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The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World
Bestselling journalist Antony Loewenstein uncovers the widespread commercialisation and brutal deployment globally of Israel’s occupation-enforcing technologies.
For more than 50 years, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has given the Israeli state invaluable experience in controlling an ‘enemy’ population, the Palestinians. It’s here that they have perfected the architecture of control, using the occupied Palestinian territories as a testing ground for weaponry and surveillance technology that they then export around the world.
The Palestine Laboratory shows in depth and for the first time how Israel has become a leader in developing spying technology and defence hardware that fuels some of the globe’s most brutal conflicts — from the Pegasus software that hacked Jeff Bezos’s and Jamal Khashoggi’s phones, and the weapons sold to the Myanmar army that has murdered thousands of Rohingyas, to the drones being used by the European Union to monitor refugees in the Mediterranean who are left to drown.
In a global investigation that uncovers secret documents, based on revealing interviews and on-the-ground reporting, Antony Loewenstein shows how, as ethno-nationalism grows in the 21st century, Israel has built the ultimate tools for despots and democracies.
For more than 50 years, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has given the Israeli state invaluable experience in controlling an ‘enemy’ population, the Palestinians. It’s here that they have perfected the architecture of control, using the occupied Palestinian territories as a testing ground for weaponry and surveillance technology that they then export around the world.
The Palestine Laboratory shows in depth and for the first time how Israel has become a leader in developing spying technology and defence hardware that fuels some of the globe’s most brutal conflicts — from the Pegasus software that hacked Jeff Bezos’s and Jamal Khashoggi’s phones, and the weapons sold to the Myanmar army that has murdered thousands of Rohingyas, to the drones being used by the European Union to monitor refugees in the Mediterranean who are left to drown.
In a global investigation that uncovers secret documents, based on revealing interviews and on-the-ground reporting, Antony Loewenstein shows how, as ethno-nationalism grows in the 21st century, Israel has built the ultimate tools for despots and democracies.
320 pages, Paperback
First published May 31, 2023
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11.1k people want to read
About the author
Antony Loewenstein
14 books184 followersAntony Loewenstein is an independent journalist, best-selling author, filmmaker and co-founder of Declassified Australia. He's written for The Guardian, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books and many others. His books include The Palestine Laboratory, Pills, Powder and Smoke, Disaster Capitalism and My Israel Question. His documentary films include Disaster Capitalism and the Al Jazeera English films West Africa's Opioid Crisis and Under the Cover of Covid. He was based in East Jerusalem 2016-2020.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 373 reviews
March 15, 2024
This book is terribly depressing. The main idea is that since Israel operates as an occupying power, it has developed a wide range of military and surveillance techniques and technologies. Israel is in the top ten arms exporters in the world (ninth). This is impressive given it has a population of about 10 million. For a long time Gaza was under some of the world’s most heavy surveillance. The drone and message interception technologies necessary to ensure this provided Israeli companies with capabilities that foreign governments were very keen to access.
I guess most people are aware of the Pegasus spyware that NSO developed – that essentially allows someone to see everything you are doing on your mobile phone. There was a scandal about this a couple of years back – not only was it being used by some of the world’s most repressive regimes, think Viktor Orban or even the Spanish against Catalan and Basque officials, but was also used by Saudi Arabia when they needed to chop up Jamal Khashoggi.
That’s the other thing this book discusses – the fact that Israel doesn’t really get all that squeamish over who it sells its stuff to. In fact, as the US’s little me, Israel is said here to supply arms to countries that it would be diplomatically uncomfortable for the US to sell them to.
A major conclusion of this book is that Israel uses its captive Palestinian population as a testing and proving ground for its military and surveillance equipment. That this laboratory allows Israel to provide better than theory for the products that it sells. The endless war against the Palestinians can therefore be used to provide proof of concept and practical examples in how to disarm, constrain and subjugate a troublesome population.
The book goes into endless detail, all of which ultimately feels tragically exhausting by the end. He reminds us that Israel is a remarkably unequal society – one of the most unequal in Europe – and that there have been times when these technologies have been used against its own population too, and not just the Palestinians. Essentially, the message of this book is that the rich and powerful are well aware that inequality is not something people are likely to tolerate forever, and so repressive technologies will necessarily remain very popular, and increasingly so in the so called democracies. That is, one day probably relatively soon we will get to be Palestinians too. After being demonised in much the same way.
All of which makes this a less niche book than you might have guessed from the title.
I guess most people are aware of the Pegasus spyware that NSO developed – that essentially allows someone to see everything you are doing on your mobile phone. There was a scandal about this a couple of years back – not only was it being used by some of the world’s most repressive regimes, think Viktor Orban or even the Spanish against Catalan and Basque officials, but was also used by Saudi Arabia when they needed to chop up Jamal Khashoggi.
That’s the other thing this book discusses – the fact that Israel doesn’t really get all that squeamish over who it sells its stuff to. In fact, as the US’s little me, Israel is said here to supply arms to countries that it would be diplomatically uncomfortable for the US to sell them to.
A major conclusion of this book is that Israel uses its captive Palestinian population as a testing and proving ground for its military and surveillance equipment. That this laboratory allows Israel to provide better than theory for the products that it sells. The endless war against the Palestinians can therefore be used to provide proof of concept and practical examples in how to disarm, constrain and subjugate a troublesome population.
The book goes into endless detail, all of which ultimately feels tragically exhausting by the end. He reminds us that Israel is a remarkably unequal society – one of the most unequal in Europe – and that there have been times when these technologies have been used against its own population too, and not just the Palestinians. Essentially, the message of this book is that the rich and powerful are well aware that inequality is not something people are likely to tolerate forever, and so repressive technologies will necessarily remain very popular, and increasingly so in the so called democracies. That is, one day probably relatively soon we will get to be Palestinians too. After being demonised in much the same way.
All of which makes this a less niche book than you might have guessed from the title.
July 8, 2023
This is definitely a book about Palestine, but it is also so much more.
It is a book about the hypocrisy, greed and disregard for human rights by the “good guys”.
It is about Israel providing arms to the brutal Hutu regime in Rwanda before and during the genocide.
It is a book about Israel supplying arms to General Pinochet and the junta in Chile and negating the US arms embargo.
It is about Israel supporting and arming Iran under the Shah, death squads in Colombia and the apartheid regime in South Africa.
It is about Israel supporting the Argentinian dictatorship, knowing that they were torturing Jews
It is about Israel currently supporting Russia in the invasion on Ukraine.
Ceausescu's Romania, Duvalier’s Haiti, Suharto’s Indonesia, Somoza’s Nicaragua, the list is huge
It is a book of governments spying on their citizens to suppress democracy, dissent, homosexuality, religious freedom or any civil liberties expected in society today.
It is a book about Facebook, Google, Instagram and Twitter suppressing the voices of Palestinians and Kashmiris and allowing hate speech from Israelis and Indians.
Books like this always take me a long time to read because I find many parts so difficult to believe that I have to check the facts myself; I haven’t managed to catch the author out on any of his assertions.
It is a book about the hypocrisy, greed and disregard for human rights by the “good guys”.
It is about Israel providing arms to the brutal Hutu regime in Rwanda before and during the genocide.
It is a book about Israel supplying arms to General Pinochet and the junta in Chile and negating the US arms embargo.
It is about Israel supporting and arming Iran under the Shah, death squads in Colombia and the apartheid regime in South Africa.
It is about Israel supporting the Argentinian dictatorship, knowing that they were torturing Jews
It is about Israel currently supporting Russia in the invasion on Ukraine.
Ceausescu's Romania, Duvalier’s Haiti, Suharto’s Indonesia, Somoza’s Nicaragua, the list is huge
It is a book of governments spying on their citizens to suppress democracy, dissent, homosexuality, religious freedom or any civil liberties expected in society today.
It is a book about Facebook, Google, Instagram and Twitter suppressing the voices of Palestinians and Kashmiris and allowing hate speech from Israelis and Indians.
Books like this always take me a long time to read because I find many parts so difficult to believe that I have to check the facts myself; I haven’t managed to catch the author out on any of his assertions.
March 30, 2024
Informative, thorough, angering account of how much Israel has contributed to war and dictatorships across the globe. Put in overly simplistic terms that the book does a better job of delving into, Antony Loewenstein writes about how Israel has used the captive Palestinian population as a testing ground for surveillance and military equipment, which it then disseminates to regimes such as the devastating Hutu regime in Rwanda and the Argentinian dictatorship which targeted Jewish people itself. Lowenstein also touches on the active silencing of Palestinian voices on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube all in support of the Zionist movement. It’s so disgusting and frustrating knowing that the United States is contributing to this wretchedness!! And I appreciate Loewenstein taking a stand especially as a Jewish person himself (perhaps a low bar, but still).
There is a lot of information packed into this book and at times I found the writing a bit dry, though maybe that’s because I’m more of a mental health/psychology/memoir girlie than an international affairs girlie. Of course the content is still super important though.
There is a lot of information packed into this book and at times I found the writing a bit dry, though maybe that’s because I’m more of a mental health/psychology/memoir girlie than an international affairs girlie. Of course the content is still super important though.
October 11, 2024
Essential. I chose this for my Patreon book club and my having a tough time waiting for the discussion. It’s truly incredibly well done and adds so many layers to better contextualize both the present and considering the future of our technological futures
March 10, 2024
The selling of an idea of an "ethnostate" that knows how to deal with its indigenous colonized population is an essential component of Israel corporate and national marketing strategies. No book I have read makes this more clear than this excellent contemporary study by Loewenstein.
Read "The Palestine Laboratory" to see how Israel markets itself in intelligence, "security", arms, cybersecurity, apartheid wall construction, drone monitoring, mercenary, etc. operations especially against indigenous peoples with the oppression of the Palestinians as their case for marketing. They were an essential part of the assisting of right-wing death squads in Central America in killing indigenous and poor peoples, and even helped through their Pegasus Program to cover up the murder of the 43 in Mexico and the surveillance of the activists and families who survived. They are literally a blueprint for anti-indigenous evil and oppression around the world, with the backing of their settler-colonizer model, the USA.
My short review does not do this book justice. It's one of the most important books on Israel you can read today.
