Long story short: the Israeli Border Police’s Lebanese listeners have come to Tel Aviv to keep tabs on J14 (July 14 movement) marchers.

Or to paraphrase a paraphrase of Leon Trotsky, “you may not be interested in the Occupation, but the Occupation is interested you.”

As our domestic and international readers know, it is common for metropolitan police forces to videotape and photograph demonstrators, as well as journalists at the protests (and then, following standard post-9/11 counterterrorism procedures, match up faces or license plates with police records and other publicly available information in “data centers“). Anyone who had encountered an “Occupy” protest march since last September has surely seen police officers videotaping the march, and knows that the aforementioned data centers can and have been keeping tabs on Occupiers. Surveillance towers, aircraft and vans are deployed as well, most recently in Chicago, Illinois to surveil anti-NATO demonstrators.

And, it almost goes without saying, the Israeli security services do the same beyond the Green Line and on Israel’s borders day in and day out, monitoring the movements of demonstrators, militants, infiltrators, undocumented immigrants, even shepherds. “The Raccoon,” more widely known as the Israeli-built STALKER system, is merely one of their many tools. War is a mother to innovation, after all.

So what makes its deployment these past nights so unnerving for J14? Because it is clear now that in addition to the police, the Border Police are videotaping and photographing Israeli demonstrators, as well as Israeli journalists at the protests. Protests that are taking place inside the Green Line not at all focused on the Occupation. And yet Police Commissioner Yohanan Danino has reportedly told his subordinates to “to document every ‘involvement of the Arab community in the protests’.”

The already blurred line between the West Bank and Israel proper is getting ever more blurred, +972’s Noam Shezaif notes.

Considering Israel’s national service policies, I wonder if it would be fairly easy for the military to identify most people there based on file photos in their service records using face recognition software. Not a pleasant thought to have as a protestor in any country. Though certainly not one that will deter them.