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On November 3, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced that the NSO Group was blacklisting the Israeli technology company. The decision to add the company to the list of entities that engage in activities against the interests of U.S. national security or foreign policy was important.
The Commerce Department said in a press release on the subject: “[there is] these entities provided evidence that these tools were used by foreign officials, journalists, businessmen, activists, academics, and embassy staff to misbehave and supply spy to foreign governments. These tools have also allowed foreign governments to engage in transnational repression, that is, the practice of silencing dissidents, journalists, and activists outside dissidents, journalists, and activists outside their sovereign heads, silencing dissidents, journalists, and activists. Such practices threaten a rules-based international order. ”
However, the Israeli government and the NSO decided to treat the issue as a public relations problem, not as a human rights crisis, and tried to underestimate that. He first tried to view the company with confidence and issued a statement saying he “feels confused by the decision”. He then sent a “secret” letter to the Israeli government, which was “leaked,” asking for help from the U.S. government to cancel the blacklist and save hundreds of Israeli jobs.
The Israeli government, for its part, tried to control the damage. On November 25, the Israeli media reported the alleged decision to stop selling cyber technology to about 65 countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and so on. this is not the case; the ministry has simply added another bureaucratic step – the need for permission to start export negotiations with these countries – to an otherwise unhindered process.
None of these attempts to control the damage helped. Moody’s warned that the NSO level has dropped and is at risk of default, while Apple, a U.S. technology giant, has filed a lawsuit against the company, targeting iPhone users.
Indeed, the U.S. blacklist could be a change, the beginning of a strong response to the challenge posed by the prosperous care systems industry to civil society and democracy movements around the world.
Amnesty International, Citizen Lab, Forbidden Stories, Access Now, and several journalists and activists from around the world, from India to Mexico and Hungary to Israel, have long been ringing alarm bells about NSOs and other spy companies in the hopes of officials. They would listen to the US and other places when they make policy decisions.
For doing so, critics have been accused of lying to the NSO and its supporters, as well as being part of an anti-Israel and anti-Semitic campaign. There has also been a fear that a high-profile company with large financial resources capable of paying for expensive lawyers will be sued for defamation.
For us, Israeli activists, there has also been an obstacle to convincing the Israeli public of the danger of surveillance systems, as many Israelis accept 24/7 custody of Palestinians living under a repressive military regime in the occupied territories.
While the U.S. blacklist of the US NSO is a victory for civil society, it is also a disgrace to the Israeli parliament and judiciary, which has refused to maintain surveillance companies or control the dealings of the defense ministry with them.
For decades the Knesset avoided having a real debate about defense licenses to countries in conflict or repressive regimes. He made little response to the Ministry of Defense’s refusal to share details of surveillance technology exports.
In 2015, together with Deputy Tamar Zandberg (the current Minister for Environmental Protection), I wrote a proposal to amend the 2007 Defense Export Control Act, which restricts defense exports only to countries under the UN embargo. We based the text on the U.S. “Leahy Act,” which prohibits the provision of U.S. military aid and export to governments and security forces that violate human rights with impunity.
The Israeli Ministry of Defense and Foreign Affairs was opposed to the synchronization of Israeli law with American law. Subsequently, the Knesset did not approve the proposal.
Repeated attempts by a group of Israeli human rights activists, I was part of, to expose the Ministry of Defense’s complicity in crimes against humanity and genocide in other countries and to stop licenses to export to conflict zones and undemocratic regimes through the Israeli judiciary. the system was also unsuccessful. In fact, we were faced with constant institutional gas lighting.
Judges and state representatives regularly tried to convince us that we were crazy or naive, and that if we were no longer part of a movement against the Israelis, we were being manipulated into knowing that we were part of one. At a hearing on arms shipments for a bloody civil war, a Supreme Court judge asked who funded us and who was actually behind the request; in another, an administrative court judge wanted to clarify that we are not part of the Boycott, Divestment, Penalties movement.
Despite the humiliating and disappointing audience, we continued to make requests because it was a way to express solidarity with Israel’s growing list of surveillance technologies and weapons victims, and we still had little hope that we would eventually succeed. We had our rare victories, for example, when the Ministry of Defense decided to stop all defense exports to Myanmar in late 2017.
But we also had our demoralizing failures. For example, in June, the Supreme Court rejected an application for a license to export Cellebrit’s system to Russia, which was used to hack the mobile phones of activists linked to opposition leader Alexey Navalny. Judges took advantage of this opportunity to block future claims that the Israeli court system has no power to oversee defense export policy.
Without the cooperation of the Knesset and the courts, it has been very difficult or impossible to push for a change in Israel’s internal policy. And that’s why the U.S. Department of Commerce’s decision is so important. It puts the necessary external pressure on the Israeli authorities, who were probably quite surprised by the blacklists.
After all, they are quite accustomed to the US not intervening in defense export policies. Probably the only major clash between the U.S. and Israeli governments over this issue occurred in the late 1990s, when the latter sought to supply a Phalcon surveillance aircraft to China. Eventually an agreement was reached, which banned the supply of certain military equipment made by Israel for Beijing and the US, which required prior authorization for other defense exports.
For all the rest, the U.S. has been mostly closing its eyes. This policy goes back to the Cold War, when successive U.S. administrations were content with Israel doing dirty work in Washington and supplying military technology to murderous dictatorial regimes that suffered U.S. sanctions or aid cuts.
For example, the Israeli government and the Reagan administration made a notorious collaboration in the Iran-Contra affair, which saw secret sales of weapons placed in the Israeli embargo on Iran. Documents declassified in recent years show that senior U.S. officials knew that Israel provided training and weapons shipments to dictatorial regimes, such as the military juntas of Argentina and Chile in the 1970s and 1980s, but did not really try to stop them.
After the end of the Cold War, the U.S. made no sense in Israel’s troubled defense exports, especially in cases where it seemed to serve the interests of China and Russia or various dictators.
One has to wonder why the Clinton administration did not stop sending arms from Israel to Serbian forces in the Bosnian war. Why was Israel allowed to continue providing weapons, surveillance systems and training to the Myanmar army until the full genocide against the Rohingya people begins? Why was Israel able to sell the Cellebrite hacking system to Venezuela, Belarus, Russia and China? And why did Israel continue to arm Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni’s illegal private security unit while his regime clashed with the US and accused his embassy of interfering in local elections?
The big question now is whether the US will stay in the NSO or make a major policy change and move away from Cold War methods and mentality. If the NSO survives the blacklist and Washington does not expand its action against uncontrollable spyware exports, then this would only reinforce the industry’s sense of impunity and the arrogance of the Israeli Defense Ministry, whose workers typically seek to integrate into the intelligence industry after retirement. from public service.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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