Read "The Palestine Laboratory" to see how Israel markets itself in intelligence, "security", arms, cybersecurity, apartheid wall construction, drone monitoring, mercenary, etc. operations especially against indigenous peoples with the oppression of the Palestinians as their case for marketing. They were an essential part of the assisting of right-wing death squads in Central America in killing indigenous and poor peoples, and even helped through their Pegasus Program to cover up the murder of the 43 in Mexico and the surveillance of the activists and families who survived. They are literally a blueprint for anti-indigenous evil and oppression around the world, with the backing of their settler-colonizer model, the USA.
My short review does not do this book justice. It's one of the most important books on Israel you can read today.
November 11, 2023
If you though Israel was evil already but want to know how in greater detail then this is the book for you. Free Palestine.
December 28, 2023
Super necessary book if you want to understand what the state of Israel and the Zionism project is really about. It is not about safety for Jewish people (as proved by the providing of weapons by Israeli defense companies to the anti Jewish government of Argentina). It is about occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and as we’re seeing in full scale today, the genocide of the indigenous Palestinian people. While so much of this book is important, I want to share two quotes that especially stood out to me.
“Every Palestinian is defined as a threat, and civil society actors are arguably seen by Israel as the most threatening because they could mobilize international support against the occupation.”
According to Israel, there are no innocent Palestinians. It is this logic that allows for Israeli lobbyists to campaign for the active silencing of Palestinian voices on social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, etc. (A silencing campaign that unfortunately seems to be working). Any Palestinian voice simply documenting injustice could be framed as ‘inciting terrorism.’ The hate speech and genocidal language coming from Israel’s government and its citizens? Unchecked.
This same logic is also what allows Israel’s government today to refer to innocent Palestinians in Gaza as simply ‘human shields’ and ‘collateral damage.’ They would never dare refer to Israeli citizens the same way, proving that Palestinians aren’t humans in their eye. The first step to genocide isn’t the killing, it’s the dehumanization.
“A catastrophic war between Israel, Iran, or Hizbollah could trigger an overwhelming argument within Israel that Palestinians, potentially protesting in support of their Arab brethren, are undermining the state’s integrity. An Israeli military operation might then be undertaken to ensure a mass exodus, with the prospect of Palestinians returning to their homes a remote possibility”
This book was published before October 7th, and it’s shockingly relevant today. For people who think that self defense is ethnic cleansing and genocide, you need to take a real look inside yourself.
“Every Palestinian is defined as a threat, and civil society actors are arguably seen by Israel as the most threatening because they could mobilize international support against the occupation.”
According to Israel, there are no innocent Palestinians. It is this logic that allows for Israeli lobbyists to campaign for the active silencing of Palestinian voices on social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, etc. (A silencing campaign that unfortunately seems to be working). Any Palestinian voice simply documenting injustice could be framed as ‘inciting terrorism.’ The hate speech and genocidal language coming from Israel’s government and its citizens? Unchecked.
This same logic is also what allows Israel’s government today to refer to innocent Palestinians in Gaza as simply ‘human shields’ and ‘collateral damage.’ They would never dare refer to Israeli citizens the same way, proving that Palestinians aren’t humans in their eye. The first step to genocide isn’t the killing, it’s the dehumanization.
“A catastrophic war between Israel, Iran, or Hizbollah could trigger an overwhelming argument within Israel that Palestinians, potentially protesting in support of their Arab brethren, are undermining the state’s integrity. An Israeli military operation might then be undertaken to ensure a mass exodus, with the prospect of Palestinians returning to their homes a remote possibility”
This book was published before October 7th, and it’s shockingly relevant today. For people who think that self defense is ethnic cleansing and genocide, you need to take a real look inside yourself.
December 18, 2023
5 stars. ‘The Palestine Laboratory’ is a groundbreaking book that unravels the intricate layers of Israel’s occupation and genocide of Palestine, and mainly, its military-industrial complex. Loewenstein looks at the covert world where Palestine has served as an unsettling testing ground fr state-of-the-art weaponry and surveillance technology, to be later disseminated globally. In this book, Loewenstein has crafted a narrative that not only exposes the evil underbelly of Israel’s occupation of Palestine but also peels back the layers of a complex geopolitical landscape.
Spanning more than 50 years of occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, Loewenstein’s narrative unveils the Israeli state’s invaluable experience in controlling and subjugating the Palestinian population. It dissects the architecture of control that has been honed over decades, frm the Nakba to the current day, and frm the disturbing reality of surveillance tactics to the devastating impact of home demolitions. Loewenstein goes beyond the surface, exploring the human cost of indefinite incarceration on the world’s largest open-air prison, and shedding light on the brutality inflicted upon Palestinians by Israel.
At the heart of the narrative though lies a deep dive into the Israeli military-technological complex, where cutting-edge tools - frm drones and other surveillance apparatuses like CCTV cameras and threat detection systems - are forged in the crucible of conflict. ‘The Palestine Laboratory’ not only scrutinises the dark realities of the occupation but also examines the exportation of these technologies to a global audience, raising ethical questions about the complicity of various nations, both democratic and despotic, in perpetuating oppression.
Basically, fr those who thought they knew the reprehensible extent of Israel’s actions, Loewenstein’s work offers a disturbingly thorough examination that brings it all into the light of day, pushing us who don’t already know to confront the inhumanity of Israel. Read this book. Frm the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
Spanning more than 50 years of occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, Loewenstein’s narrative unveils the Israeli state’s invaluable experience in controlling and subjugating the Palestinian population. It dissects the architecture of control that has been honed over decades, frm the Nakba to the current day, and frm the disturbing reality of surveillance tactics to the devastating impact of home demolitions. Loewenstein goes beyond the surface, exploring the human cost of indefinite incarceration on the world’s largest open-air prison, and shedding light on the brutality inflicted upon Palestinians by Israel.
At the heart of the narrative though lies a deep dive into the Israeli military-technological complex, where cutting-edge tools - frm drones and other surveillance apparatuses like CCTV cameras and threat detection systems - are forged in the crucible of conflict. ‘The Palestine Laboratory’ not only scrutinises the dark realities of the occupation but also examines the exportation of these technologies to a global audience, raising ethical questions about the complicity of various nations, both democratic and despotic, in perpetuating oppression.
Basically, fr those who thought they knew the reprehensible extent of Israel’s actions, Loewenstein’s work offers a disturbingly thorough examination that brings it all into the light of day, pushing us who don’t already know to confront the inhumanity of Israel. Read this book. Frm the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
January 10, 2025
So many parts of this hit so hard. It is a lesson of how Israel's relationship with the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is a warning of state and economic power when other states use the tools of Israel to control their population or separate those they control. The bias of information coming of Israel and Palestine is problematic. This book is written by a former Israeli, interviewing experts in Israel, and is well-researched and careful. It is also scary. I would love to see Israel to live up to its potential instead of another pariah state. This book was published, however, right before the October 7 attacks and Israel's response makes my optimistic hope seem like a child's fantasy. Especially in this environment in both Israel and the United States.
February 21, 2024
4.5 stars
A really informative guide to Israel's massive influence on war and dictatorships worldwide. It's mostly informational though, and there's not much background or contextualization on Israel's history and relationship with Palestine, so this isn't necessarily one I'd recommend as a "beginners guide to Israel" or anything. However, it is a great read to learn more about modern US Empire and related topics
Sadly, Verso's ebook giveaway for this is now over, but I believe some of their other titles are still available free!
A really informative guide to Israel's massive influence on war and dictatorships worldwide. It's mostly informational though, and there's not much background or contextualization on Israel's history and relationship with Palestine, so this isn't necessarily one I'd recommend as a "beginners guide to Israel" or anything. However, it is a great read to learn more about modern US Empire and related topics
Sadly, Verso's ebook giveaway for this is now over, but I believe some of their other titles are still available free!
November 13, 2023
Edit: Verso is currently offering a free digital edition of this book and five others in their Palestinian Reading List on their website!
I’ve never read about Israel’s role as a cog in the war machine in such an extensive way. This book explores Israel’s role in most world conflicts, from arms dealing to state of the art intelligence spyware, and how its importance came to be at the expense of Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied territories of the West Bank, as they're used as lab rats. When all of Israeli weapons come recommended as battle tested this is what they mean.
Loewenstein goes in detail about intelligence projects and secret military programs, also thanks to anonymous sources that used to be part of the IOF, and how these programs and the knowledge garnered from them shape the world now that they’re used against drug cartels in Mexico, or government Modi’s opposition’s in India and Kashmir, or in Israel as well, when the Israeli citizens saw these programs being used against them during Covid lockdowns - while they had accepted it when they were being used on Palestinians up until then.
It’s a bit of a tough read, first of all because the horror of violence on innocent people is undeniable, but also because it’s a very dense list of war crimes to cram in about three hundred pages.
It’s an incredible resource, up to date until late 2022/early 2023 (it was published in May of this year), but if I have to voice a complaint - the chapters are way too long. There are few paragraph breaks, there are no subsections, and as I said they are chock-full of information: they’re dense, and a bit difficult to read when you don’t know when you should stop. Of course, nonfiction shouldn’t be read like a novel, but I saw myself putting off reading because sometimes I came to dread it a bit, knowing it would take a long while for me to finish.
Regardless, this finds an easy solution in learning to pace yourself while reading, so not all hope is lost! It’s still deserving of acclamation.
3.5 stars rounded up.
Access to the ARC acquired thanks to NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
I’ve never read about Israel’s role as a cog in the war machine in such an extensive way. This book explores Israel’s role in most world conflicts, from arms dealing to state of the art intelligence spyware, and how its importance came to be at the expense of Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied territories of the West Bank, as they're used as lab rats. When all of Israeli weapons come recommended as battle tested this is what they mean.
Loewenstein goes in detail about intelligence projects and secret military programs, also thanks to anonymous sources that used to be part of the IOF, and how these programs and the knowledge garnered from them shape the world now that they’re used against drug cartels in Mexico, or government Modi’s opposition’s in India and Kashmir, or in Israel as well, when the Israeli citizens saw these programs being used against them during Covid lockdowns - while they had accepted it when they were being used on Palestinians up until then.
It’s a bit of a tough read, first of all because the horror of violence on innocent people is undeniable, but also because it’s a very dense list of war crimes to cram in about three hundred pages.
