President Joe Biden’s press secretary Jen Psaki worked for an Israeli firm accused of involvement in surveillance of Palestinians under Israeli military occupation.

Psaki’s public financial disclosures show that she earned at least $5,000 as a “crisis communications consultant” for AnyVision.

The disclosure forms for executive branch officials can be requested from the White House. Psaki’s disclosure obtained by The Electronic Intifada is included below this article.

The exact date of the work is not specified, but it occurred between the time Psaki left the Obama administration in 2017 and her new role in the Biden White House.

Psaki has operated a communications firm called Evergreen Consulting since a month after President Barack Obama left office.

This covers the period when AnyVision faced a public relations crisis over its alleged complicity in Israel’s abuses of Palestinian rights.

In 2019, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that AnyVision’s facial recognition technology was being secretly used by Israel’s occupation army “to monitor West Bank Palestinians at checkpoints on the way into Israel – while using a network of cameras deep inside the West Bank.”

AnyVision’s president, Amir Kain, was former head of the Israeli defense ministry’s security department, and one of its advisers, Tamir Pardo, is a former head of the Mossad spying and assassination agency, according to Haaretz.

In other words, AnyVision was reportedly an integral part of what Israel’s leading human rights group B’Tselem recently described as an “apartheid regime” established to perpetuate “the supremacy of one group – Jews – over another – Palestinians.”

According to Haaretz, the firm’s co-founder Eylon Etshtein asserted without apparent irony that his company is “very sensitive” to racial and gender bias and only sells to “democratic countries with proper governments.”

Microsoft divestment
A subsequent report by Olivia Solon for NBC News stated that AnyVision “powers a secret military surveillance project throughout the West Bank.”

“Palestinians living in the West Bank do not have Israeli citizenship or voting rights but are subject to movement restrictions and surveillance by the Israeli government,” NBC noted.

The network also reported that when it approached AnyVision’s Etshtein for comment, “He disputed that the West Bank was ‘occupied’ and questioned the motivation of the NBC News inquiry, suggesting the reporter must have been funded by a Palestinian activist group.”

Etshtein also apparently threatened to sue the network.

Solon’s report focused attention on how American tech giant Microsoft had invested $74 million in AnyVision.

That spurred the #DropAnyVision campaign by human rights and Palestine solidarity activists calling on Microsoft to divest from the spy firm.

The campaign – spearheaded by Jewish Voice for Peace – was successful.

Sorgente: Biden spokesperson worked for Israeli spy firm – Quds News Network

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