Afrasianet - Omran Abdullah - Palestine is under the yoke of the last colonialism in the world after the liberation and struggle of most of the peoples of the Global South in the 19th and 20th centuries, movements such as the slave revolt in Haiti in 1804, which laid the foundations for the first free black republic, the struggle  of Vietnam,  which defeated  French and then American colonialism in the mid-twentieth century, and the Algerian Revolution , which uprooted French colonialismPalestine today stands out as a living extension of a long history of peoples' resilience in the face of empires and their liberation struggle against "imperialist might".

Exploring the work of two researchers, this report attempts to provide foundations for understanding the theoretical and historical framework of considering Palestine as a global counterinsurgency laboratory, placing the Israeli colonial experience in a broader context than contemporary policies of oppression and colonialism. 

Palestine as a Counterinsurgency Laboratory

Since 2010, Iranian-American researcher Laleh Khalili has presented a thesis that Palestine is a model laboratory and a key focus for the fight against global insurgencies.

In her paper, "The Location of Palestine in Global Counterinsurgencies," Khalili, a professor of Gulf studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, noted that Palestine was a theater in which colonial control and oppression were invented, becoming a starting point or a link that took those methods to other places.

Historically, the techniques used against Palestinians — blowing up homes, detaining all men within a certain age group, and targeting civilians — have been repeated in other colonial wars (such as the British and French wars of the 20th century, as well as the U.S. wars  in Iraq and Afghanistan).

In other words, Khalili sees Palestine as a model for the development of counterinsurgency techniques adopted by world powers. Researchers have later described this role as a lab thesis, the study of repressive innovation based on  Israel's ongoing wars on Palestine.

In her 2018 Al Jazeera article, Khalili noted that Israeli politicians boast more about Israel's high-tech industry  than their agricultural achievements, noting that any innovations in the sector are the result of a huge Israeli military investment in repressive technologies.

Smart city algorithms, facial recognition software, drones, robotics, surveillance applications, eavesdropping systems, and data mining software used to collect open-source data on ordinary people were all developed either by the military's intelligence research arm, or via incubators funded by  the IDF. 

Alongside technology, traditional military methods of control have formed the basis of Israeli colonization of Palestine, and the concrete wall that surrounds Palestinian areas in the occupied territories is a prime example.

Interestingly, the idea of using the wall as a counterinsurgency measure was a gift given to the Israeli army by its early colonial patrons:  the British Mandate government, with the help of the Jewish Workers' Union, the Histadrut, was the first government to build a wall in Palestine in the 1930s, as a means of suppressing Palestinian rebellion.

The Israeli military has even  used supposedly non-military infrastructure, such as roads, as a means of expanding settlements in  the West Bank regionally and controlling Palestinian movement there.

Many of the construction projects, agricultural prosperity, technological innovation, and economic development  that Israel boasts of have been the result of the abuse of the Palestinian workforce (both from the occupied territories and from Israeli citizens), which is suffering from financial distress and severe exploitation. 

'Tried' funnels

In his 2015 book War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification, American anthropologist Jeff Halper examines Israel's role as a model of a security state that practices a permanent form of counterinsurgency.

Halper argues that the era of the global war on terror has produced a global industry of subjugation, in which states engage in long-term, low-intensity conflicts against popular resistance movements, in the name of imposing the dominance of transnational global capital, and in this context, Israel has emerged as a primary supplier of strategies, tactics, and weapons needed for these wars.

Halper points to Israel's qualitative advantage of using the Occupied Palestinian Territories as a real-world laboratory for developing models of control and oppression, as the technologies and weapons that Israel markets globally are the product  of continuous field experimentation in the occupied territories, along with periodic military campaigns used to test these tools.

Halper describes this process as an export of occupation, meaning that Israel exports globally the same methods it has tried to subjugate the Palestinians, and this role has led to the flourishing of what he calls Israel's security policy, where it reaps political and economic gains by providing regimes around the world with ready-made systems of repression.

For example, Halper documents the deployment of Israeli experts in training police and security forces in dozens of countries (including the United States, where police units have been trained by Israelis). Israel has thus become a street vendor of tools of war against peoples, drawing on its ongoing experience in oppressing Palestinians. 

Cumulative Deterrence in Israeli Doctrine

Israeli security theorists have developed a doctrine that the continued use of excessive force is an effective means of subduing and deterring adversaries in the long term. This strategy is called cumulative deterrence, and it is based on the theory that the continued use of excessive force will eventually exhaust Israel's Arab enemies and convince them of the futility of armed resistance.

This concept is an extension of the idea of the Iron Wall put forward by the Ukrainian Zionist theorist  Ze'ev Jabotinsky in 1923, according to which Israel should behave like a Spartan statelet living by the sword to impose a fait accompli.

This doctrine also includes the principle of "escalation dominance," which means that Israel must always respond more forcefully whenever provoked by an adversary. This has been reflected in the field of shoot-to-kill policies against even civilian suspects, and at certain times field instructions have even recommended aiming at the head with the intention of killing, perpetuating the idea that the rapid elimination of the insurgent is part of the creed.

Export of repression

After Israel developed its combat and security methods through experimentation with the Palestinians, it turned this experience into a lucrative export commodity, and Halper and others point out that Israel does not only sell weapons, but also exports models of complete control that include tactics and strategies to counter popular movements.

