Surveillance practices of the Israeli military in the occupied West Bank are spilling back inside the country’s pre-1967 borders and threatening the already embattled democratic aspects of Israeli governance.
For left-wing Israelis who favor a territorial compromise that would terminate the current de facto annexation of the West Bank, the leakage is proof of their long-standing argument that occupation of another people corrupts Israeli values. But it is the right wing allied with the security establishment and ideological settlers who set the tone in today’s Israel and they care less about civil liberties when security can be invoked.
Still, Calcalist newspaper touched off an outcry last month by reporting that police were using spyware it said came from the controversial NSO company to surveil the cellphones of citizens who posed no security threat. This included individuals associated with protests last year calling on Benjamin Netanyahu to resign because of corruption scandals.
The scandal greatly intensified Monday after Calcalist reported NSO’s Pegasus spyware had been widely used by police against elected officials, leading figures in the economy, those serving in government offices and persons close to then prime minister Netanyahu. Some ministers called for a state commission of inquiry.
Even with the outcry it is not clear whether the surveillance will be fully shut down or simply morph into a new form.
At stake in the police scandal is the extent to which Israelis want to live in a state with democratic attributes that controls security forces or a country in which the security forces and their settler allies wield the real power. As long as Israel runs what is essentially a military dictatorship in the West Bank that goes unquestioned by most of the public (with some notable exceptions) just a 20 minute drive from parliament, the Knesset, the spillover effect in values, practices and norms will likely be palpable.
In fact, the police commissioner who launched the spying on citizens, according to Calcalist, was Roni Alsheikh, the former deputy head of the Shin Bet internal security service that also surveils the West Bank.
According to media reports, police either didn’t get judicial approval for their targets or did so retroactively in a way that covered up their use of the spyware.
Calcalist reported the misuse was broad and took place over several years and that Alsheikh stacked SIGINT, the police’s intelligence unit, with veterans of the army’s intelligence Unit 8200, which spies on Palestinians in the West Bank among other fronts.
One particularly egregious case Calcalist reported on concerned an anti-Netanyahu activist whose phone was tracked by police. The police found that the man, who was married, used a dating app for gay men. According to the newspaper, police read his chats and told officers the places and times of his dates so they could monitor them with a view towards blackmailing him.
Reports of this brought back painful memories for an ex-soldier who this week agreed to share with me some of his experiences monitoring West Bank Palestinians for Unit 8200, the Israeli equivalent of the US National Security Agency.
The ex-soldier, who in 2014 became part of a group of Unit 8200 veterans who refused to do reserve service monitoring Palestinians, asked that his name not be published for fear of social repercussions.
He said that the reported police targeting of a gay man for blackmail inside Israel was exactly what his unit did to West Bank Palestinians to extort them into becoming collaborators or to pry information on suspects they were related to by family or in some other way.
“During our basic training in Arabic we were taught many words for LGBTQ in Arabic so that when you gather information and they use this slang you know what it means. It can be used for blackmail in the sense of ‘if you don’t do what we want, we’ll disclose it,'” he said.
“We in 8200 were asked to gather information on people who were innocent but can be used as leverage,” the ex-soldier said. “We were gathering intelligence on people who did nothing wrong other than being related to or the neighbor of someone the state of Israel had an interest in.”
It seems that some bring the “same methods and mentality with them” after they finish their service in the unit and join the police or Shin Bet, so that the occupation spills back into Israel proper, he suggested.
This spillage from the West Bank also occurs as some graduates from 8200 and other intelligence units go on to play important roles in Israeli high tech, reportedly including NSO.
It seems there may be a correlation between an occupier’s mentality towards the Palestinians and an insensitivity to human rights globally.
Meanwhile, the Israeli Defense Force is further intensifying its surveillance in the West Bank with new technology, according to individuals who recently completed their military service and gave testimonies to the anti-occupation group of IDF veterans known as Breaking the Silence.
Again, this is all happening within easy driving distance from the Knesset.
It may be that only an end to occupation of the Palestinians can both afford them the better future they deserve and help Israel begin to come to terms with the security and surveillance web entangling and endangering it.
By Ben Lynfield is the former Middle East affairs correspondent at the Jerusalem Post. his article was produced by Syndication Bureau to publish on Telegraf.
