| THE PALESTINE LABORATORY How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World Antony Loewenstein Verso, May 2023 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
|||
| ISBN-13 978-1-83976-208-6 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-83976-208-X | 265pp. | HC | $29.95 | |
The commercialization of social media is perhaps the most disappointing development of the Internet Age. At its beginning, the Internet was truly democratic for anyone who had access, and the barrier to access was low. Things were not perfect; there were trolls and flame wars. But in the main, ideas rose or fell in relattion to their own merits.
That changed when subscription fees paid to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) were replaced by media that were ostensibly free, but supported by advertisements. The providers' incentives became to maximize the number of users and to keep them online as long as possible. It soon became apparent that outrage, rather than thoughtful discussion, best matched these incentives. At the same time, there was an incentive to suppress controversy because it would likely lead to violence in the real world and thus to regulation of the providers by governments.
This is where we are now — except that certain governments don't much care about presenting their side of controveries, or even about presenting violent content, as long as it advances their interests. Today, Israel is the primary beneficiary of these trends in the western world. Anthony Loewenstein shows this clearly by contrasting how Israel treats Ukraine with how it treats Russia. The former doesn't get Pegasus even though it asks for it, because Israel wants Russia's approval for operations in Syria. (See page 153.) To its credit, the United States doesn't allow social media to block messaging by Ukrainians, but the double standard when it comes to Israeli versus Palestinian messaging is profound. To a degree, the same is true of mainstream news media like The New York Times. The bias against Palestinians, against Arabs and Muslims generally, is real.
Israel did not have much to worry about because social media platforms during this period, from Facebook to YouTube and TikTok to Twitter, routinely blocked content that was critical of Israel or showed the Palestinian point of view. Although such censorship seemed worse during this clash with Hamas, it followed a predictable path over the last decade of Palestinian posts disappearing at an alarming rate. Within Israel, the power to crack down on what it deemed inappropriate content only grew. Israel's Cyber Unit was given the green light by the Supreme Court in 2021 to operate in the dark, liase secretly with social media companies, and remove posts without any consultation with the users. It is a closed-loop system in which Palestinians are left guessing as to the reasons why their words disappear. A former TikTok moderator, Gadear Ayden, revealed in 2021 that she was part of the "Israel team" during that year's Israel/Hamas conflict and noticed far more videos being left up on the platform that featured violent, anti-Palestinian content. Ayden said that all management teams were run by Israelis and that "none of the Arabs progressed to any senior positions at the company in that group." – Page 182 |
This sort of suppression of speech by groups out of favor with the powers that be should concern everyone in America. Joseph McCarthy's crusade and the Hollywood blacklist were not that long ago— and neither was the Third Reich in Germany. Recall what Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller said about the Nazis:1
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Jillian C. York, autor of Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech under Surveillance Capitalism, told me that there had been some progress in engaging with Facebook since the May 2021 Israel/Hamas conflict after a campaign launched under the banner of "Stop Silencing Palestine." "Facebook's teams have repeatedly met with a set of experts—the majority of whom are Palestinian or have strong ties to Palestine—and listened to our demands," she said. "They have committed more resources to the issue and are responsive in situations where content being actively and wrongly removed. They have not, however, committed ... to the increases in transparency and appeals that we've asked for." York remained pessimistic that much might change because the corporations saw no reason to do so. "These companies simply have no reason to invest in better measures, particularly those that would help marginalized groups (and particularly groups and communities in the Global South)," she said. "Their motive is profit and their means is selling advertisements. Who are these ads for? Their wealthier users. And where do they therefore put most of their attention? Countries like the United States, the UK, and Germany. Of course, it isn't just about ads—it's also true that these countries' governments demand action from the companies and have the leverage to generate that action." This is what I heard from countless Palestinians in Palestine and in the Diaspora: we don't expect Facebook and other social media platforms to listen to us seriously. We need alternative outlets to be heard. "While a Silicon Valley company might have an incentive to respond to a popular US American social movement," York