Israeli Security Agencies Research Articles

Negative spaces as a strategic decision: The case of the Israeli Security Agency

The term negative spaces was coined in 2021, referring to situations and contexts in which dialogue is not possible or appropriate. The purpose of this article is to further explore this concept by using the Israeli Security Agency (ISA) as a case study to investigate whether organizations can choose negative spaces as a purposeful, strategic decision. The study uses an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, combining the notion of open governments, the Strata Approach to Dialogue Analysis (SADA) framework, and negative spaces of dialogue. It also triangulates research methods, including quantitative and qualitative content analysis, as well as a first-time, in-depth interview with a former Head of Communications for the ISA who served in the organization for fifteen years.

Judicial Framing and Immigration Policymaking: Israel's Policy toward Self-Claiming Palestinian Informers

How does the use of judicial framing, a repeated selection of certain features across a large number of related cases, enable courts to be active participants in national immigration policymaking? Previous legal studies have often underestimated the judicial impact on national immigration policies and focused, instead, on courts’ limited intervention in landmark cases. In this article, we show that by repeatedly using a particular judicial framing as part of their daily practice over a large group of legal cases, courts can help form a new national policy related to forced migration without setting any explicit legal precedent that challenges the decisions of the country's security authorities and government ministries. The analysis presented here examines the Israeli High Court of Justice's engagement in Israel's immigration policymaking toward Palestinians who claimed to have worked with Israeli security agencies as collaborators and were fearful of harsh reprisals if they remained in Palestinian autonomous areas. By looking beyond the outcomes of individual cases, our analysis opens another avenue for research on courts’ hidden intervention into national immigration policy through adopting and further developing new legal categories of forced migrants as part of their practice in the national arena.

Biscuits, the World Cup and Nobel Prizes: The Puzzling Documentation of Shin Bet Interrogations

Abstract Records kept by security authorities documenting potentially violent encounters are generally characterized by technocratic language and parsimonious content, which is intended to project an image of objective and impartial state officials. A qualitative analysis of 688 records covering interrogations of suspects in terror activities by the Israeli Security Agency (Shin Bet) presents a very different picture. They consist of representations of (1) hospitality—caring for the well-being of the person under interrogation; (2) camaraderie—amicable conversations between interrogator and interrogee; and (3) moral conviction—impassioned political or moral debates regarding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The analysis shows how unconventional documentation techniques in security interrogations may be used to preserve legitimacy; bolster professional prestige and makes a sophisticated use of a sense of secrecy.

Nontargets: Understanding the Apathy Towards the Israeli Security Agency’s COVID-19 Surveillance

This article tackles one of the latest—but nonetheless baffling—displays of public apathy towards surveillance: that of much of the Israeli public towards the decision to recruit the Israeli Security Agency (Shin Bet) to do COVID-19 contact tracing during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The case of a secretive state agency being authorized to do surveillance on its citizens for a strictly non-security-related matter seems to realize many of the dangers that surveillance/privacy scholars warn about with regards to surveillance expansion, function creep, and the creation of a surveillance state. I contribute to existing literature about apathy towards surveillance and the privacy paradox by offering the term “nontargets” as an explanation. This term suggests that, alongside social groups that are likely to be targeted by a given surveillance application, there are certain recognizable nontargets that most likely will not bear the brunt of the surveillance, at least not in the short- and medium-term, and thus do not fear it. In the case at hand, which is examined using a qualitative context-bound study, I suggest that Jewish-Israelis are such a nontarget group with regards to this novel Shin Bet surveillance, which explains a significant part of their apathy towards it.

Israel's SIGINT Oversight Ecosystem: COVID-19 Secret Service Location Tracking as a Test Case

By mid March 2020, Israel had experienced the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Within a fortnight confirmed coronavirus cases surged from half a dozen to 178 cases. The government responded to the challenge of identifying potential carriers by tasking the Israeli Security Agency (the ISA, or Shin Bet) with cellphone location tracking of the routes of confirmed coronavirus patients and the identifications of individuals with whom they had been in close contact. Israel's ISA communications metadata collection measures have been shrouded in veil of secrecy. The debate – in parliament and in court - regarding the use of the country's secret service counterterrorism mass surveillance measures to contain the spread of the pandemic, is a rare opportunity to assess whether the institutional oversight mechanisms on SIGINT collection activities are sufficient and effective. The paper will (1) describe the existing SIGINT oversight regime in Israel; (2) describe its response to COVID-19 location tracking in Israel; and, (3) in light of existing literature, will provide an analysis of that response.

