1. The permanent occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip by the State of Israel is the basis for the most sophisticated surveillance industry in the world. NSO Group, founded in 2009, with its Pegasus spying software, is also part of it. NSO co-founder Shalev Hulio was deployed with the Israeli army against the Second Intifada in the West Bank.
2. "The young soldiers, whether they are 18 or 19 years old, are given all the freedom they need to be at the forefront of the digital world in the huge development departments that the military has created." So says Israeli author Ronen Bergman of his several years of research into Israel's digital industry.
3. Israel is the Western world's most sophisticated digital laboratory for fighting insurgencies and killing people who are labelled terrorists by intelligence agencies without a court ruling. Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Apple are constantly buying up startups in Israel, e.g. Anobit, LinX, PrimeSense, SlickLogin, Waze, Annapurna. With 5,000 startups to date, the majority of which have been bought by the US and other Western corporations, Israel has the highest start-up density per capita. The companies are mostly pulled up by ex-officers of the Israeli army, often starting while still in the army. Here they apply their experience in long-range and close-range detection, combat and killing of Palestinians in "civilian" entrepreneurial form. The Israeli servicemen and servicewomen are being coddled as heroes and national elite. The military is the "innovation driver." "Those who serve in one of the well-known elite units bring valuable knowledge with them and not infrequently use it to start their own business a few years later. "
4. The practice of the decades-long occupation regime, which is contrary to international law and human rights, is a training campus of morality-free disruption. "You break things," "You are software Ninjaneers," it lauds. Since the use of remote-controlled killing drones in the First Intifada, Israel's military-industrial-digital complex has been developing ever newer and better technologies to capture all kinds of data associated with people - auditory, visual, linguistic, non-linguistic, colour, haptic, gestalt, motion, interactional, environmental, electronic, digital - and analyze it in an integrated fashion at top speed after target inputs.
5. No economy or media industry in the world is as militarized as Israel's. High school graduation, university exams - in Israel, officer rank is what counts most for positions in the economy.
6. The chip manufacturer Intel was the first company to come out of Silicon Valley four decades ago - when production there was still primarily for the U.S. military. Today, Intel employs 11,000 people in Israel, many of them ex-military. For several years, the five GAMFA giants have been expanding the startups they buy to as many as 1,000 employees and award contracts.
Google maintains its start-up area on the university campus of the Stanford imitative in Tel Aviv. No other state subsidizes digital research and development as heavily as Israel. The products and services are mainly exported to the USA and the EU. Even before Trump had the wall to Mexico extended, the Obama administration obtained Israeli detection and defence technology for thousands of kilometres of the high-tech fence to Mexico, which had already been started under President Clinton.
For example, the cyber warfare software Stuxnet was also jointly developed by the U.S. and Israeli agencies under Microsoft's Windows operating system after Obama's approval. Stuxnet was placed as a destruction worm in the control facility of Iran's Natanz nuclear centre and led to the "self" destruction of the centrifuges.
