Basem Khandakji
Middle East Monitor / May 25, 2023
An Amnesty International report published this month revealed details of the latest systems used by the Zionist state to enhance its comprehensive monitoring of occupied Palestine and its people, who are subject to the surveillance, control and punishment of this fascist security regime. The report noted that the Israeli security services are using high-tech surveillance systems through their military checkpoints across the occupied Palestinian West Bank; the systems are called Red Wolf, Blue Wolf and Wolf Pack.
Red Wolf is the newest system and is used by the Zionist colonial troops specifically in the city of Hebron. The system works by scanning Palestinians’ faces as they pass through the discriminatory security checkpoints with neither their knowledge nor consent.
The Zionist state’s security databases must be loaded with the Palestinians’ biometric data, as they are the targets of the system. This is done by providing each colonial checkpoint with more than 15,000 images capable of performing face recognition on everyone who passes through or is detained there.
The Blue Wolf system is an electronic application installed by the Zionist soldiers on their smart phones, which guarantees the photographing and monitoring of all Palestinians passing through the checkpoints, including children and the elderly. This photo data helps to update the security database used by the colonial Israeli security system to persecute and pursue Palestinians.
The Wolf Pack relies primarily on the information and data provided by both the Red Wolf and Blue Wolf systems to build the largest database possible of most of the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. In doing so, the Zionist security system uses the latest and most accurate surveillance technology in the world.
All of this demonstrates the extent of Israel’s obsession with turning the Palestinians into mere data and numbers. The objective is to strip away the emotions, morality and humanity of the oppressed Palestinian people, but in doing so it also removes all three from the inhuman Israeli oppressors. Stripping them of these characteristics is intended to ease the surveillance, persecution, marginalization and confiscation process established by the Zionist colonial apartheid system. Using these electronic wolves de-humanizes the Palestinians in the eyes of the oppressors and makes it easier to persecute and, when deemed necessary, kill them. This creates some distance between Israeli tyranny on the ground and the façade of the state’s supposedly moral stance and conscience, in a way that guarantees that the oppression and exclusion can continue.
In short, the electronic wolves act as a proxy free of consciousness, rationality or morality so that the survivors of Nazism and their descendants are not filled with guilt about pursuing the Palestinians and liquidating them. The settler-colonial state promotes this illusion of moral distance with its encyclopedic collection of gaunt images of the persecuted Palestinian people. Unwittingly, the Zionists behind the use of this technology are actually filling their soldiers’ minds with subconscious reminders that they are terrorizing the Palestinians.
Basem Khandakji is a Palestinian writer, journalist, and former political prisoner
