Yesterday, The Grayzone republished an article by Nate Bear, an anti-Zionist activist who writes about “Disease, ecology, tech, power, empire, capitalism, society, other stuff” on his own substack page. The article is a summary of Israeli domination of surveillance and hacking technology. Bear covers a long list of Israeli firms all founded by veterans of the IDF’s notorious Unit 8200, the unit responsible for covert operations, military intelligence, surveillance and other kinds of related intelligence operations.
“The scale of usage, and the range of capabilities provided by this Israeli spy tech, is vast. From face and voice recognition software, to interception and wiretap technology, to covert location tracking, to forced data extraction from smartphones and other devices,” Bear writes. “The tech, built by software engineers who cut their teeth writing code to enable and enforce Israeli domination over, and apartheid against Palestinians, is being sold to security services, police forces and immigration agencies across the west.”
Bear provides a hefty list of Israeli firms, with details about their founders and contracts, at least what can be ferreted out about them, because, for obvious reasons, a lot of these activities are in the shadows. “What this compendium demonstrates is that Israel and its apartheid economy sits at the center of the drive towards a fully surveilled, zero-dissent world,” he writes towards the end. “Across the globe, Israeli spyware is ushering in a distinct 21st century fascism that fuses new technologies of control to a tried-and-tested framework that seeks to spy, suppress and dominate. Under the guise of citizen safety and crime fighting, Israeli tech is smoothing the gears of authoritarianism.
“Israel’s permanent war and apartheid economy, and the spy tech firms run by Israeli intelligence operatives that emerge from this economy, are the single biggest threat to civil liberties in the world today. And it’s no surprise that Israel has cornered this market. Israel churns out individuals and projects directed for dominance because Israelis are raised in and surrounded by a military culture of impunity. A culture where technology is created only to dominate, test subjects are abundant and rules of engagement non-existent.
“In buying and relying on the tools of an apartheid state for security and law enforcement technology, we see how Israel’s apartheid and genocide itself becomes indispensable to western governments in their drive towards complete security states.”
Bear’s mistake, however is to treat all of this as if it were being done on behalf of Israel, when Israel itself is just marcher lord state for a collapsing trans-Atlantic financial empire desperate to keep itself afloat by any means necessary—including by genocide and even nuclear war.
