ZIONIST TECH COMPANY CHECKPOINT FINDS ITSELF CHECKED IN IRELAND

Clive Sulish

(Reading time: 4 mins.)

The efforts of the Zionist tech company Checkpoint to make inroads into the Irish tech sector1 are being dogged by public protests over its origins and connections to the armed and intelligence forces of the Zionist state.

On 15 October last year the company booked a whole day at the Westbury Hotel in Dublin’s city centre in order to promote itself. The protests in the earlier part of the day’s program were sufficiently fierce to force the abandonment of the evening’s presentation.2

There were complaints about the violent treatment of protesters by Checkpoint’s security team, which demonstrators believed Israeli and one British, from their accents.

Former Irish rugby international Brian O’Driscoll had been engaged to promote the event but the company failed to make touchdown.

Checkpoint company’s HQ in ‘Tel Aviv, Israel’. (Image sourced: Online)

The Your Tech, Their Death organisation has had the Checkpoint company in their sights for some time due to the company’s links with the Zionist armed forces.3 For the Westbury protest they teamed up with Action For Palestine Ireland, a direct action Palestine solidarity organisation.

On 25 August this year both organisations joined in action again, this time however also with Anti-Imperialist Action, a revolutionary socialist Irish Republican organisation. The target was another promotional attempt by Checkpoint at Beckett’s Lock Hotel, in Dublin’s north docklands.

A loud protest outside the building prompted the hotel’s management to close public access to their Reception but they also got their staff that the event was not taking place inside. However, some of the protesters were already inside and in communication with those outside.

In the event, the lies became truth as the organisers cancelled their event.

The Zionist tech company has chosen a macabre but appropriate name for itself. Checkpoints operated by the Zionist army in Palestine are locations of daily humiliation, long delays and threat to Palestinians, exacerbated at times by assault, arrest and even death.

There were very recently nearly a thousand Zionist checkpoints which Palestinians have to negotiate inside the West Bank alone, if they dare. Some are gate barriers, some permanent road checkpoints, some ‘flying checkpoints’, i.e temporary no-warning erections.

A very recent report, as this article was being written, documents the many ways in which these checkpoints fragment Palestine not only geographically but socially too and how they restrict access to friends and family, to land, to work and even to healthcare.4

Zionist checkpoints in the West Bank are now also AI-integrated.

That checkpoints are not merely control-and-repression erections for the Palestinian subject population but an offensive weapon in a war of subjugation is evidenced by their export into South Lebanon and Syria by invading Israeli armed forces.

Zionist tech companies and their intrusive surveillance programs have grown widespread around the world, being adopted not only by commercial companies but also by state service departments with concerns raised far beyond the genocide in Palestine.

At the moment it seems that the penetration of this Zionist company at least is being stopped or checked by Palestinian solidarity resistance. Whether the checks will result in checkmate for Checkpoint remains to be seen.

End.

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FOOTNOTES

SOURCES

1 Its head office is in the USA, according to its website.

2Possibly at insistence of Westbury’s management.

3The company claims to be committed to making the world a safer and more secure place, and this commitment applies to our work both on the internet and the physical world alike. We promote a safe, healthy, supportive and diverse work environment, with training and development opportunities for all employees. Except for Palestinians of course, who are actually targetted by Zionist tech while their own access to the Internet is simultaneously monitored by Zionist tech and restricted by Zionist power cuts.

4https://www.lighthousereports.com/investigation/chokepoints-suffocating-the-west-bank/

Snooping on Palestinians is a springboard to a lucrative career.

David Cronin

(Reading time: 3 mins.)
(Reprinted with gratefully-received permission of author of article1 originally published in the Electronic Intifada, a non-profit online publication covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflictfrom a Palestinian perspective)

Nadav Zafrir – a guru in Tel Aviv’s tech scene – offers a textbook example of how spies can make a killing.

Zafrir has gone from commanding Unit 8200 – an elite division in Israel’s military focused on electronic espionage – to leading Check Point,2 a big success story in the business known as cybersecurity.