It’s an incredible resource, up to date until late 2022/early 2023 (it was published in May of this year), but if I have to voice a complaint - the chapters are way too long. There are few paragraph breaks, there are no subsections, and as I said they are chock-full of information: they’re dense, and a bit difficult to read when you don’t know when you should stop. Of course, nonfiction shouldn’t be read like a novel, but I saw myself putting off reading because sometimes I came to dread it a bit, knowing it would take a long while for me to finish.
Regardless, this finds an easy solution in learning to pace yourself while reading, so not all hope is lost! It’s still deserving of acclamation.
3.5 stars rounded up.
Access to the ARC acquired thanks to NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
November 30, 2024
another essential. i learned a lot more abt the military industrial complex and surveillance state that had only been touched on in previous readings. this book weaves webs if you will, and gets its work done showing how far wide and down the rot truly spreads. (4.5 stars rounded down)
November 11, 2023
This was such an informative read. It’s really a testament to how global the occupation is (as well as different systems of oppression) - and how the entire world is perpetrating it (not just in silent complicity).
December 23, 2023
One of the best and most interesting books that i read this year. Kudos to the author for doing a brilliant job! 👏👏👏. Free Palestine!!!
February 28, 2025
«In solidarietà con i palestinesi e gli israeliani che combattono per un futuro giusto».
Esprimere il proprio pensiero riguardo la politica d’Israele è palesemente un tabù, o meglio, lo è se s’intende criticare in un qualche modo i metodi adottati nei confronti del popolo palestinese.
E’ come se, sia i governi sia la società civile, vivessero in un continuo stato di espiazione da una colpa gravissima, nostra malgrado ereditata, ma da cui non possiamo lavarcene le mani: la Shoah.
Da ciò un divieto che colpisce tutti indistintamente: non si può parlare di genocidio palestinese senza essere tacciati di antisemitismo.
Moni Ovadia ci presenta l’autore nella prefazione di questo saggio tremendamente doloroso nel suo illustrarci una realtà ancora più estesa di quello ci si può immaginare:
Antony Loewenstein, ebreo australiano nipote di profughi ebrei che lasciarono la Germania per sfuggire alle persecuzioni naziste, illumina un aspetto parallelo consustanziale della pratica sionista: la ripulsa dei grandi valori etici, spirituali e universalisti dell’ebraismo per imboccare il cammino idolatrico della forza, della prepotenza, di un nazionalismo fanatico, dell’idolatria della terra.
Dal 1948, dopo le prime occupazioni violente (Nakba), Israele ha costruito la sua immagine come modello di democrazia a cui ispirarsi per la lotta al terrorismo.
La realtà è che la Palestina rappresenta un ”prezioso banco di prova di nuovi dispositivi a beneficio di una potenza militare globale egemone che serve altri eserciti del pianeta. (…)
Il laboratorio palestinese di Israele trae vantaggio dagli sconvolgimenti e dalle violenze che avvengono nel mondo.”
” Il gran numero di dittature con cui Israele ha intrattenuto rapporti è sconcertante.”
... il regime di Pinochet, Sud- Sudan, Myanmar, Colombia, Sudafrica dell’apartheid (Unspoken Alliance - ‘La tacita alleanza’), Iran, Indonesia (epurazione comunisti), Romania di Nicolae Ceausescu, Haiti )sotto François “Papa Doc” Duvalier e suo figlio Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier), Paraguay, il Nicaragua dei Somoza, Argentina di Peròn, Ruanda, Tigri-Tamil, Siria..
Una lista dolorosamente lunga che approda al respingimento dei migranti per cui ci sono società israeliane private (e voi direte: «beh, se sono private il governo che c’entra?»..C’entra, c’entra..) come (eh sì facciamo nomi e cognomi!) la Elbit e soprattutto la Frontex (interessante il caso dell’ex AD Fabrice Leggeri, dimessosi nel 2022 dopo un’accusa di violazioni dei diritti umani e in questi giorni tornato sui giornali per essere entrato nelle fila dell’estrema destra francese..) che operano in tal senso:
” Israele è un attore chiave nella battaglia dell’Unione Europea sia per militarizzare i propri confini sia per dissuadere nuovi arrivi,
Armi di ogni genere, cybersorveglianza, cybersicurezza: Israele è come una start up che ha come obiettivo quello di monetizzare.
L’attacco dell’11 settembre 2001 è stato il lancio definitivo sul mercato: mentre la questione palestinese si è legittimata nel nome di una guerra mondiale a tutto ciò che si considera terrorismo, l’impennata delle richieste di sistemi di sorveglianza ha avuto un’impennata mai vista prima.
Ancora una volta la Cisgiordania è stata il laboratorio dove testare nuove forme di controllo.
Così una società come Oosto (prima AnyVision) ha messo in atto un progetto Google Ayosh, che prende di mira tutti i palestinesi attraverso l’uso dei “big data” acquisendo competenze esportate poi a livello globale.
Non da ultimo è il ruolo del web e dei social dove i messaggi sono veicolati rimuovendo, da una parte, tutto ciò che arriva e/o appoggia la Palestina, e, allo stesso tempo, mettendo in primo piano, tutte le immagini e i discorsi pro-Israele.
” Nel maggio 2021 «The Washington Post» pubblicò un articolo con un titolo straordinariamente onesto, “L’intelligenza artificiale di Facebook tratta gli attivisti palestinesi come tratta gli attivisti neri americani. Li blocca”
Dopo oltre settant’anni in cui l’ideologia di dominio e superiorità è al comando non è facile resettare nelle menti altre prospettive anche perché è stato inculcato che la soluzione dei due stati non sia assolutamente fattibile.
Esiste un mondo dissidente a tutto ciò .
Una porzione di persone che sempre più faticosamente cercano di smascherare queste strategie e giornalisti investigativi come Loewenstein che denunciano la trappola dell’ideologia tossica.
Questo libro è stato pubblicato nel 2023.
Sarei curiosa di sapere l’opinione di Loewenstein dopo gli eventi in seguito ai fatti del 7 ottobre 2024.
"Era normale che agli ebrei venisse insegnato a scuola o nel corso dell’educazione religiosa – e così mi veniva detto anche a casa dai miei genitori ebrei liberali – che erano il popolo eletto e avevano un rapporto unico con Dio e la società. Noi potevamo e dovevamo aiutare gli altri (anche se venivano posti dei limiti a questa solidarietà, ovvero ne erano esclusi i palestinesi). È un sistema di credenze che permette alla supremazia razziale contro i non-ebrei di prosperare e giustifica l’indifferenza per le loro vite."
Esprimere il proprio pensiero riguardo la politica d’Israele è palesemente un tabù, o meglio, lo è se s’intende criticare in un qualche modo i metodi adottati nei confronti del popolo palestinese.
E’ come se, sia i governi sia la società civile, vivessero in un continuo stato di espiazione da una colpa gravissima, nostra malgrado ereditata, ma da cui non possiamo lavarcene le mani: la Shoah.
Da ciò un divieto che colpisce tutti indistintamente: non si può parlare di genocidio palestinese senza essere tacciati di antisemitismo.
Moni Ovadia ci presenta l’autore nella prefazione di questo saggio tremendamente doloroso nel suo illustrarci una realtà ancora più estesa di quello ci si può immaginare:
Antony Loewenstein, ebreo australiano nipote di profughi ebrei che lasciarono la Germania per sfuggire alle persecuzioni naziste, illumina un aspetto parallelo consustanziale della pratica sionista: la ripulsa dei grandi valori etici, spirituali e universalisti dell’ebraismo per imboccare il cammino idolatrico della forza, della prepotenza, di un nazionalismo fanatico, dell’idolatria della terra.
Dal 1948, dopo le prime occupazioni violente (Nakba), Israele ha costruito la sua immagine come modello di democrazia a cui ispirarsi per la lotta al terrorismo.
La realtà è che la Palestina rappresenta un ”prezioso banco di prova di nuovi dispositivi a beneficio di una potenza militare globale egemone che serve altri eserciti del pianeta. (…)
Il laboratorio palestinese di Israele trae vantaggio dagli sconvolgimenti e dalle violenze che avvengono nel mondo.”
” Il gran numero di dittature con cui Israele ha intrattenuto rapporti è sconcertante.”
... il regime di Pinochet, Sud- Sudan, Myanmar, Colombia, Sudafrica dell’apartheid (Unspoken Alliance - ‘La tacita alleanza’), Iran, Indonesia (epurazione comunisti), Romania di Nicolae Ceausescu, Haiti )sotto François “Papa Doc” Duvalier e suo figlio Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier), Paraguay, il Nicaragua dei Somoza, Argentina di Peròn, Ruanda, Tigri-Tamil, Siria..
Una lista dolorosamente lunga che approda al respingimento dei migranti per cui ci sono società israeliane private (e voi direte: «beh, se sono private il governo che c’entra?»..C’entra, c’entra..) come (eh sì facciamo nomi e cognomi!) la Elbit e soprattutto la Frontex (interessante il caso dell’ex AD Fabrice Leggeri, dimessosi nel 2022 dopo un’accusa di violazioni dei diritti umani e in questi giorni tornato sui giornali per essere entrato nelle fila dell’estrema destra francese..) che operano in tal senso:
” Israele è un attore chiave nella battaglia dell’Unione Europea sia per militarizzare i propri confini sia per dissuadere nuovi arrivi,
Armi di ogni genere, cybersorveglianza, cybersicurezza: Israele è come una start up che ha come obiettivo quello di monetizzare.
L’attacco dell’11 settembre 2001 è stato il lancio definitivo sul mercato: mentre la questione palestinese si è legittimata nel nome di una guerra mondiale a tutto ciò che si considera terrorismo, l’impennata delle richieste di sistemi di sorveglianza ha avuto un’impennata mai vista prima.
Ancora una volta la Cisgiordania è stata il laboratorio dove testare nuove forme di controllo.
Così una società come Oosto (prima AnyVision) ha messo in atto un progetto Google Ayosh, che prende di mira tutti i palestinesi attraverso l’uso dei “big data” acquisendo competenze esportate poi a livello globale.
