US’ NSA Gave Palestinian-American Family Ties to Israeli Military

NSA shared unedited data on Arab Americans’ calls with IDF intel unit

Ex-NSA contractor Snowden told author Bamford that data could enable Israel to target callers’ relatives in Israel and territories.

By Haaretz | Sep. 18, 2014

Ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden told a U.S. author that the agency gave Israel unedited data about Arab Americans’ calls.

By Anshel Pfeffer | Sep. 15, 2014

The U.S. National Security Agency shared unredacted private communications from Americans – particularly Arab-Americans – with a key Israeli military-intelligence unit, an author and professor wrote.

In a New York Times op-ed piece, James Bamford said that he’d met this summer with Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who leaked thousands of classified documents.

Snowden found that the data NSA was passing to Israel’s Unit 8200 included IDs for who was calling whom.

Snowden said that the callers’ relatives in Israel and the territories could become targets based on the data, Bamford wrote in the Tuesday op-ed. When NSA shares information with other countries, it normally removes that identifying data, Bamford wrote.

Unit 8200 is the largest unit in the Israel Defense Forces and one of the military’s most prestigious divisions. It focuses on signals intelligence, or communications eavesdropping.

A week ago 43 former members of Unit 8200, including some officers, wrote an open letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and top military officials, saying they would refuse to do reserve service because of Israel’s `political persecution’ of the Palestinians.

43 Israeli Reserve Soldiers Stand Against IDF and SIGINT

[“A significant part of what the IDF [Israel Defence Forces] does is not the “title” [ie defence]. The “title” of what the IDF does in the occupied territories is ruling another people. One of the things you need to do is defend yourself from them, but you also need to oppress the population. You need to weaken the politics, you need to strengthen and deepen your control of Palestinian society so that the [Israeli] state can remain [there] in the long term … We realised that that’s the job of the intelligence.”: — from the interview with 3 of the “refuseniks”, in the 2nd article posted below. The unity of these “refuseniks” is a rejection of the colonial mission to control all aspects of Palestinian life.  They do not, as a group, object to other aspects of Israel and Israeli military policy and practice.  Nonetheless, their stance is noteworthy, though limited. — Frontlines ed.]

.2014/09/18

Jean Shaoul

Forty-three reserve soldiers and officers in Israel’s prestigious military intelligence gathering unit, Unit 8200, have refused to take any further part in the gathering of information on Palestinian society in the West Bank.
Their stand is the latest expression of the growing opposition within the armed forces to the ongoing repression of the Palestinian people.
Refusal to enlist was once considered unthinkable among Jewish Israeli youth other than among the ultra-orthodox, but now, as one young refusenik, Shaked Harari, explained, they “are not embarrassed that we are refusing. We believe that this declaration can make an ideological change, and it will not happen if we don’t stand behind it and we are not honest with it.”

Unit 8200 is under the control of the Israel Defence Force’s (IDF) Military Intelligence Directorate, whose role is similar to that of the National Security Agency in the United States. It collects signal intelligence (SIGINT), including eavesdropping on telephone calls, text messages, and emails. As the largest part of the IDF, the views expressed must therefore reflect a much wider layer than the number who actually signed the letter.
The unit has acquired an iconic status, in part because as a result of its technical expertise a number of 8200’s alumni have gone on to found or manage some of Israel’s high-tech start-up companies. Its operations are secret and subject to censorship, while the identities of its leading personnel are never revealed.
It is therefore all the more significant that it is the ethical and political character of the Unit’s work and above all its methods that have come to public attention. While a number of pilots, soldiers and officers from combat units faced with the daily task of humiliating and arresting Palestinians—and worse—have refused service, this is the first time that anyone in electronic surveillance has spoken up and refused to enlist.
Jewish Israeli men are required to carry out three years of military service from the age of 18 and then at least a month a year of reserve duty until the age of 40. They typically spend a few weeks each year in active duty. While women are also obliged to do military service, they are not required to serve in combat units, while their service and reservist duties are shorter.
The 43 signatories, collected over a year, to an open letter to Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, chiefs of the IDF and its SIGINT branch stressed that they believed that the information they collected was often used to exert control over innocent Palestinian civilians and to set West Bank residents against each other. At the same time it was an invasion of the privacy of the Palestinian, said the signatories.

Greenwald: NSA Docs Show ‘Israeli Action In Gaza Has US Fingerprints All Over It’

[It’s really quite amazing how supporters of imperialism believe Obama’s statements of outrage and dismay at Israeli genocidal murder of Palestinians, most recently in Gaza.  In fact, the US government has largely paid for and armed the colonial aggression, and the US’ NSA has provided targeting data to the Israeli forces for the aerial attack on Gaza’s people.  So, Obama’s “outrage” notwithstanding, it appears the debate in Washington is about whether the Israelis have not gone far enough, and if they should, right away, again with US funds, arms, and “intelligence,” further aggress toward what Israeli politicians, especially from the Likud Party, are calling the “Final Solution.” —  Frontlines ed.]