One element of his rise which has received scant attention is that he has been helped along the way by the European Union.

In 2020, the Brussels bureaucracy issued a research grant worth more than $2.5 million to Illusive Networks, a firm then chaired by Zafrir.

Illusive Networks had developed what it called a “solution that allows early detection of cyber attacks” and the grant was explicitly aimed at enabling the firm to “expand into the EU market.”

As “ethics checks” for EU-funded research projects involve little more than box-ticking, it is a safe bet that Brussels officials did not raise objections to Unit 8200’s activities before approving the grant.

The sinister nature of those activities was summarized in a 2014 letter signed by a few dozen of its veterans.

“The Palestinian population under military rule is completely exposed to espionage and surveillance by Israeli intelligence,” the letter reads. “While there are severe limitations on the surveillance of Israeli citizens, the Palestinians are not afforded this protection.”

A state which discriminates based on race or ethnicity is by definition an apartheid state. Although the 2014 letter did not use the word “apartheid,” the practices it described certainly fit the definition of apartheid.

Those practices did not materialize overnight. As Nadav Zafrir was head of Unit 8200 from 2009 to 2013, he had definitely practised apartheid – a crime against humanity, according to the International Criminal Court.

By issuing a research grant to his firm, the EU was rewarding a spy chief who had served an apartheid system.

Ireland’s dereliction of duty

Profiles of Zafrir in the mainstream press do not call out his crimes. Rather, they celebrate how he has an “X factor” and how he has been offered a “compensation” package worth more than $15 million for 2025.

Since he joined Check Point as CEO last year – a time when his old buddies in the Israeli military were busy inflicting a genocide on Gaza – he has garnered numerous favourable headlines.

Checkpoint leader Zafrir

Check Point is consolidating its position by either snatching rivals or teaming up with them.

A partnership accord has been inked, for example, between Check Point and another Tel Aviv firm Wiz. “Check Point’s cloud network security tools will be merged into Wiz’s cloud security platform,” The Times of Israel informed its readers in February.

Technology reporters may get excited by what’s happening in the clouds. Back on the ground, activists are raising awareness about Check Point’s inextricable links to Israel’s military.

In Ireland, a protest against Check Point last month grabbed some media attention.

It involved a disruption of a promotional event organized by Check Point and featuring a speech from the former rugby international Brian O’Driscoll, who is regarded as a hero to many following that sport.3

The group behind the protest – Your Tech = Their Deaths – is rightly sounding the alarm about Irish companies and public authorities that use Check Point’s software.

I contacted the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) in Dublin following reports that it had renewed a contract relating to Check Point technology over the past few weeks. The DPP’s office replied that it “does not comment on any arrangements related to cybersecurity.”

Ireland is a country still grappling with the effects of colonization. Overcoming those effects requires not only the unification of the island but a willingness to stand up for oppressed peoples around the world.

The other kind of Israeli checkpoint, this a temporary one in the West Bank in April 2024. These are in addition to the fixed ones and Palestinians driving or walking may have to go through many in one journey. Israeli checkpoints are some of the areas of confrontation and arbitrary arrest of Palestinians. (Photo: Times Israel Jaafar ASHTIYEH/ AFP)

Defending Palestinian rights – through action, not just rhetoric – is surely a moral duty for Ireland. Handing over money to Check Point is a dereliction of that duty.

End.

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Footnotes

1https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/david-cronin/how-eu-helped-israeli-spy-chief-build-lucrative-career

2An ironic name, given that the IOF and even settlers set up checkpoints to harass Palestinians on towns’ entrances and exits and many points along the roads and that their checkpoints are where Palestinians are routinely arrested and sometimes killed. (Rebel Breeze editorial comment)

3According to reports the protest received rough handling by Gardaí and by security personnel and one participant was subsequently threatened by Driscoll’s lawyers but the promotional event nevertheless had to be abandoned (Rebel Breeze editorial comment).