Non da ultimo è il ruolo del web e dei social dove i messaggi sono veicolati rimuovendo, da una parte, tutto ciò che arriva e/o appoggia la Palestina, e, allo stesso tempo, mettendo in primo piano, tutte le immagini e i discorsi pro-Israele.
” Nel maggio 2021 «The Washington Post» pubblicò un articolo con un titolo straordinariamente onesto, “L’intelligenza artificiale di Facebook tratta gli attivisti palestinesi come tratta gli attivisti neri americani. Li blocca”
Dopo oltre settant’anni in cui l’ideologia di dominio e superiorità è al comando non è facile resettare nelle menti altre prospettive anche perché è stato inculcato che la soluzione dei due stati non sia assolutamente fattibile.
Esiste un mondo dissidente a tutto ciò .
Una porzione di persone che sempre più faticosamente cercano di smascherare queste strategie e giornalisti investigativi come Loewenstein che denunciano la trappola dell’ideologia tossica.
Questo libro è stato pubblicato nel 2023.
Sarei curiosa di sapere l’opinione di Loewenstein dopo gli eventi in seguito ai fatti del 7 ottobre 2024.
"Era normale che agli ebrei venisse insegnato a scuola o nel corso dell’educazione religiosa – e così mi veniva detto anche a casa dai miei genitori ebrei liberali – che erano il popolo eletto e avevano un rapporto unico con Dio e la società. Noi potevamo e dovevamo aiutare gli altri (anche se venivano posti dei limiti a questa solidarietà, ovvero ne erano esclusi i palestinesi). È un sistema di credenze che permette alla supremazia razziale contro i non-ebrei di prosperare e giustifica l’indifferenza per le loro vite."
October 10, 2024
Ci sono aspetti meno conosciuti della storia e della politica di Israele che, letti nel loro insieme in questo documentatissimo libro del giornalista freelance australiano ed ebreo Antony Loewenstein, gettano una luce ancora più sinistra su ciò che succede in Palestina. Quello che qui viene definito Laboratorio Palestina è lo sfruttamento operato dal complesso militare e finanziario israeliano, statale e privato, in settant’anni di occupazione dei Territori, ”L’industria della sicurezza interna di Israele ha in pratica monetizzato i suoi strumenti e la sua strategia, mostrando con esempi testati sul campo di battaglia che puntare sulla separazione, tenendo palestinesi e israeliani lontani gli uni dagli altri fintantoché i secondi non avessero prevalso sui primi, fosse la soluzione nel breve e medio termine. I separatisti, nelle parole di Kimmerling, volevano “L’opposto di una pulizia etnica, ma con conseguenze simili a livello sia pratico che psicologico. Si tratta di qualcosa di radicato in un insieme di emozioni interconnesse: sfiducia, paura e odio verso gli arabi combinati al desiderio di togliere Israele dal suo immediato ambiente culturale.””.
Israele è diventato un paese leader nella cybersicurezza e nei sistemi di controllo biometrico e spionistico della popolazione, esportando sia tecnologia avanzata che il modello di segregazione (apartheid) sperimentato a Gaza e in Cisgiordania a moltissimi Stati, incurante di come questi sistemi possano essere utilizzati contro le minoranze politiche, etniche o religiose.
In un mondo sempre più arroccato e chiuso entro i suoi confini sta esportando anche il suo modello di etnonazionalismo senza briglie, invidiato e desiderato non solo da paesi a guida autoritaria, ma anche da quelli di presunta fede democratica
Israele è diventato un paese leader nella cybersicurezza e nei sistemi di controllo biometrico e spionistico della popolazione, esportando sia tecnologia avanzata che il modello di segregazione (apartheid) sperimentato a Gaza e in Cisgiordania a moltissimi Stati, incurante di come questi sistemi possano essere utilizzati contro le minoranze politiche, etniche o religiose.
In un mondo sempre più arroccato e chiuso entro i suoi confini sta esportando anche il suo modello di etnonazionalismo senza briglie, invidiato e desiderato non solo da paesi a guida autoritaria, ma anche da quelli di presunta fede democratica
May 9, 2024
The incredible information in this book is really quite riveting to read, especially as it's all documented and evidenced.
It would be unfair of me to pick on one particular element above all the others that Israel excels at in the areas of phone-hacking, surveillance, espionage, cyber warfare and house demolition. The book covers them all in great detail. You will be able to tell from the title where all these techniques are perfected.
Recommended.
It would be unfair of me to pick on one particular element above all the others that Israel excels at in the areas of phone-hacking, surveillance, espionage, cyber warfare and house demolition. The book covers them all in great detail. You will be able to tell from the title where all these techniques are perfected.
Recommended.
December 25, 2023
I will first admit that this is a well researched book, even if I wish certain claims had more specific citations. Loewenstein is very fairly critical of Israeli policy.
The issue is this book had very little to do with his main premise that Palestine is an experimental grounds, due to the fact Palestine actually factors very little into the book at all, only referenced every once in a while to discuss how certain measures are used to keep it under occupation. This isn't to say Israel definitely doesn't use it's tech against Palestinians, but the book seemed much more focused on Israeli military industrial exports then the actual effect Israel has had on Palestinians. For being a book barely over 200 pages it was a bit of a mess, where things were repeated way too often, the ideas didn't always gel together, there were a large amount of typos (editor should've done better), and this weird ad hominemy deal where the same person would be quoted in different parts of the book, but if they said something the author didn't agree with he would throw in some negative attribution to their character whereas he wouldn't do it when the person agreed with his point. There are some very important facts and ideas in this book, but I fail to see how it falls into his main argument. It could've been reworked into an exploration of Israeli military export policy, or how Israel has no issue dealing with governments commiting horrible human rights abuses (that also engage in virulent antisemitism, a weird thing for a state claiming to look out for and be there for Jews to do).
The issue is this book had very little to do with his main premise that Palestine is an experimental grounds, due to the fact Palestine actually factors very little into the book at all, only referenced every once in a while to discuss how certain measures are used to keep it under occupation. This isn't to say Israel definitely doesn't use it's tech against Palestinians, but the book seemed much more focused on Israeli military industrial exports then the actual effect Israel has had on Palestinians. For being a book barely over 200 pages it was a bit of a mess, where things were repeated way too often, the ideas didn't always gel together, there were a large amount of typos (editor should've done better), and this weird ad hominemy deal where the same person would be quoted in different parts of the book, but if they said something the author didn't agree with he would throw in some negative attribution to their character whereas he wouldn't do it when the person agreed with his point. There are some very important facts and ideas in this book, but I fail to see how it falls into his main argument. It could've been reworked into an exploration of Israeli military export policy, or how Israel has no issue dealing with governments commiting horrible human rights abuses (that also engage in virulent antisemitism, a weird thing for a state claiming to look out for and be there for Jews to do).
February 12, 2024
“Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs developed an online community and app called ACT.IL, an army of trolls to pester social media companies and media outlets for publishing content that’s critical of Israel.” Zionist troll farms that love to call you “Jew hater” for asking online why Palestinians don’t have equal rights, are subsidized by Israel or the IAC ACT.IL Media Room [check it out online]. “Israel has the highest income inequality of any nation in the OECD.” “A quarter of US Jews in a 2021 survey agreed that Israel was an apartheid state. Even the publisher of Haaretz, Israel’s most progressive, albeit Zionist, newspaper, admits it.” A 2021 survey by Jewish Electorate Institute “found that 34% of Jews agreed that ‘Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is similar to racism in the Unites States,’ 25% agreed that ‘Israel is an apartheid state’ and 22% agreed that ‘Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians’.”
“Palestinians had to suffer to make Jews feel safe.” Think of Israel as authoritarian capitalist, a government that combines aggressive racial capitalism with economic and technological power - the monetization of occupation. This occupation ain’t going to pay for itself – unless we make money off it. We can market our security products field tested in our Gaza prison that any dictatorship would want. “Both the Israeli government and private companies promoted their products as effectively battle-tested on Palestinians.” In response, because of Israel’s occupation for profit initiative, “Israeli arms sales in 2011 were the highest on record, surging 55 percent over the previous two years to US $11.3 billion.” Using this logic, Jeffrey Dahmer should have marketed his own line of cutlery and meat tenderizers, and I see a healthy market for John Wayne Gacy clown outfits that dispense chloroform through a plastic flower. Making money off the misery of others is the new black, baby! Is Israeli racial supremacy for you? You bet, if you can monetize it!
No wonder Israel is now one of the top ten weapons dealers in the world. It even shipped weapons to the brutal Hutu regime just in time to kill “around 800,000 Tutsis in 100 days.” Israel also sent Rwanda weapons once the 1994 genocide was already under way. Product Pitch: Make a killing while THEY make a killing. “A United Nations report in 2015 confirmed that Israeli weapons were fueling South Sudan’s civil war.” “Supporting despots is a bipartisan issue in Israel.” Large profits to be made in “targeting unwanted populations.” How sad that Hitler, who LIVED to target unwanted populations, didn’t live long enough to be a customer. “In 2020, Israel spent US $22 billion on its military” - the price of occupation and excessive racial hubris. Note that Latin America had been the earlier testing ground for the commercialization of repression (read Greg Grandin’s Empire’s Workshop). And before that creation of the Surveillance State in the Philippines (read Alfred McCoy’s Policing American’s Empire).
“Ethnonationalist ideology grows when accountable democracy withers. Israel is the ultimate model and goal.” Israel is well aware that “US-backed dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, Peru, and Ecuador kidnapped, tortured, raped, and killed political opponents both within their own borders and across the region.” If they could get away with it, then the rogue state of Israel sure as hell can. Israel has long sold weapons to dictatorships. “A redacted CIA intelligence report from February 5, 1988, detailed the sophisticated weapons such as missiles, tanks, and aircraft that Israel was sending to the [Chilean] junta.” “Any Vision is an Israeli start-up that secretly monitors Palestinians across the West Bank with a range of cameras.” When asked by NBC News in 2019 about its work in the West Bank, [Any Vision] CEO Eylon Etshtein initially threatened to sue them, [and] denied there was even an occupation.” “The company changed its name to Oosto in late 2021.” Gideon Levy says, “The bulk of Shin Bet’s activity involves sustaining the occupation by means of tyrannical control over an occupied people.” Israeli scholar Baruch Kimmerling wrote in 2003 that Israel’s domestic and foreign policy is “Largely oriented towards one major goal: the politicide of the Palestinian people.” Israeli parliamentarian Bezalel Smotrich said in the Knesset in 2021 to the Arab members, “You are only here by mistake, because Ben Gurion didn’t finish the job, didn’t throw you out in 1948” – [an open admission of ethnic cleansing by a leading Zionist].
