to build a profile of every Palestinian in the West Bank including information like a person's name where they live their family members car license plates and whether they are wanted or not according to testimonies from veterans Israeli soldiers are even incentivized to compete with one another over who can collect the most data and photos of Palestinians it's just one of the ways the occupation here in Hebron is being gamified this creates an idea that Palestinians are just objects out there waiting to be photographed and that may help your unit to reap some form of reward but is ultimately leading to dehumanization of an entire racialized group the Israeli military refuses to confirm its use of facial recognition but in addition to the testimonials gathered by veterans group breaking silence we also have a leaked training video for blue Wharf so it says here soldiers can identify a Palestinian in three ways typing their ID number facial recognition or a photo of their ID this is interesting soldiers can search for people using things like a car's plate number but they can also attach information about Palestinians to their profile so here it instructs the soldier to take a photo not just of the driver's ID but all the passengers too and when you look at this video you can see why soldiers have dubbed blue wolf a secret Facebook for Palestinians blue wolf enhances the military's ability to carry out what it's called mapping roads when soldiers invade Palestinian homes to gather intelligence soldiers say it's part of a practice of making their presence felt this raid on a home in Hebron shows what Israeli mapping of Palestinian communities looks like around a dozen children still half asleep forced to line up to have their photos taken illegally by soldiers [Music] I don't think there's any point in history in which the creation of a database consisting exclusively of one ethnic or racialized group has ever led to any good outcome we are dealing with something that we have recognized as apartheid and in this context the creation of a database exclusively for Palestinians to stop them from entering particular spaces to stop them from being able to live fulfilling lives to stop them from being able to access Family and Medical Services dot itself is sort of re-entrenching the form of apartheid that we've been witnessing over the many decades it's creating a sort of a digital racial hierarchy [Music] is a microcosm one of the most intense expressions of Israeli apartheid in the West Bank managing the occupation of millions of people over more than five decades is a vast and costly Enterprise that relies on dominance and intelligence gathering according to one former General Israel has become the world champions of occupation turning it in his words into an art form surveillance is really the occupations bread and butter in the mind of Israeli military leadership Palestinians across the West Bank and East Jerusalem present a security threat to an expanding settler movement and so to contain the so-called security threat as they put it the Army needs ever more advanced surveillance Technologies to control a population this is part and parcel of the occupations tactics of control the history of surveilling Palestinians so as to control them goes back more than 100 years to the days of British rule Britain's Colonial project was dependent on intensive surveillance and intelligence gathering these documents classified as very secret are from 1917 the year Britain first occupied Palestine they are handbooks on Palestinian personalities produced by British intelligence unit called the Arab Bureau they were designed to give officials insights on who is considered intelligent pro-british or easily susceptible to foreign influence from 1920 onwards British mandate authorities collected information on every facet of Palestinian life many of these strategies were adopted by and in some cases taught to Jewish paramilitary groups in Palestine like the hagana they determine you know how many men of fighting age lived in each Town they'd map out the topography so they could inform their own battle strategy and they created this vast index of all the Palestinian Villages that was called The Village files The Village files were a comprehensive survey of hundreds of Palestinian villages in the 1940s produced by the hagenah they included information on mortar Village leaders on which villagers were likely to resist and those that were poorly defended the hagana also conducted aerial surveillance taking pictures they turned into highly accurate battle maps and they recruited Jewish operatives with Middle Eastern features known as mustaravim who were planted in Arab towns and Villages as spies these Colonial intelligence gathering operations would prove instrumental in the nakba the catastrophe in 1948 when many of the villagers infiltrated were destroyed and at least 750 000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes all of that kind of cataloging and category laid the foundation for Israel's own establishment of a quite Colonial bureaucracy in the Years immediately following statehood you know this entailed deploying police forces and tapping into radio signals and tapping into phone calls to then developing newer technologies that could intercept emails and text messages and then spyware CCTV cameras Biometrics and so at every step of the way you see technology not only standing in for these more analog practices but intensifying them the surveillance being conducted by the Israeli military is only one half of the story Palestinians know there are two systems that watch over them we have one for the soldiers and one for the settlers the sitters who are living here in Hebron they have their own security camera system it's not connected to the Army for me settlers hasbower more than the military itself usually