Israel Is Hoping to Take a Byte Out of Violence

Israel is using computers as a weapon in the struggle to suppress the Palestinian uprising in the occupied lands.

A computer linkup of the military administration, the police and the civil and security service offices allows Israel to monitor almost every aspect of life in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Arab merchants who obey the calls of the uprising’s underground leaders and refuse to pay taxes are often nabbed in a network of computerized roadblocks.

On the road between Jerusalem and the West Bank town of Bethlehem, a reporter saw checkpoints where portable computers were used to track down tax evaders. Names are taken from identity cards that Arabs are required to carry. When the names are entered into the computer, it identifies those who owe taxes.

Registration Tax

The military government demands tax payment in exchange for a registration of a newborn child or marriage, Palestinians said.

“We are scared. The tax officials catch you and seize your car or impose a huge fine,” said Fahim, a wholesaler in Ramallah who gave only his first name.

A military government official said that about 400 vehicles belonging to delinquent Arab taxpayers have been seized in the West Bank.

The computer “is indeed the ultimate instrument of population control, a carrot-and-stick operation,” researcher Meron Benvenisti wrote in his annual study of the occupied territories.

$8.5-Million Project

Benvenisti said that Israel started to develop the computer system in August, 1985. The 5-year, $8.5-million project was undertaken by TIM, an Israeli representative of the U.S. computer company Data General.

The aim was to computerize all information pertaining to the population: “property, real estate, family ties, political attitudes, involvement in illegal activities, licensing, occupations,” Benvenisti wrote in the 1987 West Bank Data Project, a study financed by the U.S. Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.

Some of the military government’s departments, such as Interior and Transport, are almost totally computerized today, providing immediate access to personal and vehicle usage data, a senior Israeli official said.

Military authorities also can gain access to the main police computer, linked to all the relevant ministries and principal police stations, according to spokeswoman Ruth Schlezinger.

‘Sub-Categories’ Available

She said that by using special passwords, a police official can call up such “sub-categories” as personal data, criminal records or traffic violations.

The database was used on a wide scale this month in the Gaza Strip, where the army started to exchange 400,000 Palestinians’ identity cards for new ones.

At a military office set up at a school in Gaza City’s Rimal neighborhood, a reporter saw a computer center with 23 portable IBM computers.

Military sources said that the computer marked with a star the names of those wanted for security offenses and that a special code appeared next to the names of those who owed taxes.

Troublemakers Banned

Some cards also were stamped with a warning: “The bearer of this card is not allowed to travel to Israel.” That identifies the person as a troublemaker in Israel’s view and confines the individual to the Gaza Strip.

The Palestinians have fought back. Bill Lee, a U.N. Relief and Works Agency spokesman, and Arab reporters said that Palestinians recently burned a telephone junction box believed to serve army computers.

But military officials said that Israel is not giving up on computers. The army, in fact, is moving ahead with plans to computerize the prison system, which has been swamped by the flood of 6,000 people detained in the uprising.