Designing in Real-Time: An Introduction to Weapons Design in the Settler-Colonial Present of Palestine

Abstract

Israel is one of the world’s ten biggest exporters of weapons. Its military industry promotes rapid iterative design and real-time testing in the occupied territories as national capabilities ensuring the survival of the state and its status as a laboratory for innovating cutting-edge, battle-proven weapons for the future battlefield. This essay shows how weapons design is deployed in the theaters of military occupation in Palestine. It traces how design practices, national narratives, and ideology are entwined to produce and sustain the world of permanent war in which the Israeli military industry operates. In the process, I show how Israeli designers and design practices inhabit Zionism’s universe of reference and draw on its folk ontologies to produce individual and collective settler subjectivity. My aim is to provide an introductory map to weapons design as a feature of the settler-colonial present of Palestine and emphasize the role of design practice in organizing and shaping the ongoing nature of settler colonization in the age of neoliberal globalization.

Keywords:

• weapons design
• settler colonialism
• ideology
• laboratory
• military industry
• neoliberalism

Notes

1. Quoted in (Landsmann 2016).

2. Former Israeli minister of Industry, Trade and Labor Interviewed in (Feldman 2013).

3. While these anxieties do exist due to the role of the military industry in the economy and the occupation, it is important to remember that Israel is not completely reliant on its own military industry to ensure the survival of the state. The United States provides Israel with a huge military aid package every year to sustain Israeli military operations and upgrade the army’s capabilities. Under Obama’s presidency, the US agreed to provide Israel with US$38 billion in new military aid until 2028 (Keinon 2017).

4. Zionist representations of Jews outside Palestine as “weak” or “deficient” instrumentalize European anti-Semitic typologies to show the significance of the Zionist movement and its role in transforming the “exilic Jew” into a “New Jew” in Palestine. These representations can be found in the works of the “founding fathers of Zionism”, including Max Nordu, Leo Pinsker, Theodor Herzl, and Ze’ev Jabotinsky. For example, Jabotinsky, the founder of the revisionist Zionist Betar movement, wrote that, “of all the goals for which Betar was established, none is more honorable [than] to transform the Jewish people from a flock of battered slaves into a nation that knows the rifle” (Naor 2011, 141).

5. It is worth noting that Israel differentiates between citizens and nationals. As a self-declared “Jewish State,” it confers national rights on Jews – and Jews only – regardless of place of birth. Narratives of state formation and survival exclusively reference the national content of the state as the life to be protected and secured. This exclusivity is based on the “Law of Return” which states that any Jew recognized by Israel can become a citizen of the state (Adalah n.d.). Palestinian refugees, on the other hand, are not allowed their right to return to their land and Palestinians who survived ethnic cleansing and are citizens of the state are subject to a different set of laws than those to which Jewish Israelis are subject. The Legal Center for Minority Rights in Israel provides documents that elaborate on these articles in Israeli basic law. On Citizenship Law, see https://www.adalah.org/en/law/view/536. On Law of Return, see https://www.adalah.org/en/law/view/537.

6. In his translation of excerpts from Grégoire Chamayou’s book Les Corps Vils, Léopold Lambert used “vilization” for the French term “avilissement”; i.e. the creation of vile bodies (Lambert 2015). Avilissement can mean to abase, debase, or degrade, or more generally to lower the value or condition of someone in order to make them available for experimentation. I expand on this concept below.

7. These plans are also intimately tied to the global unmanned weapons market and the demands of maintaining Israeli dominance in this sector. The global military UAV market stood at US$8.5 billion in 2016, and is expected to grow to US$13.7 billion by 2026 (Strategic Defense Intelligence 2016). Israel is also anticipating that ground systems will become a huge market, with IAI forecasting that 70 percent of vehicles in the “battlefield” will be robotic (Ben-Dov and Yariv 2015).

8. The BBC collected the results of all Israeli operations since 2008 in one accessible page where the numbers of Palestinian and Israeli fatalities are available. “Gaza crisis: Toll of operations in Gaza” (BBC 2014). http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28439404

9. In Time in the Shadows, Laleh Khalili (2013) makes a similar argument concerning colonial representations of replacing genocide with regimes of internment and mass incarceration as a humanitarian act. This act of desistance, she notes, also created the conditions of possibility for sustainable war: “What I want to argue is that the tactics of war – whether mass slaughter or carceral techniques – are also the condition of possibility of a politics in the metropolis. If policy makers think that war can be waged more humanely, they may choose to wage war more often. The paradox, of course, is that the carceral regime of counterinsurgency was crafted precisely because mass slaughter as a routine colonial technique of warfare was challenged by anticolonial domestic constituencies, humanitarian monitoring and legislation, and the resistance of the colonized themselves” (Khalili 2013, 7).

10. Quoted in (Gordon 2011, 162).

11. (Salaita 2006, 77–78).

12. American Progress, the 1872 painting by John Gast of Columbia leading techno-civilization westward to realize “Manifest Destiny” is a dominant representation of settler-colonial linearity.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ali H. Musleh

Ali H. Musleh is a PhD student at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. He teaches Political Design and Futuristics in the Department of Political Science at UHM. His research is focused on the automation of settler colonialism in Palestine.[email protected]