Learn about the history of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, equality and justice by exploring major events in the history of their oppression on this day of the year.
3 October
"GAZA IS A GREAT LABORATORY" FOR ISRAELI ARMS
On this day in 2012, Israeli Army Brigadier General Roei Elkabetz gave a talk with a PowerPoint presentation to a conference in New Mexico. Reaching the image of the wall that encloses and shuts off the Gaza Strip from Israel, Egypt and the world, Elkabetz told the audience, “We have learned lots from Gaza. It’s a great laboratory". As with the Gaza Strip for Israel, the US borderlands, dubbed a “constitution-free zone” by the American Civil Liberties Union, are becoming a vast open-air laboratory for tech companies.
"غزة مختبر كبير" للأسلحة الإسرائيلية
3 أكتوبر
في مثل هذا اليوم من عام 2012، ألقى العميد في الجيش الإسرائيلي روي الكابيتز محاضرة مع عرض تقديمي (البور بوينت) في مؤتمر في نيو مكسيكو. قال الكابيتز للجمهور وهو يشير الى صورة الجدار الذي يحيط بقطاع غزة ويغلقه من جهة إسرائيل ومصر والعالم: "لقد تعلمنا الكثير من غزة. إنه مختبر رائع ". كما هو الحال مع قطاع غزة لإسرائيل، أصبحت حدود الولايات المتحدة، التي أطلق عليها اتحاد الحريات المدنية الأمريكية "منطقة خالية من الدستور"، مختبرًا كبيرًا في الهواء الطلق لشركات التكنولوجيا.
How Israeli high-tech firms are outfitting the US-Mexico border. American academic and corporate knowhow and Mexican low-wage manufacturing are to fuse with Israel’s border and homeland security companies.
Elkabetz was speaking at a border technology conference and fair surrounded by a dazzling display of technology–the components of his boundary-building lab. There were surveillance balloons with high-powered cameras floating over a desert-camouflaged armored vehicle made by Lockheed Martin. There were seismic sensor systems used to detect the movement of people and other wonders of the modern border-policing world. Around Elkabetz, you could see vivid examples of where the future of such policing was heading, as imagined not by a dystopian science fiction writer but by some of the top corporate techno-innovators on the planet...
Like the Gaza Strip for the Israelis, the US borderlands, dubbed a “constitution-free zone” by the ACLU, are becoming a vast open-air laboratory for tech companies. There, almost any form of surveillance and “security” can be developed, tested, and showcased, as if in a militarized shopping mall, for other nations across the planet to consider. In this fashion, border security is becoming a global industry and few corporate complexes can be more pleased by this than the one that has developed in Elkabetz’s Israel...
As such border cooperation intensified, journalist Jimmy Johnson coined the apt phrase “Palestine-Mexico border” to catch what was happening. In 2012, Arizona state legislators,