Israel's "New Economy" and the Intifada: A note on the boycott campaign [part 2]
21/04/2002
by Naxos
This article is Copyleft [see below]
6. A medieval model
The history of intellectual and scientific development of the medieval West cannot be written without acknowledging the key contribution of the Jewish intellectual diaspora in Andalus, Provence and elsewhere. The Ibn Tibbon family, with their translations of Greek scientific texts mediated through the Arabs, and the school of Jewish mathematicians, c.1250-1350. Their contribtion the productive and military techniques and technologies of their time was immense. The Prophatian Quadrant (a remodelling of the complex Arab astrolabe onto a device that was simply a piece of card and a bit of string) is one example, as theorised by Jakob ben Mahir Ibn Tibbon. [Note 20]
There are tantalising parallels with the globalised diasporic intelligentsia of today. One observer has suggested that the medieval Jews, with the daily realities of comercial life in the diaspora, were in a real sense the precursors of globalisation. As I suggest above, the Israeli capitalism of today - the extent of its global reach, the deterritorialised space in which it operates and the merceological nature of the commodities it produces - offers a precious microcosmic possibility for the study of immaterial labour in action within globalisation.
7. Visionics Inc - Biometrics as a growth sector
The unexpected domestic vulnerabiliy of the US revealed by September 11 mant that fast responses were needed at the level of security. Paranoia, xenophobia and the fear of dying provided a massive market opportunity. The Airport Security Improvement Act (2001) was passed, requiring a dramatic upgrading of security systems. Into the picture steps Visionics Inc. This company produces face-recognition and fingerprint recognition equipment, based on the new science of "biometrics".
The chairman of Visionics Inc., Joseph Atick, lived in Israel (on the West Bank) till he was 15. He dropped out of high-school and set about writing a large textbook on physics - in Arabic. He was accepted into the Maths programme of Stanford University in the US. And moved on from there to become professor at the Rockefeller University. The elements of diaspora, movement, Arabic, mathematics, university, radical conceptual innovation leading to new technologies are strikingly reminiscent of the medieval predecessors. [Note 21]
Here science and mathematics are used to generate a police-state technology. The software and technology involved in these products have a strongly Israeli dimension. Biometrics is one of the fields being explored by Israeli software companies, and these in turn have a symbiotic relation with the Israeli military. One of the earliest uses of Visionics face recognition technology was to monitor the faces of commuting Palestinian day labourers at Israeli army checkpoints.
An article describing this Israeli-American productive node as it operates in Minnesota speaks of "high-tech companies joining in a mad dash to develop and market a dazzling new generation of security devices". It is worth noting the extent, the depth of intellectual labour that has gone into this venture. We are just now at the point where our entire picture of the physical composition of the universe is being revised way from particles to superstrings. This is frontier science. Atick's work on biometrics and facial recognition derives precisely from his earlier work as a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, where he researched superstrings and the related theories of supersymmetry. [Note 22]
8. Loosening up the lumbering monster
I referred above to the success of Israeli companies in the "increased growth in the demand for bandwidth in every aspect of communications". Characteristically, the boom new-technology economy has internal problems created by the very speed of its growth. A large, lumbering monster creates for itself blockages and restrictions which need to be overcome. This has proved a characteristic area of intervention by small Israeli start-up companies monitoring and removing problems of blockages of delivery, bottlenecks, restrictions of bandwidth etc. Speeding up the flow of information-as-capital. The following is a small list of such ventures:
Foxcom Wireless: Makes an RFiber optic-fibre product, which enables wireless technologies to operate in hard-to-reach urban and shadow areas such as railway stations, tunnels etc.
Chiaro Networks: Uses the scalability of optic fibre to remove capacity bottlenecks from intersections of optical carrier backbones. Unique optical switching technology. These expand the availability of bandwidth.