explained, "what is their motivation to respond to Palestinians? Or Burmese? Or Indigenous users? These companies are always going to put profit before people—it's literally their modus operandi." None of these issues aeemed to bother the big tech firms. Giving lip service to minority group concerns was at best an inconvenience. They doubled down and invested even more in Israel. Staff at Google and Amazon issued a letter in protest in 2021 at the news that their employees had had wone work for Project Nimbus, a US$1.2 billion contract to provide cloud services to the Israeli government and military. They condemned the trend of these corporations increasingly selling their services to US government departments such as the Department of Defense, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and police departments. In 2022, Google staff quit, including Jewish employee Ariel Koren, and accused the tech company of punishing anyone who questioned its association with Project Nimbus. "Google systematically silences Palestinian, Jewish, Muslim and Arab voices concerned about Google's complicity in violations of Palestinian human rights—to the point of formally retaliating against workers and creating an environment of fear," Koren wrote in her resignation letter. Leaked documents to the Intercept in July 2022 confirmed that Google was offering machine learning capabilities and avvanced artificial intelligence to the Israeli state. A former head of security for Google Enterprise, now running Oracle in Israel, has publicly stated that one goal of Nimbus is making sure that the German government is unable to access information on the IDF for the International Criminal Court. An advertised benefit of Project Nimbus, according to the Israeli press, is that tech companies are blocked from cutting off access to the Israeli government in the event of massive boycott pressure on Google and Amazon. It's an insurance policy against potential political headwinds. *
* * When challenged on the huge amount of pro-Palestinian content that was removed due to Israeli government pressure, Meta explained that it didn't give Israeli officials any preferential treatment. It was simply because "Israel flags a lot more content and makes a lot more requests than most other governments." The Meta officials didn't explain to Shihab-Eldin's satisfaction why Israeli authorities were able to post without problems huge amounts of content of actual violence—for example, bombings in Gaza—but Palestinians and their supporters were accused of "inciting violence" and censored. – Pages 187-188 & 192 |
Another thing these historical trends, which we see arising again in some countries, remind us of is that suppression of speech is only the first step on a road that can lead to the banning of books (which we also see right here in the Land of the Free), then to burning of books, and finally to the burning of people the state considers undesirables.
What Israel hopes wil extend its appeal, beyond nations that just want some of the most intrusive and lethal military equipment on the planet, is the growth of states that share its committment to ethnonationalism. Such countries stand proudly for religious observance and against multiculturalism and liberal values. They blame a socially indulgent left for undermining traditional ideals and replacing them with morally confused perspectives on race, gender, marriage, and sexuality. The conservative Israeli political theorist Yoram Hazony has explained his vision, and it paints a frightening picture for minorities. It is a view shared by a sizable bulk of the Israeli Jewish population. He argues that America is a Christian nation with a Christian majority and therefore Christians must choose the country's laws and social rules. Minorities could get "carve-outs," but the majority must be dominant. In Israel, this dictates an aggressive Jewish majority ruling over non-Jews by increasingly brutal means to quell any resistance. The extreme force, surveillance, and technology needed to achieve that is what Israel hopes will keep its experience relevant to other like-minded states. In his 2019 book The Virtue of Nationalism, Hazony mentions the Palestinians only once, complaining that the world harasses Israel to grant the Palestinians statehood (presumably against Israel's wishes). Instead, Hazony rails against opponents of apartheid South Africa and Serbia under the autocrat Slobodan Miloŝević. He argues that "the reason these people were singled out for special hatred and disgust, and for special punishment, is that white South Africans and Serbs are seen as Europeans, and are held to a moral standard that is without any relation to what is expected of their African or Muslim neighbors." Clearly Hazony worries that Israel will suffer the same fate as these two rogue states for simply being European. This kind of toxic ideology fuels Israel's daily reality in Palestine by propagating the lie that Palestinians are inherently violent and irrational: they can't help being terrorists. In this telling, being occupied for more than half a century is a mere footnote. The Palestinians need to be monitored, imprisoned, tortured, and killed. Israel needs to keep them in a high-tech cage because the alternative is genocide against the Jews. – Pages 208-209 |
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.