In the book “Finding George Orwell in Burma,” journalist Emma Larkin describes the extensive network of informers established by the military junta in Burma (now Myanmar). One of the residents explains to her that the system works like the philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon – a prison whose inmates don’t know when they’re being watched, and therefore always behave as though they’re being watched. “It doesn’t make any difference whether they have informers or not. It is enough that we believe their informers are everywhere. After that we do their work for them,” Larkin’s Burmese acquaintance told her.
The Israeli government is far from the murderous dictatorship in Myanmar (at least on the Israeli side of the Green Line), but the present government seems to aspire to adopt its methods when it comes to informing. Among other things, we were told this week about a special treat for Gay Pride Month: the return to the government of LGBT-hunter Avi Maoz, strengthened with a budget of 285 million shekels ($77 million).
He will also head an authority that supervises school curricula, and will enable parents to threaten principals and teachers who teach material that is too progressive for Maoz’s taste. (He’s someone for whom even a pleasant breeze during a hamsin is a progressive plot.) That’s the same Maoz whose Noam party has prepared blacklists of LGBT people and feminists that will be available in case of need (if the need is for reeducation camps).
At the same time, MK Limor Son Har-Melech of Otzma Yehudit is working on a law that forbids raising the Palestinian flag on campuses – an initiative that would force universities to surveil their students and encourage students to inform on their friends. She drew up the proposal with the help of the group Im Tirtzu, which in the past published blacklists of left-wing cultural figures and lecturers, and whose activists apparently don’t regard McCarthyism as a warning signal, but rather as a plan of action.
Discussion of the law has been postponed for a month, but together with Maoz’s authority and other initiatives, it attests to the coalition’s aspiration to entrench its rule by means of informants. Legal scholar Dr. Tamar Megiddo calls this method “crowdwashing,” a secret government enforcement system that uses citizens as informants to monitor other citizens. In an article she wrote on the subject, Megiddo notes that in this way, governments receive information that they otherwise wouldn’t be permitted to gather legally or legitimately, and manage to greatly strengthen their surveillance capability.
As an example Megiddo mentions the affair in which then-Education Minister Yoav Gallant refused to award the Israel Prize to Prof. Oded Goldreich, in light of information he received regarding Goldreich’s statements and worldview. According to the appeal, the information reached Gallant via a website on which members of Im Tirtzu collect names of left-wing professors and encourage students to report on their activity.
As long as the government is interested in maintaining the appearance of democracy, it cannot post secret policemen in every corner to monitor opponents of the regime and prevent the public from voicing criticism. But it can set up a database that will tell of forbidden plans and wayward teachers, and then act against them in the name of “concerned parents”; or control the students with the help of their colleagues, who will be invited to inform on anyone whose opinions they reject, and then force the university to suspend them.
In that way the government saves the steep expenditures and unpleasantness involved in establishing a secret police force, yet still makes it clear to the citizens that they are being watched all the time, weakens their ability to oppose the government and incites them against one another. At least we can console ourselves that in Israel they won’t call this persecution “McCarthyism.” It’s simply too foreign. We prefer “darkei noam” (“paths of pleasantness,” a play on the name of Avi Maoz’s Noam party).
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