Why Israel cares less these days about sucking up to the US for aid: In 1981 US aid was equivalent to roughly 10% of Israel’s economy, but by 2020 (at close to $4 billion annually) it was down to 1%. Israel’s main products pitch has been the eternal victim trope: “We have been fighting a War on Terror (against those whose land we stole) since our birth. We will show you how it’s done.” “Without a highly militarized society it would be impossible to sustain more than fifty years of occupation.” “Israel completed the sixty-five kilometer high-tech barrier along the entire border of Gaza in late 2021, at a cost US $1.1 billion.”
“The unstated goal of the IDF information strategy is weaponizing Jewish trauma in the service of perpetuating occupation.” The job of Zionist internet trolls is to consciously “flood the internet with so much noise that the previous posts are quickly forgotten.” Israel has created two new kinds of drones: the skunk water drone [delivering water on you that will make you throw up] and a talking drone that tells Palestinian protesters to go home and [in Hebrew] tells Israeli activists to not “stand with the enemy”. Israeli intelligence is legally allowed to surveil ALL Palestinians yet is very limited in surveilling fellow Israelis. “Every Palestinian is considered a threat.” Orthodox Jews don’t get much sympathy from Zionists because they refuse to fight in the IDF and they receive welfare.
Zionist Rabbinical Ethics: “In March 2018, one of Israel’s two chief rabbis, Yitzchak Yosef, called black people ‘monkeys’ and the Hebrew version of the word ‘nigger’ during his weekly sermon.” Imagine any US preacher getting away with that. And this was the SAME rabbi who blessed Ivanka Trump in 2018. What was his blessing then? Thank God Ivanka, you are not a monkey or a N%#@? After WWII, Germany became “the most consistently pro-Israel nation on the continent and is Israel’s biggest trading partner in Europe.” That’s probably because Germany was so happy it didn’t have to give any precious German land to displaced Jews from the Holocaust and fine that the Palestinians got unfairly stuck with the ENTIRE bill. Germany sees Palestinians as a non-people. Note that Germany evolved from treating Jews like toasted shit, to treating Palestinians like toasted shit. Viva la Difference!
“The Palestinian laboratory can only thrive if enough nations believe in its underlying premise” [and what is that premise? Taking shit from others is fun? Or subjugating others is fun?]. “After 1967, Israel’s interest in liberation movements waned and its support for them became far less effective as it turned into an occupier itself.” Former South African prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd wrote in 1961 that “Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.” Takes one to know one. “Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was a known fan of Bantustans.” Sharon told an Italian Prime Minister that “the Bantustan model was the most appropriate for Palestine.” “The similarities between the US-Mexico border and Israel’s wall are growing by the year.”
India: Meanwhile, India has long occupied Kashmir and recently suspended the Kashmir and Jammu Constitution to make it a lot more like Israel’s occupation. Kashmir also has armed settlers. “Israeli Heron drones fly over Kashmir, just as they fly over the Palestinian occupied territories.” “In 2020, India was Israel’s largest purchaser of weaponry.” Did you know Gandhi openly opposed Palestine as a national home for the Jews? He wrote, “Palestine belongs to the Arabs.” Israel and India have issued joint statements, the funniest one was them saying together “there cannot be any compromise in the war against terrorism.” Ah, terrorists fighting AGAINST terrorism. Fun Fact: India is Facebook’s biggest market – 340 million users. Less Fun Fact: “Kashmiri youth are routinely arrested and tortured for social media posts, and cyber police use surveillance technology to monitor the entire population.” In the US, progressives also are often tortured, but instead by lame-ass centrist Facebook posts of liberals in the form of a parade of “Biden & Hillary as Flawless vs only Trump as Evil” memes.
But speaking of douchebag Trump you’ll dig this: In 2019 Trump reportedly suggested to his aides that to stop migrants entering the US, border guards should shoot them in the leg [shades of IDF] to slow them down and should electrify the border fence with sharp spikes on top to pierce human flesh. He later asked whether it was possible to build a water-filled trench around the border with snakes and alligators.” This book calls Saudi Arabia “a repressive ethnostate that imprisons and tortures dissidents and actively discriminates against its Shia minority.”
This book explains that no one should use What’s App, because those messages are easily hacked; What’s App was breached by Israel’s Pegasus. “according to a 2016 Privacy International report, Israel had the highest number of surveillance companies per capita in the world, beating both the US and UK.” Netanyahu has a clear history pushing spyware and selling to autocrats. Experts in cybersurveillance say “the world today is run by a transnational class of gangsters” a.k.a. a global kleptocracy. Israel’s Cellebrite helps you hack phones from short distance and Israel’s NSO Group helps you hack phones from long distance. Israel uses dark web searches to spy on BDS activists [especially in 2017]; why still physically go into activist’s houses if you are already secretly in through their back door?
All my Goodreads book reviews about Israel/Palestine books that I also put on Facebook get shadow banned by Facebook for content and this book explains why: “The Washington Post headlined a story with remarkable honesty in May 2021: ‘Facebook’s AI treats Palestinian Activists like it treats Black Activists, it blocks them’.” In May 2021, in Israel, “183,000 out of 1,090,000 Hebrew public conversations on social media were filled with incitement against Arabs and racism by Israeli Jews and yet the content wasn’t removed.” This included “A good Arab is a dead Arab” and “Scum. Just wipe them off the face of the earth and never leave a trace. Slaughter all Gazans and all Arabs everywhere” and the thoughtful “All the Arabs in the world and the Arabs who are reading this message, may all your family members have cancer.” If this hate speech were written about Israelis, it of course would be banned from US social media. No wonder Arab users have little trust in Facebook. A What’s App Hebrew message invited fellow Zionists to a “massive attack on Arabs” saying, “Please arrive with the appropriate gear, brass knuckles, swords, knives, sticks, pistols, and vehicles with bull bars.” If that was instead written by Palestinians about Israelis, you can be sure it would be prominently discussed on mainstream media for a week. US activists have only to post about apartheid, ethnic cleansing, occupation, or Genocide Joe to get shadow banned. Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked in 2014 called Palestinian children “little snakes” and urging the killing of all Palestinians because “they are all enemy combatants”. Funny how Facebook refused to remove any of these comments.
Did you know the You Tube posts at least 500 hours of new videos “every minute”? You can show Zionists proudly carrying automatic weapons and IDF destruction of Gaza, no problem, but if those videos show Israeli soldiers committed violence, they can be taken down. You Tube AI deems Palestinians “inherently violent.” A foundation and a research institute found “5.2 million comments [in Hebrew-language social media] either called for violence or were offensive, with Arabs being the main target of abuse.” One Palestinian activist Dareen Tatour spent months in prison for writing a poem that included the phrase, “Resist, my people, resist them.” Israel said those words were “inciting terrorism” even though we all know international law gives ALL occupied peoples the right to resist.
To stop Israel’s 75-year illegal occupation, the world will have to get past it’s guilt over the Holocaust in order to challenge Israel’s policies; it’s time to end Israel’s decades long “emotional extortion”. Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff Wilkerson says Israel might not exist within 20 years because it has become a “first order” strategic liability for the US.” “Israel’s Palestine laboratory thrives on global disruption and violence.” Netanyahu knows the world’s financial leaders [and others like Modi and Bin Salman] are becoming more right-wing and says, “They [the world] will become more like us than we will become like them”. The economic fools controlling our future are ghettoizing the planet in response to climate change, so Israel is assured some profit from globally controlling the surveilled. The US border surveillance budget is on track to hit $68 billion by 2025. As Edward Said said of resistance to Israel’s occupation, “what are they going to do? Kill everybody?” [They might do that soon in Rafah]. New proposed Likud legislation in 2022 is to give “prison terms for flying the Palestinian flag.” Likud members have warned that continued flying those Palestinian flags could lead to another Nakba and “don’t stretch the rope too much”.
Israel keeps going rightward: Haaretz Israeli journalist wrote in 2022 that Israel is now a “Jewish mutation” due to its embrace of messianic Jewish supremacism. A 2016 Pew poll found nearly one half of Israeli Jews “supported the transfer or expulsion of Arabs [settler-colonialism]. The Israeli Democracy Institute found that “some 60% of Israeli Jews backed the complete separation from Arabs.” Most Zionists can’t bear to be in the same room with Mizrahi or Black Jews so the other stuff should that not be surprising. The somnambulant KKK and Aryan Nations could learn a lot by studying Zionism’s many racist accomplishments. Sadly, the problem is the US still has no problem with human rights abusers like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel. Israel knows there will soon be an even bigger market for keeping your own population controlled, and that will require Israeli defense equipment. But presently to the world Israel looks like another Russia [illegally invading Ukraine] or US [illegally invading Iraq, Grenada, Panama, Vietnam, Afghanistan, yadda yadda] and it is hurting what little of its image it has left. Thus, the author concludes that to lose its increasing pariah nation status, Israel will clearly have to make radical structural changes.
To conclude, this book gives a short list of companies found by HRW to be actively aiding Israel’s war crimes: Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia, JCB, TripAdvisor, Motorola, Hewlett Packard, Chevron, Volvo, Intel, Puma, McDonalds, Siemens, Sodastream, Disney (Marvel Studios), and Caterpillar. What a legacy: “selling death and misery around the world”. And we all can help it change, simply by being vocal against Israel’s never-ending disproportionate violence and crying perpetual victim on our Facebook and Instagram pages. Great book. I learned a lot, as you can see.