the settlers give order to the soldier not to the opposite at this moment I felt that we are facing settlers by ourselves no one is here to protect us from those people throughout the occupied West Bank illegal settlements dominate the hilltops and some of the security systems are operated by the settlers themselves we visited the highly severed tepour Junction in the northern West Bank and received a special welcome from the Israeli military I'm good thank you how are you foreign areas like this it can be difficult to tell which cameras belong to the military and which are run by settlers we know about the existence of settler cameras at this Junction installed far beyond the boundaries of the settlements because of who funded them not the Israeli state but an American organization called the one Israel fund the seller organizations have really Deep Pockets predominantly in North America so the one Israel fund is a really good example of this they're an organization that was set up in the 90s to transfer money from the United States to settlements in the West Bank [Music] just look at it we can go up with the Drone see the whole area search down the Terrace in the area and the one Israel fund has recently you know sent drones with infrared cameras that settlers will use to monitor Palestinian Villages there's reports of settler using those drones to follow Farmers as they take their flocks to eat and pasture and scare away goats and totally disrupt Palestinians own ability to make money and make a living off of their livestock recently the one Israel fund has sold cameras to settlements that they're putting up in highly trafficked Junctions across the West Bank so the fact that the settlements can put up their own cameras far away from their own jurisdiction and use that information to bolster their own security apparatus just demonstrates how much the Israeli military is collaborating with settlements and using settlers as a way to really Outsource the occupation to other forms of policing that are subjected to even less regulation and oversight than the Israeli military is we asked the Israeli military for an interview on their use of surveillance in the occupied territories but they declined they did tell us however as part of the fight against terrorism and the efforts to improve the quality of life for the Palestinian population the IDF conducts routine security operations naturally we cannot comment on the IDF operational capabilities in this context with the Israeli military unable or unwilling to speak we got in touch with a former Israeli General with experience in the West Bank he spoke with us on the condition that we hide his identity to collect a lot of data you can accurately control human terrain you need a lot of Intel in order to counter terrorism and it enables you to do so while you separate between the bad guys and the majority of the population this is the main rationale and there is a lot of tension between basic human rights or privacy and kind of military occupation definitely in some places like Hebron there is a huge complexity because of Jewish settlements that are embedded in a Palestinian City I'm glad you mentioned Hebron we saw cameras there that look directly into people's homes into their bedrooms these are by Design Technologies of mass surveillance they target everyone if counter-terrorism is the rationale as you put it that's certainly not how it's actually being used it's more about control of Palestinians is it not actually I'm not very so I cannot I can know that but as an Israeli citizen I'm not satisfied with the situation there there are a lot of human rights violations because of this complex situation but I can agree that from what you describe it's also a question of more police Law and Order and controlling them than fighting terrorism but it definitely helps with terrorism as well the Israeli military says AI driven surveillance will deliver a frictionless occupation one that is supposedly more benign however these experimental technologies have also allowed Israel to covertly deepen its control over Palestinians entrenching a form of apartheid but doing so invisibly we often hear about how advanced Israeli security systems and surveillance Technologies are and how they'll deliver a more Humane and frictionless occupation but I think what falls out of that narrative is the really invasive and dehumanizing aspects of surveillance that upend Palestinians life day after day to feel as if your every movement what you say on and offline and what you're maybe even thinking is being documented and monitored by an occupying Army makes life quite unbearable under occupation on the second episode of this special edition of the listening post how spyware is being used to Target human rights defendants allowing the infiltrators to falsify evidence the intention is to actually stop us from channeling the information that we document to different entities around the world that could actually hold the Israeli perpetrators accountable the elite Israeli intelligence unit responsible for spying on Palestinians and blackmailing them into cooperation you always look for weaknesses people with psychological difficulties or trust issues stuff like that obviously once you get that you put the person at Double the risk because now he's a traitor and Jerusalem oh where there is nowhere to hide for Palestinians

Channel: Al Jazeera English

Views: 145,241

Keywords: Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera English, al Jazeera, al jazeera English, al jazeera live, al jazeera video, aljazeera, aljazeera English, aljazeera latest, aljazeera live, aljazeera live news, hebron, israel palestine conflict, latest news, media, news headlines, palestine, surveillance, technology, the listening post

Id: B1RNj8FXKqY

Length: 25min 20sec (1520 seconds)

Published: Sat May 06 2023