For example, dozens of countries in Asia, Africa,  and Latin America have signed deals to train their forces by Israeli experts in the fields of riot control, terrorism, and surveillance. In the United States itself, officials and police officers have traveled to Israel to receive training in more aggressive policing techniques and sophisticated technical surveillance, and some American communities have reportedly felt "Palestinated" as a result of importing these techniques.

In addition to security training, the concept of "combat-proof"  has emerged as a marketing feature of the Israeli military industry, and after every round of fighting in Gaza or the West Bank, Israeli arms companies are quick to display their products at arms exhibitions as field-tested. For example, the Israeli  company Elbit touts its drones as proven in counterterrorism operations, since they have already been used to target Palestinians. 

The CEO of an Israeli arms company stated in 2014, at the height of the aggression on Gaza, that after every campaign on Gaza, we see an increase in the number of customers from abroad, in an implicit acknowledgment that the war on Gaza has become a live exhibition for weapons testing.

Every new technology, such as autonomous drones to big data analysis software, is being tested there and then marketed globally as advances in the security industry.

Many fear that this precedent will lead to the generalization of algorithmic genocide among the tools of counterinsurgency globally, as when a country has the ability to identify and bomb thousands of targets with the push of a button without little human intervention, the possibility of committing atrocities against people is much higher, especially if there is no moral and legal deterrent.

International and human rights reports indicate that the continued occupation and blockade of Gaza allowed Israel to develop surveillance and repression systems and then market them globally, earning it an advanced position in the global security market. As a result of this trade, Israel's security brand has become synonymous with proven combat experience, attracting governments to bring Israeli technologies to suppress their own people or to monitor opponents under the banner of fighting terrorism.

Security Capitalism and the Occupation Economy

The transformation of Palestine into a security laboratory has given rise to what some scholars call security capitalism or the economy of occupation, and Halper argues that Israel has invested in perpetuating the state of perpetual war on the Palestinians in order to turn it into political and economic gains. On the other hand, repression itself has become an economic resource, as Israel's surveillance and armament industries thrive on its field expertise.

According to statistics, in 2020, Israeli arms exports amounted to $8.3 billion (the second highest figure ever), accounting for about 15% of the country's total exports. This boom is fueled by the fact that Israeli security technology companies cooperate closely with the military, and the army even encourages its tech-savvy soldiers to establish start-ups to transfer their military knowledge to the civilian market.

Consequently, the Israeli security system constitutes a global network of interests, and whenever a crisis or war breaks out (such as urban wars or internal unrest in other countries), the wheel of Israeli armaments and security is activated to provide ready-made and proven solutions.

In this sense, it can be said that the crushing of the Palestinians has become part of a global political economy, as the suffering of a people under occupation is turning into profit opportunities for companies and governments that see Israel as an expert partner in control technologies.

Scholars have described this reality as the militarization of capitalism, in which wars over peoples become a market in itself. For example, during the Israeli war on Gaza after October 7, 2023, the shares of Israeli arms companies rose sharply with the expectation that demand for their "tried-and-tested" products in the battle would increase. 

History of colonialism and subjugation

The idea of bombing civilians from the air, which Israel is heavily practicing in Gaza, has many precedents dating back to the early 20th century, including what is sometimes described as the first aerial bombardment in history in 1911 when Italian pilot Giulio Gavotti dropped bombs on an Ottoman-Libyan camp, in a precedent that ushered in the era of using aircraft to bomb human gatherings.

During that war (the Italo-Ottoman War), balloons were also used to drop missiles, making Libya an  early testing ground for modern military technology.

In the British colonial war against the Boer Revolution in South Africa (1899-1902), Lord Kitchener decided to cut off food supplies to the fighters and their families as part of the so-called scorched-earth policy, and the British burned tens of thousands of farms and slaughtered livestock, and put women and children in concentration camps that lacked the most basic necessities of life, leading to the slow death of thousands of people as a result of hunger and disease.

During the Philippine-American War (1899-1902), the strategy of drying up the sea was pursued by depriving combatants of their incubator by displacing villages and burning crops, and in  the Vietnam War, the United States escalated this approach using technology, adopting a plan to starve North Vietnam that included spraying chemical pesticides on crops (most famously Agent Orange) and destroying rice fields to cause famine.

By 1965, 42 percent of all pesticide spraying by the U.S. military was directed directly at food crops, putting hundreds of thousands at risk  of starvation. The U.S. military has also resorted to bombing any signs of mass cooking (such as smoke plumes at night) to deprive villages of food preparation.

These strategies amount to the use of food as a weapon of war, which  Britain also adopted during its colonization of Malaysia and Kenya in the mid-20th century, by rounding up populations in camps and withholding supplies from rebel areas.

The French army also used napalm extensively in the Algerian War (1954-1962), where historical accounts confirm that France bombed entire villages with napalm, burning them from their father's wheel, destroying crops, displacing some two million Algerians to mass camps, and  resorting to brutal techniques such as gassing the resistance in caves during the repression campaigns in Algeria.

The common denominator in all these historical examples is the "war on the peoples", i.e., the deliberate targeting of civilians to break the will of the resistance, on the margins of which the arms and security industries of the aggressor countries flourished.

Despite all the destruction, France was unable to subdue the Algerians who seized their independence in 1962, America did not succeed in bringing the Vietnamese to their knees who liberated their country in 1975, and Vietnam became an example for liberation movements, and the Japanese massacres in China or Italy in Libya did not break the will for liberation in the long run.