Laboratories of War: US-Israeli Collaboration in ‘Asymmetric Warfare’ and Urban Securitisation

Laboratories of War: ���US-Israeli Collaboration in

‘Asymmetric Warfare’ and Urban Securitisation ���

Stephen Graham

Newcastle University

• “In America, Palestine and Israel are regarded as local, not foreign policy, matters.” Edward Said, 2003

• “The security challenges of Israel are the security concerns of the United States writ small.” Thomas Henriksen , The Israeli Approach to Irregular Warfare and Implications for the United States , Joint Special Operations University Report, 2007.

• “The second Intifada and the U.S. global war on terror, though quite different, both involve asymmetrical warfare that pits powerful states with powerful militaries against stateless individuals and groups and non-state organizations in the midst of dense, urban concentrations of civilian populations.” Lisa Hajjar Journal of Palestine Studies, 2006

‘Assymmetric,’ ‘low intensity,’ ‘irregular,’ ‘urban,’ ‘counterinsurgency’ or ‘fourth generation’ warfare’:

Challenges US Military’s Technophiliac Dreams of Vertical Omniscience and Control

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Israel-Palestine Central Exemplar: ‘Gold Standard’

• “An almost dreamy regard for Israel's military acumen” Steve Niver, 2008; “a new ‘strategic cult’” Marwan Bishara

• ‘Pre-emption’; ‘preventative war’; ‘terror’ and insurgency as existential threat to high-tech western modernity and democracy; centre on purported challenges of population control, ‘information operations,’ ‘situational awareness’ and ‘tracking, targeting and locating’ ‘non-traditional war targets’ within urban and urbanising contexts telescoping between home and abroad

• “The Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) military actions, have been—and are—a crucible for methods, procedures, tactics, and techniques for the United States, which now faces a similarly fanatical foe across the world in the Global War on Terror. [Israeli experiences] offer an historical record and a laboratory for tactics and techniques in waging counter-insurgencies or counterterrorist operations in America’s post-9/11 circumstances.” Thomas Henriksen, Joint Special Operations University, 2007

‘Surge’ -- Divide and Rule: Archipelago Biopolitics ���Passage-Point Urbanism���

• Check-points “have proven effective as well as road patrols

in limiting terrorism. Thus a near-saturation of territory seems effective,” Thomas Henriksen, Joint Special

Operations University 2007

Joint Exercises and Surveillant-Simulations

Jordan Crandall: ‘Armed Vision’: ���“Tracking is an anticipatory form of seeing”

Urban ‘Situational Awareness’ •  “From tennis ball-sized sensors that can

be thrown or shot from sniper’s rifles into terrorist lairs to wall-breaching devices for urban combat, gear invented for Israel’s anti-terror wars in Gaza and the West Bank are increasingly being put in the hands of U.S. warfighters in Iraq” Barbara Opall-Rome, Defense News, 2004

•  Include automatic system to locate and target snipers in cities, the Hunter and Pioneer drones, new radio systems designed to overcome urban interference, and new missiles for armed drones

•  Also “Eye Ball R1” system

Dronespace���

• “Certainly, Israeli [assassination] actions against Palestinian, Hezbollah, and other terrorist leaders and support infrastructure since independence constitutes the gold standard for the systematic conceptual and operational consideration it has received from the Israeli Government and military and security bodies.” Graham Turbiville, Joint Special Operations University 2007

• Gaza a model of “Urban Area Domination”: territorial withdrawal and ‘external control’ through aerial dominance and ‘persistent surveillance’

“Vertical Orientalism” ��� •  “The geography of occupation has thus completed a

90-degree turn: the imaginary ‘orient’ – the exotic object of colonization –was no longer beyond the horizon, but now under the vertical tyranny of Western airborne civilization that remotely managed its most sophisticated and advanced technological platforms, sensors and munitions above.”

Eyal Weizman, 2007

Selling the Security

State���

•  “Since 9/11, the US has regarded Israel the model for managing the War on Terror. As Israel has been dealing with terrorism on a daily basis since the State’s founding in 1948, the country’s entrepreneurs and scientists have developed proven technology solutions to address these problems.”

•  Israel 4th biggest arms and security exporter: IDF secondary market; cross-investment and ownership; NASDAQ listing; “match-making” events; inter-state security agreements; joint training; visits; exchanges; joint ventures; economic development collaborations

Sewcure Border Initiative

•  Secure Border Initiative: Elbit & Boeing successful

•  The debate over a physical US border barrier no longer seems debatable in light of my fresh first-hand experience with the Israeli border fence solution. Anthony Kimery Homeland Security Today February 2008

Spatial Political Economies of Military-Industrial-Security-Surveillance-Entertainment Complex

Shoot to Kill Goes Global

•  “Both ‘shoot-to-kill’ policies and behavior pattern recognition techniques have long been used in Israel,

whose counter-terrorism experts are actively recruited to train law enforcement and security

personnel worldwide on the implementation of these policies and techniques.” Irreversible Consequences: Racial Profiling And Lethal Force In The “War On

Terror” Briefing Paper 2006 •  The International Association of

•  Chiefs of Police (IACP), •  EG Met’s Operation Kratos (De Menezes)

Foucauldian ‘Boomerangs’

“It should never be forgotten that while colonization, with its techniques and its political and juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other

continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the

apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice

something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself.”

Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended:, 1975-6