“Palestinians had to suffer to make Jews feel safe.” Think of Israel as authoritarian capitalist, a government that combines aggressive racial capitalism with economic and technological power - the monetization of occupation. This occupation ain’t going to pay for itself – unless we make money off it. We can market our security products field tested in our Gaza prison that any dictatorship would want. “Both the Israeli government and private companies promoted their products as effectively battle-tested on Palestinians.” In response, because of Israel’s occupation for profit initiative, “Israeli arms sales in 2011 were the highest on record, surging 55 percent over the previous two years to US $11.3 billion.” Using this logic, Jeffrey Dahmer should have marketed his own line of cutlery and meat tenderizers, and I see a healthy market for John Wayne Gacy clown outfits that dispense chloroform through a plastic flower. Making money off the misery of others is the new black, baby! Is Israeli racial supremacy for you? You bet, if you can monetize it!
No wonder Israel is now one of the top ten weapons dealers in the world. It even shipped weapons to the brutal Hutu regime just in time to kill “around 800,000 Tutsis in 100 days.” Israel also sent Rwanda weapons once the 1994 genocide was already under way. Product Pitch: Make a killing while THEY make a killing. “A United Nations report in 2015 confirmed that Israeli weapons were fueling South Sudan’s civil war.” “Supporting despots is a bipartisan issue in Israel.” Large profits to be made in “targeting unwanted populations.” How sad that Hitler, who LIVED to target unwanted populations, didn’t live long enough to be a customer. “In 2020, Israel spent US $22 billion on its military” - the price of occupation and excessive racial hubris. Note that Latin America had been the earlier testing ground for the commercialization of repression (read Greg Grandin’s Empire’s Workshop). And before that creation of the Surveillance State in the Philippines (read Alfred McCoy’s Policing American’s Empire).
“Ethnonationalist ideology grows when accountable democracy withers. Israel is the ultimate model and goal.” Israel is well aware that “US-backed dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, Peru, and Ecuador kidnapped, tortured, raped, and killed political opponents both within their own borders and across the region.” If they could get away with it, then the rogue state of Israel sure as hell can. Israel has long sold weapons to dictatorships. “A redacted CIA intelligence report from February 5, 1988, detailed the sophisticated weapons such as missiles, tanks, and aircraft that Israel was sending to the [Chilean] junta.” “Any Vision is an Israeli start-up that secretly monitors Palestinians across the West Bank with a range of cameras.” When asked by NBC News in 2019 about its work in the West Bank, [Any Vision] CEO Eylon Etshtein initially threatened to sue them, [and] denied there was even an occupation.” “The company changed its name to Oosto in late 2021.” Gideon Levy says, “The bulk of Shin Bet’s activity involves sustaining the occupation by means of tyrannical control over an occupied people.” Israeli scholar Baruch Kimmerling wrote in 2003 that Israel’s domestic and foreign policy is “Largely oriented towards one major goal: the politicide of the Palestinian people.” Israeli parliamentarian Bezalel Smotrich said in the Knesset in 2021 to the Arab members, “You are only here by mistake, because Ben Gurion didn’t finish the job, didn’t throw you out in 1948” – [an open admission of ethnic cleansing by a leading Zionist].
Why Israel cares less these days about sucking up to the US for aid: In 1981 US aid was equivalent to roughly 10% of Israel’s economy, but by 2020 (at close to $4 billion annually) it was down to 1%. Israel’s main products pitch has been the eternal victim trope: “We have been fighting a War on Terror (against those whose land we stole) since our birth. We will show you how it’s done.” “Without a highly militarized society it would be impossible to sustain more than fifty years of occupation.” “Israel completed the sixty-five kilometer high-tech barrier along the entire border of Gaza in late 2021, at a cost US $1.1 billion.”
“The unstated goal of the IDF information strategy is weaponizing Jewish trauma in the service of perpetuating occupation.” The job of Zionist internet trolls is to consciously “flood the internet with so much noise that the previous posts are quickly forgotten.” Israel has created two new kinds of drones: the skunk water drone [delivering water on you that will make you throw up] and a talking drone that tells Palestinian protesters to go home and [in Hebrew] tells Israeli activists to not “stand with the enemy”. Israeli intelligence is legally allowed to surveil ALL Palestinians yet is very limited in surveilling fellow Israelis. “Every Palestinian is considered a threat.” Orthodox Jews don’t get much sympathy from Zionists because they refuse to fight in the IDF and they receive welfare.
Zionist Rabbinical Ethics: “In March 2018, one of Israel’s two chief rabbis, Yitzchak Yosef, called black people ‘monkeys’ and the Hebrew version of the word ‘nigger’ during his weekly sermon.” Imagine any US preacher getting away with that. And this was the SAME rabbi who blessed Ivanka Trump in 2018. What was his blessing then? Thank God Ivanka, you are not a monkey or a N%#@? After WWII, Germany became “the most consistently pro-Israel nation on the continent and is Israel’s biggest trading partner in Europe.” That’s probably because Germany was so happy it didn’t have to give any precious German land to displaced Jews from the Holocaust and fine that the Palestinians got unfairly stuck with the ENTIRE bill. Germany sees Palestinians as a non-people. Note that Germany evolved from treating Jews like toasted shit, to treating Palestinians like toasted shit. Viva la Difference!
“The Palestinian laboratory can only thrive if enough nations believe in its underlying premise” [and what is that premise? Taking shit from others is fun? Or subjugating others is fun?]. “After 1967, Israel’s interest in liberation movements waned and its support for them became far less effective as it turned into an occupier itself.” Former South African prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd wrote in 1961 that “Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.” Takes one to know one. “Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was a known fan of Bantustans.” Sharon told an Italian Prime Minister that “the Bantustan model was the most appropriate for Palestine.” “The similarities between the US-Mexico border and Israel’s wall are growing by the year.”
India: Meanwhile, India has long occupied Kashmir and recently suspended the Kashmir and Jammu Constitution to make it a lot more like Israel’s occupation. Kashmir also has armed settlers. “Israeli Heron drones fly over Kashmir, just as they fly over the Palestinian occupied territories.” “In 2020, India was Israel’s largest purchaser of weaponry.” Did you know Gandhi openly opposed Palestine as a national home for the Jews? He wrote, “Palestine belongs to the Arabs.” Israel and India have issued joint statements, the funniest one was them saying together “there cannot be any compromise in the war against terrorism.” Ah, terrorists fighting AGAINST terrorism. Fun Fact: India is Facebook’s biggest market – 340 million users. Less Fun Fact: “Kashmiri youth are routinely arrested and tortured for social media posts, and cyber police use surveillance technology to monitor the entire population.” In the US, progressives also are often tortured, but instead by lame-ass centrist Facebook posts of liberals in the form of a parade of “Biden & Hillary as Flawless vs only Trump as Evil” memes.
But speaking of douchebag Trump you’ll dig this: In 2019 Trump reportedly suggested to his aides that to stop migrants entering the US, border guards should shoot them in the leg [shades of IDF] to slow them down and should electrify the border fence with sharp spikes on top to pierce human flesh. He later asked whether it was possible to build a water-filled trench around the border with snakes and alligators.” This book calls Saudi Arabia “a repressive ethnostate that imprisons and tortures dissidents and actively discriminates against its Shia minority.”
This book explains that no one should use What’s App, because those messages are easily hacked; What’s App was breached by Israel’s Pegasus. “according to a 2016 Privacy International report, Israel had the highest number of surveillance companies per capita in the world, beating both the US and UK.” Netanyahu has a clear history pushing spyware and selling to autocrats. Experts in cybersurveillance say “the world today is run by a transnational class of gangsters” a.k.a. a global kleptocracy. Israel’s Cellebrite helps you hack phones from short distance and Israel’s NSO Group helps you hack phones from long distance. Israel uses dark web searches to spy on BDS activists [especially in 2017]; why still physically go into activist’s houses if you are already secretly in through their back door?
All my Goodreads book reviews about Israel/Palestine books that I also put on Facebook get shadow banned by Facebook for content and this book explains why: “The Washington Post headlined a story with remarkable honesty in May 2021: ‘Facebook’s AI treats Palestinian Activists like it treats Black Activists, it blocks them’.” In May 2021, in Israel, “183,000 out of 1,090,000 Hebrew public conversations on social media were filled with incitement against Arabs and racism by Israeli Jews and yet the content wasn’t removed.” This included “A good Arab is a dead Arab” and “Scum. Just wipe them off the face of the earth and never leave a trace. Slaughter all Gazans and all Arabs everywhere” and the thoughtful “All the Arabs in the world and the Arabs who are reading this message, may all your family members have cancer.” If this hate speech were written about Israelis, it of course would be banned from US social media. No wonder Arab users have little trust in Facebook. A What’s App Hebrew message invited fellow Zionists to a “massive attack on Arabs” saying, “Please arrive with the appropriate gear, brass knuckles, swords, knives, sticks, pistols, and vehicles with bull bars.” If that was instead written by Palestinians about Israelis, you can be sure it would be prominently discussed on mainstream media for a week. US activists have only to post about apartheid, ethnic cleansing, occupation, or Genocide Joe to get shadow banned. Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked in 2014 called Palestinian children “little snakes” and urging the killing of all Palestinians because “they are all enemy combatants”. Funny how Facebook refused to remove any of these comments.
Did you know the You Tube posts at least 500 hours of new videos “every minute”? You can show Zionists proudly carrying automatic weapons and IDF destruction of Gaza, no problem, but if those videos show Israeli soldiers committed violence, they can be taken down. You Tube AI deems Palestinians “inherently violent.” A foundation and a research institute found “5.2 million comments [in Hebrew-language social media] either called for violence or were offensive, with Arabs being the main target of abuse.” One Palestinian activist Dareen Tatour spent months in prison for writing a poem that included the phrase, “Resist, my people, resist them.” Israel said those words were “inciting terrorism” even though we all know international law gives ALL occupied peoples the right to resist.
To stop Israel’s 75-year illegal occupation, the world will have to get past it’s guilt over the Holocaust in order to challenge Israel’s policies; it’s time to end Israel’s decades long “emotional extortion”. Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff Wilkerson says Israel might not exist within 20 years because it has become a “first order” strategic liability for the US.” “Israel’s Palestine laboratory thrives on global disruption and violence.” Netanyahu knows the world’s financial leaders [and others like Modi and Bin Salman] are becoming more right-wing and says, “They [the world] will become more like us than we will become like them”. The economic fools controlling our future are ghettoizing the planet in response to climate change, so Israel is assured some profit from globally controlling the surveilled. The US border surveillance budget is on track to hit $68 billion by 2025. As Edward Said said of resistance to Israel’s occupation, “what are they going to do? Kill everybody?” [They might do that soon in Rafah]. New proposed Likud legislation in 2022 is to give “prison terms for flying the Palestinian flag.” Likud members have warned that continued flying those Palestinian flags could lead to another Nakba and “don’t stretch the rope too much”.
