How we are financing Israel’s security

Ben Hayes, schrijft voor Neoconopticon, een site over het Europese security-industrial complex. Vandaag een bijdrage over de banden tussen Europa en het Israelische veiilgheidscomplex.

The EU is providing yet more R&D subsidies for the Israeli security-industrial complex, this time for a €15 million project entitled “Total Airport Security System” (the EC contribution is €9 million). The Verint-led consortium promises to deliver ,,multisource labyrinth fusion logic enabling situational and security awareness of the airport anytime and anywhere” (or, in other words, “total surveillance”).

According to the project synopsis: “TASS is a multi-segment, multi-level intelligence and surveillance system, aimed at creating an entire airport security monitoring solution providing real-time accurate situational awareness to airport authorities. TASS divides the airport security into six security control segments (environmental, cargo, people, airplanes, vehicle-fleet & facilities) each of them being monitored by various technologies that are fused together, creating a multisource labyrinth fusion logic enabling situational and security awareness of the airport anytime and anywhere.’’

Since the European Community began funding research in 1984, both the amount of funding available and the range of topics on offer have steadily increased (the latest framework programme, FP7, has a seven-year budget of €53 billion). So has the participation of researchers from outside the EU in collaborative projects.

In per capita terms, no non-EU country has received more from the EU’s largesse than Israel. Indeed, the European Commission says that the EU is now second only to the Israel Science Foundation in Jerusalem as a source of research funding for Israeli academics, corporations and state enterprises.

More and more of that funding is finding its way to Israel’s already buoyant security sector. Israeli revenues from the export of counter-terrorism-related products now top $1bn annually, according to the Israeli government.

Since incorporating Israel into the ‘European research area’, the Commission has signed off on dozens of lucrative EU research contracts to the likes of Israel Aerospace Industries (a state-owned manufacturer of drones), Motorola Israel (producer of ‘virtual fences’ around Israeli settlements) and Elbit Systems (one of Israel’s largest private military technology firms, responsible for segments around Jerusalem of, to use the United Nation’s term, the separation wall constructed between Jewish and Palestinian communities).

Some 58 EU ‘security research’ projects have now also been funded under the new €1.4bn ‘security research’ component of FP7. Israeli companies and institutions are participating in 12 of these, leading and coordinating five of them. Only the UK, Germany, France and Italy lead more projects.

Among this latest tranche of contracts is a €9.1 million project led by Verint Systems that will deliver “field-derived data” to “crisis managers” in “command-and-control centres”. (These contracts tend to avoid phrases such as ‘surveillance’ and ‘homeland security’, substituting less emotive terms.)

Verint describes itself as “a leader in enterprise workforce optimisation and security intelligence solutions, including video intelligence, public safety and communication intelligence and investigative solutions”. What it primarily provides is workplace surveillance, CCTV and wire-tapping facilities. Verint is now effectively being subsidised by the EU to develop surveillance and communication systems that may ultimately be sold back to the member states.

The raison d’être for establishing the EU security research programme was to enhance the ‘industrial competitiveness’ of the nascent European ‘homeland security’ industry. The Commission argues that funding for Israeli ‘homeland security’ is wholly consistent with this aim (insofar as it will enhance Europe’s “knowledge base”).

But should the Commission be giving more money to Israel’s flourishing security sector than to its counterparts in most of the EU states?

More importantly, should it be subsidising it at all? Israel’s control of what remains of the Palestinian territories now depends as much upon the hardware and software provided by its ‘homeland security’ industry as its traditional military supremacy.

Factsheet on how Israeli arms companies benefit van EU science funds

• Israel is the main foreign partner for the EU’s “framework programme” for scientific research, which has been allocated €53 billion between 2007 and 2013. The EU is the second only to the Israel Science Foundation in Jerusalem as a source of research funding for Israel.

• Israel expects that its investment in the EU’s current research programme will be worth at least €500 million by the time it has concluded in 2013.

• Using the pretext of fighting terrorism, the EU has decided in recent years that arms companies are eligible to receive funding for “security research”. Ten of the 45 initial projects described by the EU as “security research” have involved Israeli companies, academic or state institutions.

• Motorola Israel, for example, is taking part in iDetect 4All, an EU-funded surveillance project designed to provide alerts of suspicious activities near buildings or resources of economic value. Motorola is the top maker of fuses for aircraft bombs used by the Israeli air force. Weapons components bearing a Motorola label have been found by investigators  from Human Rights Watch who searched the sites bombed by Israel in Gaza in late 2008 and the beginning of 2009. Motorola-made fuses were also a central part of the bomb with which Israel killed at least 28 civilians, most of them children, living in an apartment block in Qana, Lebanon, in 2006.

• The iDetect 4All project is likely to draw on experience gained from the use of surveillance technology in the occupied West Bank. Over the past five years, a Motorola radar system worth $158 million has been installed in 47 Israeli settlements there. The Jerusalem Post has described the system as a “virtual fence” that uses thermal cameras to pinpoint “intruders”.

• Not all of the EU-financed projects involving Israel fall under the security research category. Israel is participating, too, in road safety and environmental research. It is instructive, however, that Israeli arms companies are active in apparently civilian projects, suggesting that the technology being developed by them can have military applications.

• Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), the manufacturer of warplanes used by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories, is also benefiting from several EU-financed projects. These include the “Clean Sky” project, aimed at developing more  environmentally-friendly aircraft engines. The European Commission has confirmed that IAI will be able to apply for patents on innovations realised as part of this project, allowing it to use the fruits of research financed by the European taxpayer for military purposes.

• Elbit, the largest private arms company in Israel, is taking part in a project called CAPECON (Civil Applications and Economical Effectivity of Potential UAV Configurations). Its objective is to deliver a blueprint for flying unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in civilian airspace by 2015. More commonly known as drones, Elbit’s UAVs have been used frequently in attacks on Palestinian civilians, as well as in Afghanistan and Iraq. Thomas Bingham, a British law lord, has compared these weapons to landmines and cluster bombs and suggested they are so cruel “as to be beyond the pale of human tolerance”.