Fear of panoptic surveillance: using digital technology to control the COVID-19 epidemic

BackgroundIn a bid to reduce infection rates by COVID-19 the authorities in some countries, in collaboration with medical regulators and experts, have employed digital technologies to control and regulate citizens’ behavior. Public opinion and the public’s compliance with these technologies come into play here. The objective of the present study was to examine attitudes expressed in the public discourse toward the use of digital technologies to control people’s behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic, as reflected in the media.MethodsQualitative analysis was performed on posts and comments submitted in response to 12 articles that appeared on the four leading Israeli news sites, on three significant occasions: first, upon the announcement of the use of surveillance technologies by the Israeli security agency (ISA); second, upon the announcement of the launch of the Health Ministry’s app that tracks contacts with COVID-19 patients; and third, following reports of petitions lodged with Israel’s supreme court challenging the use of surveillance technologies. The analysis was performed using ATLAS-Ti software for systematic analysis.ResultsA total of 2551 posts and comments referring to these 12 articles were found, 714 of which were relevant to the purpose of the study. The analysis revealed disagreement between those who supported the measures taken and opponents. Supporters regarded contact tracing by means of digital technologies as essential to the effort to protect people during the pandemic, and believed that employing the ISA’s capabilities was the correct way to combat the epidemic. Opponents of the measures rejected the use of tracking technologies, regarding this step as a move toward dictatorship and a violation of fundamental civil rights. Some proposed alternative measures that would obviate the use of such tracking.ConclusionsThe primary task of medical practice is to heal illness and alleviate suffering. The debate surrounding the employment of digital technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic highlights the complexity of the close connection between social control and care in times of pandemic. The context of this pandemic has highlighted the interrelatedness of advanced digital surveillance technologies, medical care, and social control exercised by authorities and medical regulators and experts, which raises issues of transparency, trust and mistrust among the public. These issues become all the more relevant when the number of patients grows rapidly, the authorities need to deal with the extended ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the country has entered a second lockdown, and the public must be persuaded to comply with highly restrictive regulations. Recommendations to policy makers, practical implications, and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Revise Your Syllabi: Israeli Supreme Court Upholds Authorization for Torture and Ill-Treatment

This paper reviews the recent decision of the Israeli Supreme Court in the case of Tbeish v Attorney General, in light of the 1999 landmark Public Committee against Torture in Israel (pcati) case, which prohibited torture and ill-treatment of detainees, but acknowledged necessity as a possible criminal defence for interrogators. Tbeish is not framed as a break from the past, or even as a change in the law, but I argue that it provides a new authorization for torture and ill-treatment. The Court upheld internal guidelines of the Israeli Security Agency (isa) that establish a ‘necessity procedure’ for the application of ‘special interrogation means’. The Court’s specific construction of the guidelines circumvents the unambiguous prohibition in pcati on general rules setting criteria for using special interrogation means, by turning the process into a supposedly ad hoc decision on each individual case without preexisting rules. Nevertheless, this paper argues, the decision approves a system of prior authorization for the use of violent means of interrogations. Creating a framework for an organizational decision, the guidelines relieve interrogators of personal responsibility for potentially unlawful acts by shifting the meaning and function of necessity from a criminal defence to a principle of governmental action. As such, they provide bureaucratic authorization and justification for acts which violate the prohibition against torture.

Terrorism reports: The tip of the iceberg.

Medical impact of terror is a public health issue as the threat is growing all over the world. Our objective was to compare the number of injured and incidents in the three different databases and reports [Global Terrorism Database (GTD), Israeli Security Agency (ISA) and National Insurance Institute (NII)] in Israel. Retrospective study. Analyses of three different databases (GTD, ISA and NII) and basic comparison. The victims reimbursed for medical expenses are the largest population. The number of injured as described by GTD and ISA database are less important. The 2010-2013 years are marked by more incidents recognized in Israel vs GTD assessment (except in 2014). The number of victims being reimbursed for medical and mental health services is radically different from the GTD and the ISA reports. Public Health specialists should be advised of this phenomenon to deliver their right approach (including mental health) to growing threat and develop new definition of victim of terror.

Sumud: A Palestinian Philosophy of Confrontation in Colonial Prisons

This article investigates Palestinian-Zionist colonial relations from the perspective of the interrogation encounter between Palestinian munadilin (strugglers) in prison and their interrogators from the Israeli security agency during the past forty years of Zionist settler colonization in Palestine. The interrogation site constitutes a condensation point for reading the colonial relations. Each interrogation encounter reflects a singular relation and simultaneously encodes the collective history of past, present, and future colonial relations. The interrogation encounter is a revealing ethnographic site for analyzing the dialectic of the colonial relations and how Palestinians have simultaneously carved out a space for a form of subjectivity and politics that breaks with the predicament of the colonial dialectic through the cultivation of sumud, or “steadfastness.” In the context of colonized Palestine, sumud has come to embody a whole range of significations, sensibilities, affections, attachments, aspirations, and practices. It is a form of subjectivity and politics that embodies the possibility of escaping hegemonic configurations of colonial liberal politics. To practice sumud in the interrogation means to refuse to confess in order to protect one’s comrades, political organization, and community, as well as the Palestinian revolution more broadly. However, sumud is not a definable practice. For there are as many ways to practice sumud as there are Palestinians-in-sumud; the significance of sumud lies in its nonconceptualized features. Sumud is a form of what Gilles Deleuze might term “singular revolutionary becoming,” a creative way of restructuring the self that assumes an absolute difference as immanent to the self, a “difference-in-itself,” and not merely in relation to an outside other, as presupposed by the Hegelian dialectic. The article explicates the complex web of relations that sumud incarnates. Through ethnographic cases, it discusses the form of nonrecognitive politics made possible through sumud.

