JENNY JACOBY
A surveillance camera is pictured at an Israeli checkpoint in the occupied Palestinian city of Hebron, on Nov. 9, 2021. (HAZEM BADER/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES).
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October 2023, pp. 56-57
Waging Peace
ISRAEL IS ON a mission to become an artificial intelligence (AI) “superpower,” retired Israeli Maj.-Gen. Eyal Zamir said earlier this year. Already subjected to Israeli mass surveillance and facial recognition technologies, Palestinians will likely face greater risks as AI technology grows, argued panelists on the Arab Center Washington DC’s June 15 webinar, “Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights: The Case of Israeli Surveillance of Palestinians.”
Mona Shtaya, a non-resident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, referred to Palestine’s state of reality as a “panopticon.” “You are watched, you are spied on, you are surveilled all the time—if you are walking in the streets, if you are in a public square, if you are on the internet,” she said.
This is already having an impact on the personal relationships of Palestinians. People are finding workarounds, such as altering phone conversations, but “relationships are collapsing” due to constant suspicion, Shtaya noted. “It’s not only between people and the government, but also between people within the same community,” she said of the growing trust deficit.
A key factor to Israel’s leading role in the AI sector is “the close ties that have been developed and maintained between the military and Israel’s technology industry,” noted Sophia Goodfriend, a Ph.D. candidate at Duke University. Israel’s intelligence units grew exponentially from 2002-2010, and today there are more soldiers in Israeli intelligence units than there are in its navy, she explained. Notably, many private AI companies are led by former military members, feeding further into the inseparable loop binding the military and technology industries in Israel.
A few months ago, Amnesty International exposed how AI technology perpetuates a state of apartheid in Palestine in its report “Automated Apartheid.” The report found AI has been critical to restricting the movement and promoting the segregation of Palestinians through databases, facial recognition technology and physical infrastructure. In East Jerusalem, Mabat 2000, a network of thousands of cameras, monitors Palestinians’ daily movements and specifically identifies protesters. In Hebron, biometric data is being collected non-consensually with Red Wolf, the latest technology that adds to Blue Wolf and Wolf Pack surveillance already in use.
Shtaya also noted the development of the Smart Shooter, an automated gun installed in Palestinian areas capable of deploying tear gas and sponge and rubber bullets. “We are talking about an open laboratory where they are first developing and then testing such kinds of technologies on Palestinians before they start selling them worldwide,” she said.
Amnesty International is one of the leading voices in the campaign against facial recognition technology, and has been since 2020. “We consider facial recognition technologies for identification as a tool of mass surveillance, which is never a proportionate interference with the rights to privacy, freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly,” Rasha Abdul-Rahim, director of Amnesty Tech at Amnesty International, said.
Privacy is not an absolute right, noted Rohan Talbot, the director of advocacy and campaigns at Medical Aid for Palestinians. However, international human rights law has established a four-part test to justify interferences of privacy, including that it must be on the basis of clear and precise laws and in the interest of serious matters such as security or health. “These requirements cannot ever be true of a generalized mass surveillance technology which is processing the biometric data of all people crossing a camera network’s path. Interferences with privacy must be done on a case-by-case basis, not be blanket in nature, as appears to be the case in the West Bank,” Talbot said.
—Jenny Jacoby
