The U.S. and Israel both outsource surveillance technologies to private companies, a practice often called cyber or surveillance capitalism. The U.S. helps Israel test these technologies and strategies of policing and repression on Palestinians. The U.S. then imports these technologies back for domestic use. Every time the U.S. launches a new war “abroad,” it imports its violent technologies of surveillance, the torture of prisoners, or its repression of activists back home to the U.S. Scholar Ila Ravichandran refers to this as an “import/export” approach to surveillance. Notably, the U.S.’s repression of pro-Palestinian activism helps rationalize the repression of all of our BIPOC movements. This conflation enables the U.S. to target members of the movement for Black lives with terrorism charges. For example, after the police-perpetrated killing of George Floyd — may he rest in peace and power — DHS collected intelligence on protesters who were arrested for trivial criminal infractions having little to no connection to domestic terrorism. More of us should be outraged and deeply concerned that the Department of Homeland Security is surveilling protesters and collecting lists not only of activists but also their friends, family members and social media associates — whether or not these associates engage in any political activity themselves.
This surveillance continues the legacy of programs like the FBI’s COINTELPRO between 1956–1971. Since the ‘60s, the ADL worked closely with the FBI to place under secret investigation not only neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups like the KKK, but also tens of thousands of left-leaning groups, including anti-apartheid, Black Power, Chicanx and Indigenous movement activists. They especially sought to paint the Black Power movement as antisemitic, which helped disrupt support for the Black Panthers. Zionist pressure groups like the ADL have always understood that controlling and containing BIPOC movements is integral to repressing Palestinian resistance. In this sense, we need to be clear that U.S. empire understands that it will fall when our movements learn to refuse a “Progressive except for Palestine” politics. We cannot strive for racial justice aims such as abolition while remaining silent on U.S. imperial wars.
3. Border Violence
The military-industrial complex (MIC) depends on the policing of borders, including both U.S. state and vigilante violence against migrants.The U.S.’s murderous practices on the Mexican border borrow from Israel’s border policing and the U.S. and Israel use their borders as laboratories for new forms of militarized police enforcement and control. For example, on the Tohono O’odham Nation’s reservation, near the Arizona-Mexico border, the company Elbit Systems of America, based in Israel, has built surveillance towers that increase police and border control’s capacity to surveil and track people’s everyday lives, contribute to the militarization of Native lands and reinforce false militarist ideas about “protecting” borders from “enemy” migrants who “threaten” the U.S.’s economy and security. The U.S. leans on Elbit especially since it has already “tested” its practices on Palestinians through its work on Israel’s separation wall and the border of the Gaza Strip.
Let us also not forget how the U.S. relied on 500 pages of documents from the Israeli military in the federal U.S. deportation case of beloved community activist Rasmea Odeh. In 2014, the U.S. Department of Justice, in collaboration with Israel, put Odeh, leader of the Arab Women’s Committee, on trial for allegedly lying on her naturalization application 10 years earlier. Here, the U.S. went on a fishing expedition to target a 69-year-old Palestinian American activist, and then used her immigration papers, filed a decade earlier, to build a deportation case against her. The U.S. claimed that she failed to indicate that she had previously been incarcerated. While Odeh was indeed incarcerated for 10 years in an Israeli prison before immigrating to the U.S., she was a political prisoner. An Israeli military sweep had picked her and 500 other Palestinians up in 1969. They sexually tortured her for 45 days, coerced her to confess to two bombings and incarcerated her for the next 10 years before exiling her from her Palestinian homeland. Before her immigration trial, the judge, Gershwin Drain, ruled that Odeh was forbidden from mentioning her imprisonment in Israel in court. Reifying U.S. rape culture, while he silenced her from telling her story of sexual assault at the hands of the Israeli military, he allowed the U.S. prosecutor to rely on Israeli military documents to portray her as a “bomber” — which he repeated at least 50 times throughout the trial, leading the jury to deem her guilty of immigration fraud, sending her into a second exile from the U.S. back to Jordan.
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