The Discursive Construction of Biometric Surveillance in the Israeli Press

Abstract

In 2017, following vigorous public debate, Israel established a centralized biometric database for storing its citizens’ bodily information. This step, according to privacy advocates, signifies a critical phase in the development of Israel as a surveillance society. This study examines coverage of Israel’s biometric project by three leading Israeli newspapers. Drawing on the intersection of media studies and surveillance studies, it employs discourse analysis to understand how the Israeli press constructs this project in various contexts, asking which narratives are promoted and how they coalesce into a consistent story about Israel’s surveillance agenda. The analysis points to two competing sub-discourses – legitimizing and delegitimizing – each of which positions Israel differently, either as a vulnerable victim of external enemies or as an abusive state violating its citizens’ rights. Surprisingly, Israeli coverage is more critical than supportive, offering a strong and challenging criticism of Israel’s surveillance. I suggest two explanations for the difference between the Israeli case and other accounts, which tend to be supportive, poor, and superficial.

Keywords:

• Biometrics
• citizenship
• discourse analysis
• framing
• Israel
• nationality
• surveillance

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This paper draws on my doctoral dissertation, supervised by Dr. Rivka Ribak. I would like to thank Dr. Ribak for her dedicated mentorship and guidance.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

Supplementary material is available for this article at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2018.1468723

Notes

1. Nahon v. Israeli Parliament, 1516/12 Israel High Court of Justice (February 20 2012), p. 2.

2. Discrepancy between the wide range of years and the relatively small sample stems from insignificant coverage during 2002-2007, as illustrated in Figure 1.

3. Typing asterisks before and after a word (e.g. *biometric*) will launch a search for different combinations of the word (e.g. biometrics).

4. For example, to find articles with different inflections of the word “biometric” on Ynet, I typed [site:Ynet.co.il *biometric*].

5. Digger, powered by Ifat – an Israeli commercial company specializing in media analysis – provides access to content published from 2006 on by most Israeli media.

6. This evaluation is based on three components. First, I defined the articles’ overall tone as positive if they were exclusively or mostly supportive, negative if they were entirely or primarily critical, or neutral if they were completely or chiefly informative. Second, I defined the articles’ headlines as positive, negative or neutral, using the same criteria. Third, I defined the op-eds as positive or negative. The general approach above is based on an average of these three components. For detailed charts, see Appendix 2.

7. To avoid complication, the analyzed articles are listed separately in Appendix 1, included as supplemental material. References to the articles are organized as follows: Parentheses with the first letter of the newspaper (I, H, or Y) and the item’s ordinal number. Bold texts are mine.

8. In April 2015, Israeli Minister Naftali Bennett was interviewed by CNN about Iran’s Nuclear Program. During this interview, he read this sentence in Hebrew, explaining that “it’s Passover now, and just a few days ago all Jews read a sentence – ‘in every generation, there’s someone who wants to annihilate the Jewish people,’ the ancient Egyptians and Greeks and Romans, Nazis, and now it’s Iran who explicitly want to eliminate us.”

9. The technical salience is highly evident in the quantitative representation of opponents versus advocates. A simple headcount suggests that professional opponents (62) outnumber professional advocates (20), that elected official opponents (76) outnumber elected official advocates (30), and opponents of organizations or institutions (40) outnumber their advocates (6).