How would you feel if when you arrived at your holiday destination, security staff demanded to read your personal emails and look at your Facebook account?

Israel’s attorney general has been asked to look into claims that security officials have been doing just that – threatening to refuse entry to the country unless such private information is divulged by some tourists. Keith Wallace reports.

Find this story at 31 July 2012

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The company has provided equipment for Israeli-run checkpoints and terminals in the West Bank and Gaza, including luggage scanning machines and full body scanners by Rapiscan and L-3’s Safeview to the Erez checkpoint in Gaza and to the Qalandia, Bethlehem and Irtah (Sha’ar Efraim) checkpoints in the West bank.

G4S Israel is one of the major security systems provider to the Israeli government, including the Ministry of defense building (“Hakiria”) in Tel Aviv. It also provides security systems to the Israeli armored corps base of Nachshonim, which was donated by the US army in accordance with the Wye River Memorandum. The company operates security patrol units which secure oceanic facilities, vehicles and transport routs, buildings and equipment of the security and finace industries. These units, as the company states, are manned by “worriers who graduated elite combat units in the Israeli army”.

G4S Israel installed and operates the entire security system of the Ktziot Prison, the central control room of the Megido Prison and security services to Damon prison. The Ktziot, Megido and Damon Prisons, located inside Israel, are incarceration facilities designated for Palestinian political prisoners. G4S Israel clearly indicates in its website that it operates in prisons which hold “security prisoners”, that is Palestinian political prisoners. Ktziot prison is the biggest incarceration facility in Israel and populates 2,200 Palestinian political prisoners, Megido prison populates over 1200 Palestinian political and Damon prison populates over 500 Palestinian political prisoners and illegal aliens from the occupied West Bank. some of these prisoners have not been charged yet and some are administrative detainees.

The company also installed peripheral defense systems on the walls surrounding the Ofer prison and operates a central control room for the entire Ofer compound. Ofer is an Israeli prison for Palestinian political prisoners, located in the West Bank, near the settlement of Givat Ze’ev. The prison populates 1,500 Palestinian political prisoners and includes a military court which judges detainees from the West bank on a daily basis.

In addition, G4S Israel also provides the entire security systems and the central control room in Hasharon compound – Rimonim prison, which is mostly a criminal prison but includes a wing for Palestinian political prisoners.

The company also provided security systems for the Abu Kabir, Kishon (“Al-Jalameh”) and Jerusalem (“Russian Compound”) detention and interrogation facilities. Palestinian political prisoners are usually held in detention facilities without legal proceeding for long periods of time. Human rights organizations have collected evidence showing that Palestinian prisoners are regularly subjected to torture in these facilities.

G4S Israel is the sole provider of electronic security systems to the Israeli police. It provided equipment to the West Bank Israeli Police headquarters, located in the highly contested E-1area next to the Ma’ale Adomim settlement (the Judea and Samaria Police headquarters – “Machoz Shai”).

The company offers its security services to businesses in illegal settlements, including security equipment and personnel to shops and supermarkets in the West bank settlements of Modi’in Illit, Ma’ale Adumim, Har Adar and the settlement neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. In addition, after the company purchased Aminut Moked Artzi, one of the oldest private security companies in Israel, it took over its entire business operations, which includes security services to businesses in the Barkan industrial Zone.

G4S Israel also maintains cooperation with Ariel College in the settlement of Ariel in the West Bank, which included the company’s participation in an open career day in the college.

Click here to read a full report about the activities of the company March 2011

De Amerikaanse voormalig spion Jonathan Pollard zit een levenslange gevangenisstraf uit. Als werknemer bij de VS Marine Inlichtingendienst stal hij honderdduizenden geheime documenten en verkocht die aan Israël. De man die hem ontmaskerde, schreef er een boek over.Bradley Manning wordt verdacht van het lekken van geheime documenten van de Amerikaanse overheid. Deze documenten werden openbaar gemaakt voor Wikileaks. Nog voordat Manning een eerlijk proces heeft gekregen, zit hij al een ruim een jaar in eenzame opsluiting.