Legal Emotions: An Ethnography of Distrust and Fear in the Arab Districts of an Israeli City

Recent sociolegal scholarship has explored the role of emotions in lawmaking and policymaking on security and crime issues. This article extends this approach to the relationship between law enforcement and affect by addressing the role of policing and security agencies in the (re)production of long-term emotions, which bind a collective and fuel ethnonational division. An ethnography of the distinct emotional climate within the Arab districts of Lod, an Israeli city, shows that this climate is structured by two emotions: rampant distrust toward friends and neighbors, and intense fear of the Israeli authorities. This emotional climate is the product of the subterranean ties of Lod Palestinians with the Israeli security agencies as well as their experiences of the blurred line between state security and crime control enforcement. I embed the initial creation and relative stability of this emotional climate in the broader relationship between the Israeli state and its Palestinian citizens from 1948 to the present. The article concludes with a discussion of how the law enforcement's affective production has consequences for the salience and scope of citizenship and by arguing for a greater focus on the link between law enforcement, collective emotions, and processes of inclusion and exclusion.

Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948–1967 by Hillil Cohen (review)

Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948–1967 by Hillil Cohen (review)

Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948-1967 (review)

Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948-1967, by Hillel Cohen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. 281 pp. $27.50. The story that Hillel Cohen tells is a sad one, about a defeated people who had to face their former enemies coming to their villages as the victors and as their sovereigns. The "Good Arabs" were those Arabs who seemed to change their heart almost overnight, anxious to help in any way they could those with whom they were in war with just yesterday. However, this is not completely accurate; while usually the reference is to the Jewish-Palestinian intercommunal war that took place from late November 1947 to May 1948, in which the Arabs were unequivocally beaten, the actual warfare was not between the two communities. Out of the 1,200,000 Arab Palestinians, only about 6,000 went to war against the Jews. For various reasons, of which the almost complete lack of national institutions was prime, the vast majority of the Arab Palestinians did not take up arms. In fact, during the first months of the intercommunal clashes, many Arabs asked for truce from their Jewish neighbors. The Arab tragedy was that despite the fact that the vast majority of them did not want to go to war, they had to suffer the consequences of the very few who dictated their agenda over the rest of their brethren and went to war under the leadership of Haj Amin al Husseini. Finding themselves citizens of a Jewish state after the war ended, both the Arabs who tried to avoid war and those who embraced it had to try to accommodate to their new situation. One way to do so was by cooperating with the Israeli authorities and collaborating with Israel's security services. In describing that process, the book wishes to refute some accepted truths about the Arab Israelis and their relations with the Jewish state: first, the relationship between the Arab Israelis and the Jewish state was not a one-way street in which the government was the powerful side, imposing its will on yielding population; Cohen argues that the Israeli Arabs were also active and influential in the making of the Israeli policy toward them. They expressed their will and opinion, advancing their own agenda, even through clashes and conflict with the authorities. Second, the Israeli attempt to control the Israeli Arab national consciousness and identity failed. Israel tried, through the education system, to dictate to the Arabs a narrative that would shape their identity: "The effort was almost a complete failure," says Cohen (p. 6). Connecting with the first point, that failure of the authorities was yet another demonstration of the ability of the Israeli Arabs to shape their own destiny, even shortly after the Nakba: the catastrophe. Those points lead to Cohen's main argument concerning the place of the main heroes of his story, or those Israeli Arabs who collaborated with the Israeli security authorities. Once again, they were not passive tools in the hands of their operators; "some of them knew how to demand their rights and to maneuver around the security forces" (p. …

Good Arabs: the Israeli security agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948-1967

Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Beginning a Beautiful Friendship: The Rise of the Collaborator Class 2. Communists vs. the Military Government, Collaborators vs. the Communists 3. Boundary Breakers: Infiltrators, Smugglers, Spies 4. The Land 5. The Battle of the Narrative: Symbols, Pronouncements, Teachers 6. Minorities within a Minority: Dilemmas of Identity 7. Circles of Control, Circles of Resistance Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index