Israel keeps going rightward: Haaretz Israeli journalist wrote in 2022 that Israel is now a “Jewish mutation” due to its embrace of messianic Jewish supremacism. A 2016 Pew poll found nearly one half of Israeli Jews “supported the transfer or expulsion of Arabs [settler-colonialism]. The Israeli Democracy Institute found that “some 60% of Israeli Jews backed the complete separation from Arabs.” Most Zionists can’t bear to be in the same room with Mizrahi or Black Jews so the other stuff should that not be surprising. The somnambulant KKK and Aryan Nations could learn a lot by studying Zionism’s many racist accomplishments. Sadly, the problem is the US still has no problem with human rights abusers like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel. Israel knows there will soon be an even bigger market for keeping your own population controlled, and that will require Israeli defense equipment. But presently to the world Israel looks like another Russia [illegally invading Ukraine] or US [illegally invading Iraq, Grenada, Panama, Vietnam, Afghanistan, yadda yadda] and it is hurting what little of its image it has left. Thus, the author concludes that to lose its increasing pariah nation status, Israel will clearly have to make radical structural changes.
To conclude, this book gives a short list of companies found by HRW to be actively aiding Israel’s war crimes: Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia, JCB, TripAdvisor, Motorola, Hewlett Packard, Chevron, Volvo, Intel, Puma, McDonalds, Siemens, Sodastream, Disney (Marvel Studios), and Caterpillar. What a legacy: “selling death and misery around the world”. And we all can help it change, simply by being vocal against Israel’s never-ending disproportionate violence and crying perpetual victim on our Facebook and Instagram pages. Great book. I learned a lot, as you can see.
May 21, 2024
Felt physically unwell reading this. Highly recommend - great exposition and research
October 30, 2023
This book really helped contextualize the extent and mission of Israel's military apparatus, and how it markets it's occupation of Palestine to sell their arms and technology around the world. It was hard to read—not because of the author's writing, which was detailed and thorough without being too dense—but because of the revelations within and the implications of worldwide growth of occupation, dictatorship, surveillance and control.
The parts that will stick with me are Israel's domination in the arms and tech market, and its ambivalence of who they sell to and aid in operations. Even if the US stopped giving military aid to Israel, they would still dominate in weaponry and be able to target and maim Palestinians at leisure. Israel's goal is endless growth and expansion at any cost, and they will turn a blind eye to whomever they sell to—even if the regime is targeting Jews (as was the case in arming Nazis in Argentina post WW2, in one example). The Israeli government favors "expelling Palestinians over finding killers of Jews," as the author writes; in short, they want total extermination. Their collaborations with Modi's regime in India, the apartheid in South Africa, the US-Mexico border wall, the genocide in Rwanda, and the coups in Chile and Guatemala stand out as other notable global examples of their participation in settler-colonialism, but that doesn't even scratch the surface of everything covered in this book.
Kudos to Loewenstein for engaging in this deeply personal work with a clear eye, and bringing to light what is often glossed over in mainstream reporting on Palestine.
I received a copy of this from Netgalley and the publishers in exchange for an honest review. I must note that at the time of this writing you can also get a free ebook direct from the publisher at https://www.versobooks.com/products/2...
The parts that will stick with me are Israel's domination in the arms and tech market, and its ambivalence of who they sell to and aid in operations. Even if the US stopped giving military aid to Israel, they would still dominate in weaponry and be able to target and maim Palestinians at leisure. Israel's goal is endless growth and expansion at any cost, and they will turn a blind eye to whomever they sell to—even if the regime is targeting Jews (as was the case in arming Nazis in Argentina post WW2, in one example). The Israeli government favors "expelling Palestinians over finding killers of Jews," as the author writes; in short, they want total extermination. Their collaborations with Modi's regime in India, the apartheid in South Africa, the US-Mexico border wall, the genocide in Rwanda, and the coups in Chile and Guatemala stand out as other notable global examples of their participation in settler-colonialism, but that doesn't even scratch the surface of everything covered in this book.
Kudos to Loewenstein for engaging in this deeply personal work with a clear eye, and bringing to light what is often glossed over in mainstream reporting on Palestine.
I received a copy of this from Netgalley and the publishers in exchange for an honest review. I must note that at the time of this writing you can also get a free ebook direct from the publisher at https://www.versobooks.com/products/2...
November 15, 2024
Lowenstein explains how and in what ways israel has positioned itself as a global leader in surveillance, drones, defense systems, cybersecurity, and ethnonationalist verve—not alongside Palestinians and their land such that these technological and “legislative” advances are occurring in parallel with Palestinian livelihood, but literally in a way that directly compromises Palestinian life, depletes Palestinian spirit, and literally erases Palestine history (libraries and archives). one example very thoroughly reported on here is pegasus spyware, which had been either employed or requested by so many israeli allies and non-allies alike during COVID. the means of fine-tuning and testing this technology (literally using Palestinian land as a laboratory and Palestinians as lab rats) is forgotten or ignored by different nations as they scramble to acquire the newest toy. this global dependence on israel is inseparable from currying favour and upholding allyship with the settler state, which, in turn, encourages and ossifies the colonizer-colonized condition. of course, this book (and the reality Lowenstein so excellently reports on) is incredibly depressing and recursive. there is no mobility or moral consistency at the national level because nations are pacified by spyware and the next new thing. there is only ever mobility through protests and people; let this book anger you
May 23, 2023
“Israel is monetising occupied Palestine as a testing ground for its powerful weapons industry” - such a thesis may sound like an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, but this very well-documented book, peppered with facts and sources, makes a convincing case that it is a sad reality.
I am sure that “Palestine Laboratory” will cause much controversy, but its author is a respected journalist and I think anyone interested in geopolitics should read it.
Thanks to the publisher, Verso Books (US), and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.
I am sure that “Palestine Laboratory” will cause much controversy, but its author is a respected journalist and I think anyone interested in geopolitics should read it.
Thanks to the publisher, Verso Books (US), and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.
September 16, 2024
[...] la decisión de Israel en 1969 de dejar de buscar nazis en Sudamérica, un pacto con el demonio que daba a entender que en las más altas esferas del Gobierno israelí preferían expulsar a palestinos a encontrar a asesinos de judíos.
December 15, 2023
I have researched & followed the coverage of the Palestinian struggle since the 2014 Gaza War, where the information were limited to what I can find via the 'official' media sites and other social media networks. Back then, while the movement for BDS was already underway to pressure Israel into stopping their atrocities, the movement didn't gain the momentum as it has today. It has been 9 years since then and the conditions of living for the Palestinians have only gotten worse, but never did I think that the information that I have gleaned since then were only the tip of the iceberg.
This iceberg of information, previously unseen or hard to find, are now succinctly and exhaustively compiled in Antony Loewenstein's "The Palestine Laboratory", which elaborated on how Israel has used its combat & surveillance capabilities on the Palestinians (the 'lab rats') before exporting their combat & surveillance service to 160 countries and more at the time of writing.
If this little bit of info doesn't make you angry yet, what I'm about to extract & summarize from the book likely will. The book's thesis rests on the fact that Israel is profiting from its own & other countries’ warfare:
Israel's weapons/expertise/services mentioned in the book:
i. USA - Elbit (an Israeli firm) is a major player in repelling migrants at the US-Mexico border; Pentagon used Israeli drones in Syria & Afghanistan (Germany, Canada, Britain, and Australia also used the same drones), etc.
ii. European Union - Used Israel's drones to monitor the seas for refugees, not in order to save them, but in order to ignore them because the EU do not want these refugees (despite the fact that they are also partly responsible for the creation of these refugees). Extracts from the book:
iii. Sri Lanka - Israel also helped generations of Sinhalese politicians build and maintain Sinhalese enclaves in the north and east of Sri Lanka, areas where most Tamils live. The aim was to create buffer zones around Tamil-majority areas and establish an unofficial occupation of Tamil territory. These plans continued after 2009 and Sinhala colonization has never stopped. These ideas were directly taken from Israel’s presence in the West Bank, where Palestinian sovereignty is denied with numerous fortified Jewish colonies. Israel signed a US$50 million deal with Sri Lanka in 2021 to upgrade the country’s Kfir jets.
iv. Myanmar- [...] Jewish state was happy to support another regime in its ethnic cleansing. Myanmar was credibly accused by the United Nations in 2018 of committing genocide against the Muslim Rohingya minority: the country’s military had used arson, rape, and murder as weapons of war in its brutal campaign. None of this had bothered Israel, and in 2015 a secret delegation from Myanmar visited Israel’s defense industries and naval and air bases to negotiate deals for drones, a mobile phone-hacking system, rifles, military training, and warships.
v. Singapore - Under Prime Minister Naftali Bennett's administration, the defense minister, Benny Gantz, visited Singapore in October 2021 for meetings about arms sales. (Note that no further information are forthcoming on this, so do go on with your own research on this matter)
vi. Canada - Under PM Justin Trudeau, Canada purchased Elbit-made Hermes 900 drones worth US$28 million in late 2020. This drone was first tested during the 2014 Gaza war. Canada claimed that the drones would be used for surveillance purposes in the Arctic “to detect oil spills, survey ice and marine habitats.”
vii. Russia - Moscow used Israeli drones for reliable surveillance drones after it lost many planes during its war in 2008 against Georgia in South Ossetia.
viii. Georgia - Tbilisi had used Israeli drones during the same war
ix. UAE - The UAE established full relations with Israel in 2020 under US President Donald Trump. In 2021, the UAE said it hoped to secure US$1 trillion worth of economic ties between itself and Israel in the next decade.
x. The United Nations - United Nations [...] in 2020 announced that Mer Security, Elbit, and Israel Aerospace Industries had won contracts to provide security for UN bases in Mali, with the work including the installation of CCTV cameras, drones, and threat detection systems.
xi. Finland - Bought Israel's “biometric offender monitoring technology,” (i.e. GPS tracking).
xii. German - [The] most consistently pro-Israel nation on the continent & Israel’s biggest trading partner
xiii. India - Uses Israel’s tech to continue its military hold on disputed borders of Kashmir
xiv. Due to character limits in GR review box, I can't list more and most of them are authoritarian governments like Sudan, Saudi Arabia etc.; so do read the book. (The fact that Israel's crime list is too long to list is disheartening; the depth of the iceberg has barely been plumbed.)
