Documentary | Automated Racial segregation: Walking through the smart city of Hebron

 

Racial segregation: Walking through the smart city of Hebron

A silent sentinel watches over every corner of the bustling streets of Hebron, the largest city in the West Bank, where the ancient echoes of history collide with the modern hum of daily life. This sentinel is not a person but a network of surveillance technology known ominously as the “Smart City of Hebron.” Designed by Israeli authorities, this system covers the city with a network of cameras, sensors and even automatic weapons, tracking every movement of its Palestinian residents.

“The Palestinians of Hebron are the most survived people on the planet,” explains journalist and activist Mnar Adley, highlighting the omnipresence of cameras and facial scanning technologies. Adley says the area, also known as al-Khalil by Palestinians, has become a testing ground for Israel's surveillance apparatus, with advanced technologies such as the "Wolf Pack" surveillance system in operation. This system collects large amounts of data on Palestinians, including their personal details and movements, creating an atmosphere of constant surveillance.

Izzat Karake, a member of Youth Against Settlements, echoes this sentiment and points out the discomfort caused by constant surveillance. "Everywhere I go as a Palestinian, I can see cameras," he told MintPress as he pointed out dozens of Israeli military cameras lining the streets. "We are constantly under surveillance."

 

  Hebron Smart City, Adley explains, is more than just a collection of cameras and sensors; It is a symbol of Israel's tireless efforts to control all aspects of Palestinian life. Facial scanning cameras, known as Red Wolf, line every street and their unblinking gaze captures the faces of every passerby without her consent. These images are then entered into Israel's Wolf Pack database, a vast repository of information about Palestinians, which can be accessed through a mobile app, allowing them to track and monitor people with ease.

  Amnesty International has condemned this mass surveillance project, denouncing it as “automated apartheid” in a scathing report. They argue that the system reinforces existing practices of discrimination and segregation, further eroding the rights of Palestinians in Hebron at the hands of Israeli authorities, who the rights group says have “a history of discriminatory and inhumane acts that maintain a system of apartheid.” . “Israeli authorities may use facial recognition software – particularly at checkpoints – to consolidate existing police practices of discrimination, segregation and restriction of freedom of movement, violating the basic rights of Palestinians,” the report concludes. 

 This invasive surveillance technology that targets and monitors Palestinians aggravates an already existing segregated system of apartheid in Hebron, where the city has been divided into two zones, H1 and H2. These two segments of Hebron are separated by a militarized checkpoint that allows the maintenance and expansion of an illegal Israeli settlement right in the middle of the Tel Rumeida neighbourhood overlooking the Palestinian city market.                                                 

This is where Youth Against Settlements was born after a Palestinian building that was initially occupied first by the Israeli army and then by Israeli settlers was reclaimed for Palestinian use through non-violent direct action and a legal campaign. Tel Rumeida, once a bustling Palestinian neighbourhood, is now home to more than 700 illegal Israeli settlers, heavily armed and protected by the army. The main street, formerly known as Shuhada Street, has been renamed “Chicago Street” by Israeli authorities in an attempt to erase Palestinian heritage.

Every year, Izzat and his Youth Against Settlements colleagues hold an annual march called the Open Shuhada Street Campaign that draws international attention to the illegal siege of the city. Israel has not only occupied and fragmented this neighbourhood to make room for Israeli settlers, it is altering this area to Judaize the neighbourhood, which means planning to expand its colonization of the area to ethnically cleanse and displace Palestinians out of here, to that Israeli settlers can take control. This military strategy is used to protect, expand and connect other nearby Jewish settlements in Israel's quest to secure an ethno-Jewish state.

Hebron has seen some of the most violent settler attacks against Palestinians, especially after the Hamas surprise attack and Israel's subsequent attack on Gaza. In many cases, armed settlers are escorted and protected by Israeli soldiers. Barbed wire covers Palestinian homes that are fenced off to protect them from attacks and harassment by Israeli settlers. But the intimidation doesn't end there.

 

A smart AI shooter sits atop a checkpoint on Shuhada Street, aiming directly at the Hebron market, where thousands of Palestinians pass through each day. Israel installed the remote-controlled automatic turret weapon in 2022. According to the Israeli army spokesperson, the AI smart shooter “is used as a dispersal measure” as part of the army's enhanced preparations to confront disruptions. order. However, the introduction of artificial intelligence technology, such as the smart shooter, has only increased tensions in the city. Residents walk through their own neighbourhoods with a sense of unease, knowing that they are always under surveillance.

Just as Gaza has become a laboratory and showroom for Israel's "battle-tested" weapons, the success of facial recognition technology and Hebron's Smart City database via Wolf Pack to track to the Palestinians will be used so that Israel continues to benefit from its illegal army. occupation of Palestine and surveillance of Palestinian civilians.

This “automated apartheid” only further segregates Palestinians and expands the apartheid system and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Israel.

 

 Mnar Adley is an award-winning journalist and editor and founder and director of MintPress News. She is also president and director of the nonprofit media organization Behind the Headlines. Adley also co-hosts the MintCast podcast and is a producer and host of the Behind The Headlines video series. Contact Mnar at mnar@mintpressnews.com or follow her on Twitter at @mnarmuh.

Milei and political degradation

                           Milei and political degradation
Atilio Boron: The exponential increase in so-called social networks has favoured the emergence of deeply "antisocial" behaviour. Their objective is to manipulate public opinion

These are communication devices that promote individualism, isolation and, based on the ease with which anonymity can be used, create the conditions for the proliferation of fake news and virulent messages of hate, in most cases politically. motivated.

