{"id":202232,"date":"2021-06-13T17:49:23","date_gmt":"2021-06-13T17:49:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/radiofree.asia\/?guid=60f0e7c3b12676d7a1efe9a93f1b93b7"},"modified":"2021-06-13T17:49:23","modified_gmt":"2021-06-13T17:49:23","slug":"israels-arms-and-security-industry-is-reshaping-state-violence-everywhere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/06\/13\/israels-arms-and-security-industry-is-reshaping-state-violence-everywhere\/","title":{"rendered":"Israel\u2019s Arms and Security Industry Is Reshaping State Violence Everywhere"},"content":{"rendered":"\"Israeli<\/a>

Amid the horror of Israel\u2019s escalation of violence in May 2021, from bombing in Gaza to lynch mobs of Israeli settlers assaulting Palestinians, there was also coverage of a weapon Israeli forces are currently using for \u201ccrowd control\u201d, skunk water, developed by the Israeli company Odortec. Palestinian author Yara Hawari detailed<\/a> how \u201cthe skunk\u201d was developed against the popular protests in the West Bank and has been widely used including in the siege off Palestinian families resisting expulsion from Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem that sparked the latest round of violence. Skunk water is a concoction of chemicals smelling of sewage and rotting corpses that causes intense nausea, violent gagging and vomiting.<\/p>\n

It is also a weapon available in the United States, supplied by the company Mistral Security, which recommends its use at \u201cborder crossings, correctional facilities, demonstrations and sit-ins\u201d<\/a>. Several police departments have already bought it, including in Ferguson, Missouri, following the 2014 protests against police brutality and institutional racism. As Hawari puts it, \u201cIsraeli arms manufacturers do not even have to invest in marketing their weapons; news channels running footage of brutal attacks by the Israeli army do the job for them.\u201d<\/p>\n

The story (and stench) of skunk water reveals the way Israel\u2019s arms and security industry has itself become an intrinsic part of the apartheid regime \u2013 present in both the brutal violence of ethnic-cleansing neighbourhoods as well as the constant harassment and dispossession of Palestinians. As Hawari writes, \u201cthe Israeli forces do not only use [skunk water] to suppress protests. Skunk trucks [also] pass through Palestinian neighbourhoods spraying buildings in retaliation for local residents protesting Israeli occupation and apartheid. As a result, businesses have to close for days and families have to leave their homes for long periods of time until the stench is gone. This is what makes it a brutal collective punishment tool.\u201d<\/p>\n

So while Israel\u2019s attacks are motivated by extreme racism and colonialism, which lie at the roots of the Israeli state, it is also clear that Israel\u2019s oppression of Palestinians is highly profitable for the apartheid regime. The Israeli state and its military enterprises show how savage capitalism and colonialism intertwine. Through its exports Israel in turn is also shaping the coercive dimensions of states everywhere, bringing the politics and methodology of occupation to other international arenas. Those states buying military and security products from Israel are therefore complicit in both the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and for importing its brutal politics of coercion.<\/p>\n

Israel and Its Allies\u2019 Profit From Oppressing Palestinians<\/h2>\n
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Israel is one of the world\u2019s most militarised and securitised countries. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), in 2020 Israel was among the five countries with the highest military budgets in the world,<\/a> at 5.6% of its GDP. Israel is also the eighth largest arms exporter in the world. Israeli arms exports accounted for 3% of the global total in 2016\u201320, 59% higher than in the period 2011\u201315.<\/p>\n

Israel has made itself central to the international arms and homeland security industry by exporting cutting-edge military equipment, technologies and tactics to other countries. Israel exports to an estimated 130 countries worldwide<\/a> \u2013 the graphic below captures SIPRI\u2019s tracking of arms exports to 65 of those countries since 2008. As Sahar Vardi mentions<\/a>, it is impossible to find a full list of those countries. Apart from its reports to the United Nations Register of Conventional Arms, Israel releases no official information about its arms exports. Some of Israel\u2019s clients have involved dictatorships and human rights abusers; including apartheid South Africa, the military Junta in Argentina, the Serbian army during the Bosnian genocide, and Rwanda in the years leading up to the genocide in the country. Recently Israel has sold arms to South Sudan and the military junta in Myanmar. Countries like Morocco, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and others have begun using Israeli spyware against journalists and political opposition.<\/p>\n

But Israel doesn\u2019t only export arms, it also exports policing and surveillance technologies to repressive regimes and \u2018liberal\u2019 democracies alike. Israel has forged a strategic role in deploying a level of daily surveillance and control that has marked out internationally as the cutting edge of states counter-insurgency and population control efforts everywhere. As Maren Mantovani and Henrique Sanchez argue<\/a> \u201cIn a globalized world, any analysis of militarization and repressive ideologies, methodologies and technologies has to take into account the dynamics of import and export of these concepts and tools across borders. One of the world\u2019s most prominent exporters of ideology and technology of repression is undoubtedly Israel\u201d.<\/p>\n

A report by the Spanish NGO Novact<\/a> in 2014 showed how the Israeli company Guardian-Homeland Security had organised trainings for Spanish police forces in Israel. Various Spanish police force bodies were listed as clients on the company website. In videos published by the company<\/a>, you can hear a Mosso d\u2019Esquadra (Catalan national police) who has done the two-week training in Israel saying \u201cWe have learned a lot during these two weeks [\u2026.] we have learned from the best\u201d. This caused a huge public uproar at the time as it emerged after Spanish state police had brutally repressed the post financial crisis 15M protests. In Catalonia, during pro-independence protests in 2019, the police used a tank armed with high-pressure water to disperse protests for the first time<\/a>. The tank had been bought from the Israeli company Beit Alfa Industries<\/a> in 1994. These tanks are also used in the Occupied West Bank and had been used by the Apartheid South African regime before.<\/p>\n

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Arms Exports From Israel<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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Volume of arms exports (TIV* in millions), 2008\u20132020<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n