One sanction on Israel
What to make of the US blacklisting NSO for its spyware
The US government has sanctioned one Israeli business and will impose further sanctions on all entities doing business with it. The sanction is not therefore specifically against Israel, but against NSO; the now-infamous manufacturer of the Pegasus malware best-known for helping Saudi Arabia track and then murder the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. A US court has dismissed NSO appeals that it should be protected by the principle of sovereign immunity.
Since its rise to international attention in the killing of Khashoggi, NSO has been busy. Its software has been used by Madrid to track Catalans in Spain; in Rabat to track dissidents and human rights observers, particularly those involved with Western Sahara, where the Moroccan government mines lucrative minerals but keeps local communities under militarised, impoverished conditions; it has been used in Budapest where Viktor Orban has waged what is modern Europe’s fiercest campaign against Hungarian media and civil society. Saudi allies also made use of the spyware, with Sheikh Mohammed al Maktoum employing it to hack the phone of his ex-wife, and also daughters the Dubai ruler has previously abducted. Israel itself is thought to have used NSO products to spy on European political figures including Emmanuel Macron, while its license to Saudi Arabia enabled spying on Turkish journalists as well as Jamal Khashoggi.
The sanctioning of NSO is doubtless late in coming, but it is still welcome. The extension of the sanction to all those who do business with NSO is also welcome, and has had the effect of putting NSO at risk of defaulting on its debts (to what extent the Israeli state would step-in to support this now-crucial part of its surveillance apparatus is uncertain but not impossible).
For those campaigning on Palestine, or for wider justice and democracy in West Asia, the designation is of course welcome for a number of reasons, but it should nonetheless be viewed in a broader context.
What the designation is
The first valuable lesson is that it is in fact possible to have sanctions placed on an Israeli entity. This should give encouragement to those who campaign, specifically on Palestine, for an end to sales to the West Jerusalem government that uphold its military apartheid across Palestine.
The UK manufacturer of plant machinery, JCB, should not be selling diggers and other vehicles to Israel in full knowledge of the fact that they will be used to demolish homes and such essential infrastructure as water sources in the South Hebron hills; a Palestinian region facing mounting violence from settlers and associated groups of Jewish supremacists.
Heidelberg Cement should not be working with Israel to help construct infrastructure or residential units for settlers whose presence on annexed territory is itself illegal, and who are violently displacing Palestinians from their own lands. The UK should not be selling bullets and other weapons to help the Israeli army maim and kill hundreds of Palestinians a year - whether they be protesting or simply driving to a wedding. Washington should not be increasing by a billion dollars its budget to pay for Israel’s ‘Iron Dome’ missile system; effectively an insurance policy that allows Israel to besiege Palestinians, particularly in Gaza, while sidelining diplomacy and political solutions known to be the only thing that will bring peace to Palestine/Israel.
There are countless more policies to put a stop to, and entities that could and should be sanctioned for doing business with and in Israel, but to see NSO placed under sanctions is at least a start, and valuable evidence that sanctions of an Israeli entity are not impossible. The UN has listed more than a hundred further companies complicit in illegal and violent Israeli policy in Palestine.
What the designation isn’t
While the NSO designation is good, some issues are worth clarifying.
Firstly, the victims of NSO who have aroused most concern - despite NSO’s surveillance software being tested-on and developed using Palestinian targets - are not Palestinian. Put better, Israel has not been reprimanded for spying-on, or brutalising, Palestinians so much as for helping authoritarians spy on a US resident who wound-up murdered, Westerners, Spanish politicians, and for enabling governments largely regarded as repressive and illiberal to further their repressive illiberalism.
The sanctioning of NSO is a rebuke for an indisputable overreach; for venturing outside of the populations it is deemed acceptable to brutalise and violate the rights of, and into those populations where it is regarded as bad form. The designation does not fundamentally challenge the crucial notion of who has the right to a life safe from being brutalised and repressed.
Secondly, whatever the Western deftness in double-standards, at a time when its own USP in the emerging global propaganda war with China is Freedom, there is only so far your principal and already-controversial ally in West Asia can be allowed to go in helping undermine and dismantle global freedoms, particularly within the so-called liberal world order.