De omvang en gevoeligheid van de Wikileaks-documenten vallen echter in het niet in vergelijking met het aantal geheime stukken dat Jonathan Pollard begin jaren ’80 aan de Israëliërs heeft overhandigd. Pollard werkte voor de Naval Intelligence Service. Van juni 1984 tot zijn aanhouding in november 1985 wandelde hij bijna dagelijks het gebouw van de Naval Intelligence Command uit met een tas vol top secret documenten.

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Introduction
I. Civil society campaigns
II. Elbit, the security industry and the pensionfunds
III. Selling drones, selling the ‘Israeli experience’
IV. Israel and the FP7 European Security Research Programme
V. Israel’s security industry and the Netherlands: linked, or not?
Conclusions

The Israeli security industry is comprised of a state-owned Military-Industrial Complex and hundreds of privately owned companies, the so-called ‘homeland security industries’. The security industry is estimated to generate revenues totalling billions of dollars annually. European countries sustain through economic relations with the Israeli security industry an export economy directly profiting from military occupation. The economy of the occupation constitutes one of the major obstacles for a peaceful and just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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In the past few years, the anti-Israel movement has grown from marginal into a serious and visible issue for the country. The anti-Israel tide rose right after Operation Cast Lead, according to Haaretz, as the world watched Israel pound Gaza with bombs on live television. The paper continued: “No public-relations machine in the world could explain the deaths of hundreds of children, the destruction of neighbourhoods and the grinding poverty afflicting a people under curfew for years.” In 2010, both the cultural and the economic boycott gained momentum. In this first section, there is an overview of current civil society campaigns with a focus on links to the Netherlands. While far from complete, the intention is to get an idea of what is going on, and to determine if and where research into companies with links to the Netherlands had already been established by others elsewhere. This overview is based on – limited – internet research only.

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In the case of Israel, it is almost impossible to draw a line between the military-industrial complex and the homeland security industry, in the sense that equipment developed by the military industry and tested in the real-war circumstances of the occupation are later marketed for civilian use. The history and present marketing of drones, as related in the next chapter of this report, is a good example of such a development. There are, however, big differences between the arms industry and the homeland security industry as well. Taking Neve Gordon’s recent paper “The Political Economy of Israel’s Homeland Security” as a point of departure, this chapter explores the field. The large military electronics corporation Elbit Systems serves as an example, including the recent divestments from the company.

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Israel’s homeland security industry is not just a conglomerate of industries – both state companies as well as privatised business – it entails, as Neve Gordon argues, the “Israeli experience.” This idea helps explain the success story of Israel’s homeland security industry in the global market. Neve Gordon concludes that there is an economic motivation to produce and reproduce the so-called security related experiences and to diversify them. He claims that “the Israeli experience is perceived as extremely valuable and attractive because it manages to connect between a hyper-militaristic existence, a neoliberal economic agenda, and democracy.” With the Unmanned Armed Vehicles (UAVs or drones) as an example, this section sketches out the road from military to civilian use of homeland security products – including in the Netherlands.

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To get access to the European markets and to sell the “Israeli experience” as described in Chapters I, II and III, the programme of EU grants provides a great opportunity. The Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development, also called Framework Programmes or abbreviated FP, are funding programmes created by the European Union in order to support and encourage research in the European Research Area (ERA). The specific objectives and actions vary between funding periods.¹¹⁷ This chapter introduces the so-called Framework Programme FP7, aimed at Security Research, and discusses some of the arguments against Israel benefiting from this programme. It also gives an overview of the contacts the Programme provides between the Israeli homeland security industry and Dutch partners in some of the projects, and details of the content of one of those projects.

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The original assignment for this research was to make an overview of the links between the Israeli homeland security industry and the Netherlands. This last chapter of the report describes the part of the investigation focussed on finding Israeli companies, institutions or state services with links to the Netherlands – or the other way round. Because we had no indications or leads, the search was one of the metaphorical needles in the haystack. The chapter starts with a short resume of the research trajectory; for a detailed description we refer to our Intermediate Reports, added as an appendix.

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The conclusions are designed to follow the separate fields of this report. One section wraps up the research in specific companies and their Israeli-Dutch connections in relation to the OPT (Chapters I, II and IV). From a different perspective, the next section evaluates the ‘Israeli experience’ and the Netherlands in more general terms, with the drones as an example (Chapter III). The last section of this chapter summarises some ideas on the European perspective, focusing on the role of Dutch companies and institutions in this area (Chapter IV).

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