Various studies indicate that at the beginning of 2024 there were 5,037 million internet users around the world. Facebook was at the top of the list with 3,049 million, followed by YouTube with 2,491, while WhatsApp and Instagram had 2,000 million, TikTok 1,362 and WeChat, WhatsApp's Chinese competitor, 1,336. The X network, formerly Twitter, was much lower in the ranking due to the loss of users resulting from its acquisition by tycoon Elon Musk.

According to some estimates, the total number of users listed above would be equivalent to 62.3% of the planet's population, but this conclusion must be seriously challenged if one takes into account that many individual users usually register with several profiles on the same network and if In addition, the large number of "troll farms" that spuriously multiply the number of users are taken into account. These have acquired extraordinary importance in recent times and there are millions of them around the world, each of which manages tens of thousands of profiles of people who do not exist in reality. Its objective is to manipulate public opinion, or influence certain very specific targets within it identified by algorithms as sectors very prone to favourable reception of certain types of messages.

For example, homophobic, racist, supremacist, sexist, xenophobic users, but also others open to receiving radical messages, from the left or the right. The list would be endless and the increasingly specific and socially restricted targeting process has metastasized throughout the globe.

Because of this, troll farms are a huge factory for the automated production and dissemination of fake news, hate messages, attacks on public figures and exaltation of others, and the installation of an agenda invariably manipulated by dominant groups. The objective is to tilt public opinion in the desired direction, creating distracting controversies, demonizing certain political or social leaders, including their organizations, and seeking to influence the population on the eve of an electoral process. The data that arise from the analysis of different countries confirms the effectiveness of these devices.                                                                                                                                                                    

                                                                                                                                                     The anonymity and almost total impunity that is inherent to this type of activities, which seriously calls into question the functioning of democratic regimes, facilitated the rise to the surface of the discourses of the extreme right, in some cases openly Neo-Nazi, which in The past circulated in the deepest subsoil's of our societies, but without appearing publicly for fear of social sanction. Today that has ended and proposals or vituperation's once judged as "antisocial", "immoral", "fascist" or "Nazi" circulate widely on social networks. All this unfortunate perversion of communication is favoured by the proven rapid trivialization of fake news or hate messages, something that occurred much more slowly in the "Gutenberg galaxy", the phase prior to the advent of the "digital age." With an aggravating factor: a study carried out at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has revealed that fake news is more believed than true news, and that it travels faster on the Internet.

The reverse of this dangerous reality is also disturbing because the credibility enjoyed by traditional media has declined dramatically in recent decades. Measurements carried out through surveys indicate that in 2023 only 33% of Argentines trusted the media, a figure equal to that of Japan and even a little higher than the 31% in Great Britain. And in the US this figure improved, but a little: 39%. Conclusion: fake news circulates in inverse proportion to the credibility of traditional media, and their credibility is clearly declining, especially in the West.

Speech by the Argentine president at the Liberty Foundation, on April 24.

Rude show

One of the most worrying consequences of these phenomena that the digital age has brought us has been the naturalization of hate speech and the acceptance of cruelty as a normal form of social interaction. This is clearly perceived in a case of exceptional significance, due to the position held by the person who engages in such conduct: President Javier Milei. Indeed, this character has used and abused offensive and rude expressions, typical of a "dirty mouth" to insult and disqualify his critics. The vulgarity that he has exhibited in numerous official events, and before foreign dignitaries - such as José María Aznar and the current president of Uruguay Luis Lacalle Pou - in his recent intervention at the dinner of the Libertarian Foundation, a 'lobby' sponsored and financed by money Americans, speaks of the extremes to which the degradation of politics can reach in the hands of leaders who owe their ephemeral primacy to social networks.

On that occasion Milei once again forgot that he is the president of the Argentines, an forgetfulness that is unfortunately now a constant, and he starred in a pathetic stand-up full of rudeness, bad taste jokes and defamatory imitations of public figures. All this lamentable spectacle, which shames us before the world, is combined with the sadistic pleasure that he expresses when he refers to the cuts in "social expenses" caused by his "chainsaw", in a behaviour that speaks of a pathological insensitivity relative to the consequences of their actions that generate poverty, hunger and death.

How to explain such cruelty? Answer: Milei does not live in this world, but like every prophet, fueled by insatiable fanaticism, he lives in his perverse microcosm armored with seven sheets of steel and where the suffering and cries of pain that his decisions as president cause do not penetrate. to millions of Argentines. His followers, who for now are many on social networks, would seem to conform to a sharp observation by the Spanish essayist Basilio Baltasar when he said that "the model citizen of the globe sphere - the one who has mostly supported Milei until now - is a gullible and naive, helpless and rewarded with baits and placebos, hypnotic and addictive. The citizen of the globe sphere was once a human being and now he is a doll. "Poor bastard."

Let us trust that this involution is not irreversible and that what Engels stated when he attributed to work the decisive role in the transformation of the ape into man, will not be denied by the globe that returns men and women to their simian origins. It is to be hoped that the doll, beaten and impoverished by the ruthless logic of the markets, will sooner rather than later recover its humanity and its will to build a better world.

Milei's case is an unprecedented loss that in other times would have been nothing more than an extravagant curiosity on television panels. But if he arrived at the Casa Rosada it is because the thin stratum of Argentine super millionaires and the largest national and foreign companies, in addition to the US Government, detected in his character, more than in his person, the skilful demagogue of the extreme right. , a pure-blooded fascist and  McCarthyism, whose brutal gestures and fiery words would capture the will of an electorate impoverished by the last governments and would immensely favour their interests.

When the sale, auction or free delivery of the country and its riches has been consolidated, it will be these stupefied and uncomfortable applauders at the aforementioned dinner who will be in charge of pointing out the exit door and dismissing the Anarcho-Capitalist troglodyte without further contemplation. Even by force.