Xact Technologies: of Ramat Gan and Santa Clara: "A Santa Clara start-up" which monitors Internet customers' usage of the network on the basis of how much bandwidth they use. Like estimating a gas bill. The crucial aspect of Xact software is that it enables Internet usage to be monetised.
Mavix: Produces a multimedia streaming system for monitoring and security. It routes all security inputs into one control unit. Can be used for surveillance of football stadiums, metros, ferries, prisons etc.
Mercado Software: A product entitled Intuifind which adds more refined searchability to e-commerce search engines. Integrated search and browse facilities.
Sapiens International: Specialises in programmes that gather discrete packets of information and shuttle them around at speed. For instance, remediation of insurance quotation systems, where installation of new systems would be hugely expensive. Operates via internetted cyberspace conferencing for its global marketing. [Note 23]
9. Biomedical production
As we know, the concept of immaterial labour extends far into the fields of the caring and the corporal, and here too Israeli companies have made major interventions. This development is driven in part by commercial spin-out interests of teaching-hospitals in Israel, and in part by the excesses of medical skilled labour-power in-migrating from the Soviet Union in the 1990s. [Note 24]
"The evolution of new medical device companies in Israel continues its unabated growth, spurred by the influx of highly trained immigrants in the physical, biological and engineering sciences, and expanding sources of capital from venture firms in Israel and the US, as well as from corporate strategic partners." [Note 25]
This growth is so marked that the multinational pharmaceutical giant Johnson and Johnson maintains a permanent office in Israel to search for start-up companies in which to invest. The following is a small list of such ventures. As is the case with the companies cited above, most of these companies have one foot in Israel and the other in the USA, clearly catering to the massively emerging US market for health products.
Applied Spectral Imaging: Techniques for treating retinal eye diseases that otherwise might lead to blindness.
Biocontrol: An electronic device to control urinary incontinence.
Vision Cure: Implantable telescopic lenses for treatment of macular degeneration.
Or Sense: A non-invesive technology to measure cholesterol levels and blood viscosity.
Novamed: Clinical diagnostic tests.
Transdermics: Through-the-skin non-invasive drug delivery technology.
Advanced Monitoring Systems: Home-use salival testing techniques, to monitor safe levels of drug administration.
It is important to stress that in no sense are these "caring and sharing" technologies separate from the military industrial complex outlined above. For instance:
Given Imaging has delivered a pill-sized capsule for transmitting pictures as it passes through the patient's intestine. This is a spin-off from a CMOS device developed by NASA.
Galil Medical: Cryosurgery techniques which enable minimally invasive treatment of prostate cancers. This is an outgrowth of the Rafael Development Corporation, the largest R&D organisation in Israel, which seeks commercial applications of defence technologies.
We should also be in no doubt about the radicality of some of these interventions. They will affect our lives fundamentally. For instance, I have spoken of Israeli start-up projects involving the monitoring and resolution of problems of blockage and delivery. In this vein, Labour Control Systems of Nesher, Israel, has produced a vaginal electronic monitor which will reduce the need for frequent examination of dilation during child-birth. Such a process is likely to contribute immensely to the ongoing factoryisation of the birth process.
10. Back to the start
In a moment it will be time to return to Oxford Street, December 2001.
But first we should look at the case of one of the most famous Israeli new-technology start-ups. Mirabilis, founded by "legendary high-tech entrepreneur Yassi Vardi" produced an internet messaging system which identifies which of your Internet correspondents are on-line at any given time, and enables you to exchange messages with them. [Note 26] I imagine that this is a direct spin-off of Israeli electronic battlefield technology. The product was known as ICQ ("I-seek-you"). In a very short time Mirabilis built a community of users of over 50 million, covering most of Western Europe. In 1998 Mirabilis was bought by AOL.com, and the system became an industry standard in messaging technology. It is now part of the operating system of AOL, the world's biggest Internet, e-mail and chatroom operator.