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New documents leaked by Edward Snowden show how intellegince cooperation enables repeated Israeli aggression against Palestinians.
By Jon Queally, Common Dreams | August 4, 2014

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, talks with the media on Capitol Hill in Washington. While much of the rest of the world watches the Gaza war in horror and scrambles for a cease-fire, U.S. lawmakers are pressing the Obama administration to take no action that puts pressure on Israel to halt its military operations. Boehner said Monday, July 28, the administration should “stand with Israel, not just as a broker or observer but as a strong partner.”

A new analysis of the intelligence and military relationship between the U.S. and Israeli governments—bolstered by new top secret NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden—exposes the deep complicity of American foreign policy when it comes to enabling Israel’s continued occupation of the Palestinian territories and its ongoing aggressive military assault on the Gaza Strip.

Reported by The Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald on Monday, the new NSA documents show how the U.S. spy agency “has significantly increased the surveillance assistance it provides to its Israeli counterpart, the Israeli SIGINT National Unit (ISNU; also known as Unit 8200), including data used to monitor and target Palestinians.”

According to Greenwald, the “new Snowden documents illustrate a crucial fact: Israeli aggression would be impossible without the constant, lavish support and protection of the U.S. government, which is anything but a neutral, peace-brokering party in these attacks. And the relationship between the NSA and its partners on the one hand, and the Israeli spying agency on the other, is at the center of that enabling.”

Israel: Dissent Among the Enforcers of Ethnic Genocide, but Not Enough

	We Are Israeli Reservists. We Refuse to Serve — A Petition.  By Yael Even Or July 23, 2014 Washington Post To us, the current military operation and the way militarization affects Israeli society are inseparable. In Israel, war is not merely politics by other means — it replaces politics. Israel is no longer able to think about a solution to a political conflict except in terms of physical might; no wonder it is prone to never-ending cycles of mortal violence. And when the cannons fire, no criticism may be heard.
	Israeli cannons fire toward Gaza this week., (Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images),
	Whenever the Israeli army drafts the reserves — which are made up of ex-soldiers — there are dissenters, resisters, and AWOLers among the troops called to war. Now that Israel has sent troops to Gaza again and reserves are being summoned to service, dozens are refusing to take part.

Palestine: Btselem’s end of 2011 video

btselem on Jan 4, 2012

In 2011, volunteers in B’Tselem’s camera project filmed over 500 hours of footage in the West Bank.

There are two minutes we collected from it, in order to sum up the passing year.

Three Wounded in Gaza, Three Arrested in Nablus

21.12.10 – 10:00

The aftermath of an earlier Israeli airstrike on Gaza (PNN Archive) Gaza City – PNN – Israeli air raids on Monday night in Gaza Strip left three wounded, while a predawn incursion into the northern West Bank city of Nablus ended with three Palestinians arrested in the village of Beit Hasan. . In Gaza, local sources said the airstrikes were carried out by F-16 warplanes firing rockets at Palestinians in western Khan Yunes, resulting in two injuries described as “moderate to critical.” A third airstrike occurred in eastern Khan Yunes. All three wounded were taken to al-Nasir Hospital for treatment. Warplanes also bombed the northern Gaza Strip, near Beit Lahiya, and in the southern city of Rafah, targeting tunnel sites. Strikes were also recorded in Gaza City and Beit Jabaliya in the north. Nobody was injured. In related news, a homemade Qassam shell fired from Gaza lightly wounded a 14-year-old girl on Tuesday morning in the city of Ashkelon. The attack is thought to be in retatliation for the Israeli airstrikes. Overnight raids in Nablus targeted the house of Muhammad Salah Abu Zour of the village of Beit Hasan, north of the city. He and his two sons were arrested after troops searched the house and their belongings and left before dawn.

Israel’s New Remote-Controlled Killing Machines

Female soldiers are preferred to operate remote killing devices because of a shortage of male recruits to Israel’s combat units.

By Jonathan Cook

13 July, 2010, Countercurrents.org

Nazareth: It is called Spot and Shoot. Operators sit in front of a TV monitor from which they can control the action with a PlayStation-style joystick.

The aim: to kill terrorists.  Played by: Young women serving in the Israeli army.

Spot and Shoot, as it is called by the Israeli military, may look like a video game but the figures on the screen are real people — Palestinians in Gaza — who can be killed with the press of a button on the joystick.

The female soldiers, located far away in an operations room, are responsible for aiming and firing remote-controlled machine-guns mounted on watch-towers every few hundred metres along an electronic fence that surrounds Gaza.

The system is one of the latest “remote killing” devices developed by Israel’s Rafael armaments company, the former weapons research division of the Israeli army and now a separate governmental firm.