                                ISRAELI TECHNOLOGY

    Thu Apr 11 12:15:10  2002

                       TWO WHEELS GOOD

    Palestinians are barred from basic rights in their own land by
Israel. These rights include the rights to participate in arts and
sciences, as well as dangerous sports such as hangliding, riding fast
motorbikes on open roads and mountaineering. These latter dangerous
sports could provide the Israelis a respite from suicide bombing ! In
the UK it's a regular ritual for young people to crash into stone walls
on the Isle of Man (TT races) or the Buxton-Leek road in the Peak
District. If the young people of Palestine had the affluence to engage
in these sports then we would see that the influence of the extremists
would be diminished.

                            BOYCOTT ISRAELI GOODS

    People in Sheffield can do very little to influence events in the
Middle East. Support networks are easily disrupted by visa requirements
and national frontiers. Propaganda networks flourish, because many
media owners are in a position to influence governments (when they are
not actually running them, as in the case of Berlusconi, the Italian
strong man).

    Boycotting a few specialist foods and beauty products will not help
the Palestinians so much. In the case of Marks & Sparks, many of their
goods are undoubtedly made in Third World sweatshops, under contract,
and are probably exectly the same as goods bought under other labels.

                        BOYCOTT ISRAELI SERVICES

    There is one sector of the Israeli economy which has global
importance. This is essentially crime and security. Crime goes with
specialist skills honed up for military communications. Israel can get
the best computer scientists in the world to work there. These people
come from the USA, the former USSR and even China. Right since the dawn
of the personal computer era the Israelis have lead the world in
localisation, or writing software compatible with the local language.
Their military attaches were out there with the Swiss, selling military
encryption devices to Third World states. The military attaches have
also been selling coercion expertise to Third World dictators and NGOs
such as drug cartels.

    Defence requirements, and a mistrust of the USA has lead the
Israelis to subsidise military aircraft production and a nuclear
weapons program. Despite the horrendous consequences it's undoubtedly
more interesting to work in a nuclear weapons lab than McDonalds.

    Hurting the science base of the Israeli economy is now under
discussion. One proposed method is an academic boycott: people refuse
to invite Israeli guests to conferences, and cancel bookings for
conferences in Israel. Personally I am against this, unless Israeli
academics show that they want this. There are other methods that can be
tried.

                       THE NDS LINK

    NDS [1] is a company controlled by Rupert Murdoch's News
Corporation. It started life as News Datacom, with offices in Haifa.
Canal-Plus, a French TV company has accused NDS of leaking the
information on how to build clones of the smart cards used and marketed
by Canal Plus. Vivendi a French media group ia the owner of Canal Plus.

    The Haifa offices of NDS must have been important for distributing
grey market technology: controlled leaks of smartcard technology is a
good way of circumventing accounting laws and suchlike. The Sky Network
has at least 27 million subscribers, and the smartcards are almost like
a licence to print money.

    Data encryption is the technology for the paranoid. The history of
ciphers has its episodes of defeat and death as in the case of Mary
Queen of Scots, or abject failure in cases such as the Zimmerman
Telegram or the Enigma Machine. It's much better to try and live in a
world where everyone can be honest without fearing for their lives.

    Encryption is routinely used by large organisations who often have
best access to telecommunications infrastructure. Governments only
really got worried about this when personal encryption became a
possibility.

                          KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY

    Israelis are destroying Cybercafes in Palestine. This wanton
vandalism seeks to undermine any progressive attempts to modernise what
is in many respects a conservative and patriarchal society. Before the
physical destruction were decades of humiliation and closures of
Palestinian Universities. It's like the low wage ghetto workers in
Schindlers List with only one difference: the American's were not on
Hitler's side back in 1944.

    They expect Palestinians to be grateful for taking low paid low
skilled jobs for most of their lives, and then they can dodge the
shells and bullets when out shopping.

    The Israelis in the meantime boost their knowledge based economy
where the rich live in fortified compounds and send their children to
school in armourplated buses. Israel is an extreme example of a place
where one population limits access to education for its competitors.
Bearded men who feared women did the same in Taliban controlled
Afghanistan.

                        KNOWLEDGE WAR

    It is alleged that The NDS offices in Haifa embarked on an extensive
reverse engineering task to unveil the secrets of the Canal-Plus
decoder. After working out the technical details the instructions on
how to clone these decoders was released on a California website. Abe
Peled the chief executive of NDS denies any wrongdoing. He can remain
quite happy. The technology of secrecy will always have its financial
backers.

    Data massage and encryption are the stuff of everyday life. Parents
want to keep sex secret from their children so they want controls on
the TV or computer. The rich and powerful generally want to control how
other people see them, so they exert influence on all of our mass
media.

    Many of the rich and powerful in Europe were happy enough to make
money out of the Milosevich regime. When the cashh strapped regime
privatised the phone system there were many beneficiaries in the EU.

                               ALL LIES

    Controlled TV is a speciality of the British. Rather than opening
our market to continental TV channels, like the Dutch and Belgians do,
the cable companies here sell English language output for the most
part. Sky News is a major provider here. All news programs concentrate
on a terribly limited agenda, with stories of footballers and
supermodels regularly taking priority over stories such as the Central
Asian famine, or even the miserably unsuccessful efforts of western
backed paramilitary squads to eliminate opium production in the same
area.

    In terms of profitable media coverage a broken bone in a football
player's foot is worth a hundred dead Palestinians, or a thousand dead
Afghans. And the death of an old lady who liked booze & betting stops
the whole nation!

                        ROGUE STATE

    Zionism combines features of communism and fascism. The Israeli
kibbutzim are successful versions of collectives where socialism almost
works, while the labour movement, which includes many veterans of wars,
is the body of the Israel-Industries corporate state. The ideas of this
type of corporate state with its acompanying underclass have had great
success in recent political philosophy. Enthusiastic devotees include
sections of New Labour in Britain, and sections of the BJP in India.

    Many sometime socialists are attracted to the ideas of social
cohesion and communitarianism espoused by Israeli pundits inter alia.

Israel's determination to go it alone, and proceed boldly down a path
which leads to hostility are widely admired in many parts of the world.
The Serbs certainly rated their troubles since 1389 as something
comparable to the troubles of the Jews, and pointed out that they had
been victims of terrible oppression until they could control vast
police and paramilitary forces to defend what turned out to be a
diminishing nation.

    Iraq's leader Saddam, will deaw much comfort from the elected leader
of Israel. For those who claim that democracy doesn't work the present
leadership of Israel is a killing counter arguement. It's about as bad
as saying that democracy doesn't work because the Germans elected
Hitler in 1933.


    References:
    [1] How codebreakers cracked the secrets of the smart card.
    John Casey & Paul Murphey.
    Guardian, 13/03/2002















