1. Laboratories of War:
US-Israeli Collaboration in
‘Asymmetric Warfare’ and
Urban Securitisation
Stephen Graham
Newcastle University

2. • “In America, Palestine and Israel are regarded as local, not
foreign policy, matters.” Edward Said, 2003
• “The security challenges of Israel are the security concerns of
the United States writ small.” Thomas Henriksen , The Israeli
Approach to Irregular Warfare and Implications for the United
States , Joint Special Operations University Report, 2007.
• “The second Intifada and the U.S. global war on terror, though
quite different, both involve asymmetrical warfare that pits
powerful states with powerful militaries against stateless
individuals and groups and non-state organizations in the midst
of dense, urban concentrations of civilian populations.” Lisa
Hajjar Journal of Palestine Studies, 2006

3. ‘Assymmetric,’ ‘low intensity,’ ‘irregular,’ ‘urban,’
‘counterinsurgency’ or ‘fourth generation’ warfare’:
Challenges US Military’s Technophiliac Dreams of
Vertical Omniscience and Control

5. Israel-Palestine Central Exemplar: ‘Gold Standard’
• “An almost dreamy regard for Israel's military acumen” Steve Niver,
2008; “a new ‘strategic cult’” Marwan Bishara
• ‘Pre-emption’; ‘preventative war’; ‘terror’ and insurgency as
existential threat to high-tech western modernity and democracy;
centre on purported challenges of population control, ‘information
operations,’ ‘situational awareness’ and ‘tracking, targeting and
locating’ ‘non-traditional war targets’ within urban and urbanising
contexts telescoping between home and abroad
• “The Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) military actions, have been—and
are—a crucible for methods, procedures, tactics, and techniques for
the United States, which now faces a similarly fanatical foe across
the world in the Global War on Terror. [Israeli experiences] offer
an historical record and a laboratory for tactics and techniques in
waging counter-insurgencies or counterterrorist operations in
America’s post-9/11 circumstances.” Thomas Henriksen, Joint
Special Operations University, 2007

6. ‘Surge’ -- Divide and Rule:
Archipelago Biopolitics
Passage-Point Urbanism
• Check-points “have proven
effective as well as road patrols
in limiting terrorism. Thus a
near-saturation of territory
seems effective,” Thomas
Henriksen, Joint Special
Operations University 2007

8. Joint Exercises and Surveillant-Simulations

10. Jordan Crandall: ‘Armed Vision’:
“Tracking is an anticipatory form of seeing”

11. Urban ‘Situational Awareness’
• “From tennis ball-sized sensors that can
be thrown or shot from sniper’s rifles
into terrorist lairs to wall-breaching
devices for urban combat, gear invented
for Israel’s anti-terror wars in Gaza and
the West Bank are increasingly being put
in the hands of U.S. warfighters in Iraq”
Barbara Opall-Rome, Defense News, 2004
• Include automatic system to locate and
target snipers in cities, the Hunter and
Pioneer drones, new radio systems
designed to overcome urban interference,
and new missiles for armed drones
• Also “Eye Ball R1” system

13. Dronespace
• “Certainly, Israeli [assassination] actions against Palestinian,
Hezbollah, and other terrorist leaders and support infrastructure
since independence constitutes the gold standard for the systematic
conceptual and operational consideration it has received from the
Israeli Government and military and security bodies.” Graham
Turbiville, Joint Special Operations University 2007
• Gaza a model of “Urban Area Domination”: territorial withdrawal
and ‘external control’ through aerial dominance and ‘persistent
surveillance’

14. “Vertical Orientalism”
• “The geography of occupation has thus completed a
90-degree turn: the imaginary ‘orient’ – the exotic
object of colonization –was no longer beyond the
horizon, but now under the vertical tyranny of Western
airborne civilization that remotely managed its most
sophisticated and advanced technological platforms,
sensors and munitions above.”
Eyal Weizman, 2007

15. • “Since 9/11, the US has regarded Israel the model for
managing the War on Terror. As Israel has been
dealing with terrorism on a daily basis since the
Selling the State’s founding in 1948, the country’s entrepreneurs
and scientists have developed proven technology
Security
solutions to address these problems.”
State
• Israel 4th biggest arms and security exporter: IDF
secondary market; cross-investment and ownership;
NASDAQ listing; “match-making” events; inter-state
security agreements; joint training; visits; exchanges;
joint ventures; economic development collaborations

17. Sewcure Border Initiative
• Secure Border Initiative: Elbit
Boeing successful
• The debate over a physical US
border barrier no longer seems
debatable in light of my fresh firsthand experience with the Israeli
border fence solution. Anthony
Kimery Homeland Security Today
February 2008

18. Spatial Political Economies of Military-IndustrialSecurity-Surveillance-Entertainment Complex

19. Shoot to Kill Goes Global
• “Both ‘shoot-to-kill’ policies and behavior pattern
recognition techniques have long been used in Israel,
whose counter-terrorism experts are actively
recruited to train law enforcement and security
personnel worldwide on the implementation of these
policies and techniques.” Irreversible Consequences:
Racial Profiling And Lethal Force In The “War On
Terror” Briefing Paper 2006
• The International Association of
• Chiefs of Police (IACP),
• EG Met’s Operation Kratos (De Menezes)

20. Foucauldian ‘Boomerangs’
“It should never be forgotten that while colonization, with
its techniques and its political and juridical weapons,
obviously transported European models to other
continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on
the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the
apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power. A
whole series of colonial models was brought back to the
West, and the result was that the West could practice
something resembling colonization, or an internal
colonialism, on itself.”
Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended:, 1975-6