Thirdly, NSO, in its ability to breach the systems of Apple, WhatsApp, Google and other powerful US tech firms, represents - as an Apple press release stressed - potential for “abuse and harm to its users”. To have a Western ally seriously and avoidably undermine the viability of big tech companies and their basic product is not good business. Facebook’s refusal to create a “back door” entry to WhatsApp for FBI or Department of Justice officials keen to examine the phones of terrorist suspects (with WhatsApp citing that this would put state access to information above the right to privacy of all customers) shows how seriously - for all their ills - the tech companies do take this basic understanding of privacy (at least where privacy is defined as state rather than commercial surveillance).
A red line from the US?
Throughout the above I am using “NSO” and “Israel” somewhat interchangeably, a position that is deliberate on account of the considerable overlap between the state and the company. Given that it is the Israeli state that ultimately decides who NSO can and cannot license Pegasus to, the blurring of lines seems hard to dispute. The very fact that officials in West Jerusalem saw no problem in sales to regimes like those in Saudi Arabia and the UAE is clear evidence of the country’s own agenda and priorities in West Asia.
One of the clearest elements of overlap between state and corporate power in the NSO case has been NSO itself claiming sovereign immunity for the abuses in its name. While the NSO case infers it derives immunity because Pegasus was used by the sovereign states NSO sold it to (names of which NSO will not disclose), it nonetheless feels like a stretched and special pleading, and the dismissal of NSO’s reasoning in US courts is unequivocal.
It is hard not to reason that - just as it has found it can be excused the routine massacre of Palestinians, or the bombing of media offices - entities within Israel have deduced that lobbying or lawfare can undo any rebuke of, or even mild checks upon, their behaviour by reasoning the application of additional protection or indulgences, or exception from normal rules of law. There is a conspicuous likeness between the overly generous definition of sovereign immunity sought by NSO, and the same methods by which Chinese entities seek protection from US courts.
In terms of talking openly about the harm that NSO and Pegasus have done to human rights and private communication, it already creates difficulties that such uniquely powerful malware, already put to such heinous uses, is so closely associated with, and even authorised by, an entity that self-identifies as a custodian of Jewish values. As in its routine brutalisation of Palestinians, the Israeli state cannot rightly or safely be regarded as any such thing. The very real concerns about NSO and Israeli licensing of malware should be considered further concerning because they fly dangerously close to anti-Semitic falsehoods about how power operates.
Statehood and limit-setting
If this feels like a bleak note on which to sum-up, that’s not the intention. Arguably one of the greatest distorting factors in Israeli behaviour over its decades in Palestine has been the notion that it could be allowed to exist within a vacuum, free of either standards or meaningful consequences for actions that are fundamentally bad and obviously wrong. Any move to the contrary is a positive one.
At this stage - and assuming it stands in its current, meaningful form - the NSO designation is a clear sign from the US that there are or should be limits to Israel’s abuses of democratic norms and human rights, particularly where - in the form of NSO - it is helping to export those abuses. If Israeli businesses and the Israeli state cannot assert (or choose not to assert) those limits then at some point international standards will be enforced. The limits are not yet set in the correct places, abuses in Palestine and further afield are still the norm, but the designation is an important reminder to all concerned that limits can be set and the system can occasionally be forced to work.
This sort of moment is not unprecedented in the US-Israel relationship. Most recently, Obama-era Democrats asserted the need for a “cold peace” with the JCPOA and the endeavour to bring Iran into the world economy and global community; a deal in return for a curtailment of its nuclear programme that - in the end - Israel did not want and lobbied hard to crush, along with its implicit US understanding that Israel must learn to live within the region it has chosen to make a state in. The 1956 Suez Crisis, in which Israel conspired with Britain and France to annex the Suez Canal, and the US (correctly) sided with Egypt to rebuke such disregard of the international rules-based order, is probably the most famous (and arguably last significant) example.
For those who believe in the idea of Israel, the goal should be a society where these limits are enshrined and enforced from within, rather than in rare instances from outside, and only once abuses are already wildly out-of-hand. Israel maintains that its licensing is rigorous, and NSO claims that Pegasus is used to stop serious crime and terrorism, but it is of note that Israeli lobbyists have as a result simply worked hard to smear Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist with the Washington Post, as a terrorist.
On these grounds the sanctioning of NSO by the US should be considered a positive step for all those working for just, peaceful solutions in Palestine and West Asia, and even if the basis of the decision leaves many further injustices unturned.