Israel on the Border and the New Slave Power
Either their tech isn't good, or we don't want it to work
House Republicans failed to impeach DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas this evening. That’s probably for the best—he had the endorsement of notorious dual loyalist Michael Chertoff, who used to run the agency. And it’s good to watch this clique fail so people can get the point.
We are supposed to believe the Israelis are very good at developing security technology, but their companies are the rotgut shtetl vodka of this kind of tech. We can see that from our border being so porous, and from Benjamin Netanyahu allowing all those pretty raver girls to be butchered by the terrorists he gave money to.
One of the bad things about these massive omnibus spending bills that have become the totally insane way we fund the government, is that it becomes an orgy for all the pet projects of various creeps who have no business working on the security of this country.
Because the top rank of national security professionals in the U.S. are, with almost no exceptions, extremely skeptical of the Israelis, they sell their tech to the punisher-tattoo agencies of DHS, and that’s where most of these projects are. Their role in the security technology market is much more significant than defense technology. When Israel is in a constitutional crisis, all of this information-sharing becomes a risk.
A big one here is Elbit Systems, which has been on the southern border for 20 years. It was contracted in 2014 to build the “virtual wall”—those little towers with the cameras on them—which of course didn’t work. The Israelis have supplied Sheriff Joe. The fight over a virtual wall or Trump’s “big, beautiful” one is more or less a fight between mobbed-up security companies and mobbed-up construction companies.
In the last few years Elbit has had a number of problems, the Australians cut its battlefield management system because of concerns that it had a backdoor. It probably did, because the Israelis are untrustworthy. As of this week, the huge Japanese trading company Itochu cut ties with them, too. What’s happening here is everyone is realizing Israel has very little to offer the world that the world needs, and they’re a huge pain.
There’s the BIRD program, a partnership between DHS and the Israeli National Cyber Directorate, which uses “bilateralism” as a pretext for not developing tech in the U.S. There’s the focus on the University of Arizona, which is a hub for DHS-Israeli collaboration. The Israelis are on the other side of the border too, selling drones and Pegasus to the Mexican government, the latter of which has gotten into the hands of the cartels.
The result of this is the West Bank-ization of America’s southern border, where everything gets securitized, but nothing really gets solved. It ends up like that because that’s in everyone’s interests: the cartels, the security contractors, the human smugglers, and elected Republicans. This is Israel’s stake in the American immigration debate.
One of my frustrations with the Mitt Romneys of the immigration argument is they come up with these very consultant-class solutions that always rely on some technological MacGuffin like eVerify somebody’s going to make a buck off of. It’s not really necessary. What’s missing is simply prosecutorial will. You don’t want to deal with the problem by prosecuting a bunch of desperate, poor people? Fine, your terms are acceptable: let’s throw some ranchers and restaurant owners in prison.
We only need state attorneys general to prosecute labor trafficking, which is well within the means and technical ability of states, already. The attorneys general of Republican states—nor Democratic ones either, but that’s a given—do not do this because they both work for America’s slave power. If you’re a Republican and your governor is standing behind Greg Abbott in his fight with the feds, ask him why his AG isn’t doing this. It’s a tell.
“Slave power” is, of course, a loaded phrase. But I consider it a fair characterization for people who exploit the labor and resources of an underclass with dubious legal status and limited recourse to the courts. We’re talking about landlords, agricultural companies, and construction companies, mostly—the Stephen Miller latifundia class. All of them have a vested economic interest in not fixing immigration, and a vested political one too, because if it were fixed, downwardly mobile Republican voters would start to vote for the other party. The slave power employs a vast galaxy of think tanks in Washington, including the Cato Institute. Alex Nowrasteh is one of the slave power’s mouthpieces.
If I worked for the new slave power, as the Cato Institute does, I would be keen to distance myself from any association with the Confederacy, as David Boaz and most of their other people are continually at pains to do. There are also a lot of supposedly progressive immigration maximalists who want to get rid of the statues, but keep the slaves. I, on the other hand, think the statues are pretty, but am opposed to slavery. Which would you prefer?
The main point here is the Israelis are not reliable security partners in any sense, and immigration probably won’t be fixed until the GOP can sort out its own conflicted incentives.
This recent situation in Gaza proves that without the status of Israel being resolved, a pivot to Asia can’t happen, because an unscrupulous Israeli government can bait the United States into unsustainable involvement in the Middle East. The best resolution to the ethnic cleansing in Gaza—it’s not even accurate to call it a war, because a modern military versus a militia of around 30,000 doesn’t meet the definition—is to take control of Israel, depose Netanyahu, and treat it like a dependency. That’s preferable to the alternative of cutting them loose in a bad neighborhood. I consider this a moderate view.