The most notable political characteristic of this Israeli export-product is that it disappears, it becomes invisible, it becomes grafted into the very flesh and bone of the operating systems of today's capitalism. In short, it is more or less immune from being boycotted. And that characteristic is shared by many of the products described above.
Which brings us to Mercado Software, a company with Israeli roots and a Palo Alto headquarters. Mercado produces the Intuifind software system. This product is the outcome of advanced studies in psycholinguistics combined with new search-engine technologies. In provides an "intuitive and easy to navigate on-line shopping experience". Put briefly, on-line shopping is developing very fast. But the systems are stupid, monolithic and lumbering. A shop's catalogue may have many "lamps" in store, but if you search on-line for a "light" you will get no result. Therefore, teaming up with technology from Backweb.com (Ramat Gan and San Jose), Intuifind has built a system "utilising more that 50 powerful linguistic knowledge banks, including stemming, spelling and thesauri, which help customers define requests in their own words." A truly immaterial labour product. This system has been installed at Macy's, Caterpillar, Sears, Blockbuster Video etc.
And now the irony. At the same moment that the Palestine Solidarity Campaign was picketing Selfridges Store against the sale of Israeli goods, at the other end of Oxford Street the John Lewis store (much frequented by Britain's liberal middle classes) was installing a new Israeli export product - Mercado's "Intuifind" search-and-shop technology - as a central part of its operating system. Grafted, invisible, immune to boycott.
11. A note on Jaffa Oranges
To end, I would merely add that many people in the Internet community have had the experience of using the opportunites for anonymity which the Internet affords. Israeli capitalist companies are no exception. They begin their life as small locally-based Israeli start-ups. In no time at all they set up their websites. They provide themselves with a nominal HQ in the leafier high-tech glades of the USA and UK. They market their produce on-line, often by offering on-line cyberspace teleconferencing facilities which transcend national border problems. Then, very quickly, these companies merge, blend, are bought up by bigger non-Israeli companies. There is a tendency to conceal their "Israeli-ness", which anyway becomes effaced in the merger process. Thus they become a neutral capitalist product, free of the taint of association with the country in which they were produced.
Incidentally, those among us who are boycotters of Jaffa oranges might note the following. On 27 December 2001 the Jerusalem Post reported that the Chinese government is negotiating "to market its own fruit under the Jaffa brand name and purchase the rights" from the Israeli Citrus Marketing Board. Jaffa is now playing the logo-game. So it could turn out to be a Chinese orange that you are boycotting. [Note 27]
NOTES
20. http://www.astrolabes.QUADRANT.HTM
21. International Herald Tribune, 23 January 2002.
22. Superstrings - http://www.sciam.com
23. Other Israeli high-tech companies which can be search-researched via the Internet include Opticom (integration of biometric technology), Shonut - Probabilistic Solutions Ltd (voice recognition, fingerprint analysis), TeKey (biometrics and human recognition simulation), Tadiran Co. ("over 40 years experience in military communications technology"), Proneuron, Net2Wireless, Batm Advanced Communications, Luz Industries, Mercury Interactive, Team Computers, and SAFe-Mail..
The strength of the Israelo-American diasporic nexus in military-security technologies can be gauged from the following. On 27 November 2001, BIO-key International (formerly the Israeli company SAC Technologies, optical fingerprint scanning, founded 1993) announced from its US headquarters in Minnesota that it was taking on former prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu as its Senior Strategy Advisor. "The current addition [sic] of his book "Fighting Terrorism" is a terrific example of the insights he possesses to combat terrorism and secure freedom for us all". Article at http://biz.yahoo.com/bw011127/272262_l.html.
24. See Note 10 above.
25. Jeffrey Berg, in The BBI (Biomedical Business International) Newsletter, September 2000.
26. Article at http://www.malibutel.com/mobilemediaworld/features/israeli.html. The AOL buy-out of Mirabilis was "an event which spurred Israel's high-tech frenzy".
27. Jerusalem Post Internet edition, 27 December 2001.
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