Israel Wants to Have Its Ice Cream and Cybersecurity, Too

But while the new government’s tone has slightly changed from that of its predecessor, its position remains the same — as reflected by what the NSO revelations make very clear: Israel is a belligerent occupying power with a thriving, offensive cybersurveillance industry.

Israel is a leading exporter of state-of-the-art surveillance technology such as face recognition, internet monitoring and biometric data collection. (High-tech industry constituted 46 percent of Israeli exports in 2019.) It tests and utilizes these tools every day in the occupied territories as part of its intricate system of control over the movement and lives of millions of Palestinians. In recent years, the Israeli military has installed thousands of cameras and monitoring devices at checkpoints in the West Bank, including facial-recognition software developed by an Israeli company, AnyVision. The director of the Technology and Liberty Project at the ACLU of Washington, Shankar Narayan, described such surveillance as “possibly the most perfect tool for complete government control in public spaces.”

Israel also operates an extensive network of cameras tasked with observing every corner of the Old City of Jerusalem. The city of Hebron, where some 800 Israeli settlers live cordoned off from its 200,000 Palestinian residents, is known in the military as a smart city because of its sophisticated system of data collection that helps field observers monitor the urban landscape from the safety of their control rooms. Israel conducted its last war, in May, with Hamas in Gaza primarily from an underground bunker, relying on intelligence and digital technology to direct its air force on which targets to strike. Many Israeli soldiers and officers who serve in elite intelligence units in the army — for example, Unit 81, known for its covert cybertechniques — have gone on to found cybersecurity start-ups. Roughly 100 veterans of the unit have started 50 companies.

In excoriating Ben & Jerry’s, the Bennett-Lapid coalition is, in effect, defending decades of illiberal policies: military rule of the occupied territories, creeping annexation and a blurred distinction between 1948 and 1967 borders that insists on Israeli sovereignty between the Jordan River and the sea. At the same time, they are implicitly acknowledging that it’s not easy to maintain an enlightened and peace-seeking image (the Abraham Accords notwithstanding) when an ice cream company calls attention to the gap between rhetoric and reality. Nor when a duly licensed Israeli company climbs into bed with some of the most repressive governments on the planet.

The question is what happens now. Israel sees its high-tech sector as a point of national pride, and it constitutes an integral part of its economy and power in the world. It is not clear whether heightened scrutiny will bring consequences for Israel’s actions, either at home in the occupied territories or secreted in mobile phones around the world. Although the United States and other Western democracies have largely come to terms with Israel’s restrictions of Palestinians’ rights, now that some of that surveillance technology is being exported to restrict free speech in other parts of the world, the world is standing up and noticing. Israel is accustomed to having its ice cream and eating it, too. That apparently comes with a price, and not just for Palestinians.