CONCLUSION
As mentioned by Loewenstein:
In this, the author has succeeded in his painstaking effort in compiling all the evidence and follow the money trail to show readers how Israel has not only used Palestine as a laboratory to develop its military & surveillance prowess, it has also made billions (if not trillions) of profit from blatantly selling their weapons and surveillance services to every government that has willingly taken up their offer. (The only countries Israel did not sell to: Iran, Syria, and Lebanon, for political reasons.)
The profit is then used to further subjugate the Palestinians and used as bribe/hush money to the major world leaders such as the US, UK & other countries that have partaken in the entire apartheid project. If anything, the list of infractions show that a majority of governments are knowingly contributing to the project while they are also responsible for the repression of their own citizens (yes, even the US & UK are not completely democratic; you'd only have to look through a few of the recent news to see how their citizens are jailed and intimidated for supporting Palestine).
It also shows that these cycles of violence is unlikely to stop because the colonizing countries and authoritarian governments support each other and develop parasitic relationships with one another due to their fraternization. That is, unless WE protest against all of these unnecessary conflicts and violence and demand for our governments to heed our voice. The book shows how Israel’s business are perpetuating the cycles of violence and the destabilization of countries in the majority of the world, and thus all of the oppressions we are currently seeing are all interrelated.
I'm reminded of a popular quote: "If you're not angry, then you're not paying attention."
There is no reason we should remain blithely ignorant of all of these war crimes, not when everything is readily available to us in this digital (*cough* surveillance) age. So I urge everyone to pick up a copy of this excellent book, read it, and do your own research if so required.
Thank you to Verso Books for making this ebook available for free right when Israel's latest ethnic cleansing exercise started in October 2023; it has been a valuable reference, and I hope more people can be made aware of Israel's & other countries' war crimes throughout the entire world.
-----------------------------
SELECTED QUOTES:
This iceberg of information, previously unseen or hard to find, are now succinctly and exhaustively compiled in Antony Loewenstein's "The Palestine Laboratory", which elaborated on how Israel has used its combat & surveillance capabilities on the Palestinians (the 'lab rats') before exporting their combat & surveillance service to 160 countries and more at the time of writing.
If this little bit of info doesn't make you angry yet, what I'm about to extract & summarize from the book likely will. The book's thesis rests on the fact that Israel is profiting from its own & other countries’ warfare:
i. Quote #1
From the mid-1950s, Israel, having developed a viable defense sector, started to sell its deadly wares beyond its borders. Years later, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion stressed that Israel would “sell arms to foreign countries in all cases in which the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has no objection.” The 1950s saw the development of government-owned defense companies, and privately owned entities grew in the 1960s, including Elbit, the biggest private arms manufacturer in Israel today.
ii. Quote #2
The centrality of Israeli arms to the country’s economic survival is impossible to overestimate. “The economy abandoned oranges for hand grenades,” writes researcher Haim Bresheeth-Žabner in An Army Like No Other: How the Israel Defense Forces Made a Nation.22 Exact figures are impossible to obtain, since the state never releases them, but today there are over three hundred multinational companies and six thousand start-ups that employ hundreds of thousands of people. Sales are booming, with defense exports reaching an all-time high in 2021 of US$11.3 billion, having risen 55 percent in two years. Israel’s cybersecurity firms are also soaring, with US$8.8 billion raised in one hundred deals in 2021. In the same year, Israeli cyber companies took in 40 percent of the world’s funding in the sector.
From an Israeli perspective, the Palestine laboratory has had few downsides. Israel has worked closely with Washington for decades, often operating in places where the US preferred covert support rather than public backing. For example, Israel supported the police forces of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Costa Rice during the Cold War when the US Congress had blocked US agencies from officially doing so.
Israel's weapons/expertise/services mentioned in the book:
i. USA - Elbit (an Israeli firm) is a major player in repelling migrants at the US-Mexico border; Pentagon used Israeli drones in Syria & Afghanistan (Germany, Canada, Britain, and Australia also used the same drones), etc.
ii. European Union - Used Israel's drones to monitor the seas for refugees, not in order to save them, but in order to ignore them because the EU do not want these refugees (despite the fact that they are also partly responsible for the creation of these refugees). Extracts from the book:
(A) Economic researcher Shir Hever has investigated the Israeli presence in the EU and says that the growing use of drones, including those from Israel, has a clear political aim. “Drones cannot rescue anyone and they can only take pictures,” he told me. “If an actual armed boat or suspicious looking vessel is approaching, the drone operator alerts a patrol boat, which will arrive at the scene, but if it looks like a leaky refugee boat, the drone operator could always take his time, and the patrol boat will leave too late so that there is no one left to save. This is the key difference and the real reason that the drones are a technological upgrade for the coastguard—it gives them the option to let refugees drown.” (Shir Hever, The Privatisation of Israeli Security, London: Pluto Press, 2018, p. 1.)
(B) The EU spent at least US$3.7 billion since 2015 on high-tech research to find the most efficient ways to digitally and physically target migrants. The EU provided training in Africa, the Middle East, and Balkans in sophisticated surveillance techniques. Police in Algeria and Morocco were trained in how to spread disinformation online and harvest personal information from Facebook
(C) Nevertheless, there was huge money to be made. The EU is Israel’s biggest trading partner, accounting for more than 29 percent of its trade in goods in 2020. In tandem, the Frontex budget surged from €6 million in 2006 to €460 million in 2020, rising again to €543 million in 2021. The EU pledged to spend €34.9 billion for border and migration management between 2021 and 2027.
iii. Sri Lanka - Israel also helped generations of Sinhalese politicians build and maintain Sinhalese enclaves in the north and east of Sri Lanka, areas where most Tamils live. The aim was to create buffer zones around Tamil-majority areas and establish an unofficial occupation of Tamil territory. These plans continued after 2009 and Sinhala colonization has never stopped. These ideas were directly taken from Israel’s presence in the West Bank, where Palestinian sovereignty is denied with numerous fortified Jewish colonies. Israel signed a US$50 million deal with Sri Lanka in 2021 to upgrade the country’s Kfir jets.
iv. Myanmar- [...] Jewish state was happy to support another regime in its ethnic cleansing. Myanmar was credibly accused by the United Nations in 2018 of committing genocide against the Muslim Rohingya minority: the country’s military had used arson, rape, and murder as weapons of war in its brutal campaign. None of this had bothered Israel, and in 2015 a secret delegation from Myanmar visited Israel’s defense industries and naval and air bases to negotiate deals for drones, a mobile phone-hacking system, rifles, military training, and warships.
v. Singapore - Under Prime Minister Naftali Bennett's administration, the defense minister, Benny Gantz, visited Singapore in October 2021 for meetings about arms sales. (Note that no further information are forthcoming on this, so do go on with your own research on this matter)
vi. Canada - Under PM Justin Trudeau, Canada purchased Elbit-made Hermes 900 drones worth US$28 million in late 2020. This drone was first tested during the 2014 Gaza war. Canada claimed that the drones would be used for surveillance purposes in the Arctic “to detect oil spills, survey ice and marine habitats.”
vii. Russia - Moscow used Israeli drones for reliable surveillance drones after it lost many planes during its war in 2008 against Georgia in South Ossetia.
viii. Georgia - Tbilisi had used Israeli drones during the same war
ix. UAE - The UAE established full relations with Israel in 2020 under US President Donald Trump. In 2021, the UAE said it hoped to secure US$1 trillion worth of economic ties between itself and Israel in the next decade.
x. The United Nations - United Nations [...] in 2020 announced that Mer Security, Elbit, and Israel Aerospace Industries had won contracts to provide security for UN bases in Mali, with the work including the installation of CCTV cameras, drones, and threat detection systems.
xi. Finland - Bought Israel's “biometric offender monitoring technology,” (i.e. GPS tracking).
xii. German - [The] most consistently pro-Israel nation on the continent & Israel’s biggest trading partner
xiii. India - Uses Israel’s tech to continue its military hold on disputed borders of Kashmir
xiv. Due to character limits in GR review box, I can't list more and most of them are authoritarian governments like Sudan, Saudi Arabia etc.; so do read the book. (The fact that Israel's crime list is too long to list is disheartening; the depth of the iceberg has barely been plumbed.)
CONCLUSION
As mentioned by Loewenstein:
The potency of Palestine as a laboratory for methods of control and separation of populations is my primary focus in this book. How Israel has exported the occupation and why it’s such an attractive model are examined in ways that frame the Jewish state as one of the most influential nations on the planet. The chapters that follow don’t just detail the many countries where Israeli tools and tracking have reduced democratic possibilities but reveal a campaign to increase and influence similarly minded ethnonationalist entities.
In this, the author has succeeded in his painstaking effort in compiling all the evidence and follow the money trail to show readers how Israel has not only used Palestine as a laboratory to develop its military & surveillance prowess, it has also made billions (if not trillions) of profit from blatantly selling their weapons and surveillance services to every government that has willingly taken up their offer. (The only countries Israel did not sell to: Iran, Syria, and Lebanon, for political reasons.)
The profit is then used to further subjugate the Palestinians and used as bribe/hush money to the major world leaders such as the US, UK & other countries that have partaken in the entire apartheid project. If anything, the list of infractions show that a majority of governments are knowingly contributing to the project while they are also responsible for the repression of their own citizens (yes, even the US & UK are not completely democratic; you'd only have to look through a few of the recent news to see how their citizens are jailed and intimidated for supporting Palestine).
It also shows that these cycles of violence is unlikely to stop because the colonizing countries and authoritarian governments support each other and develop parasitic relationships with one another due to their fraternization. That is, unless WE protest against all of these unnecessary conflicts and violence and demand for our governments to heed our voice. The book shows how Israel’s business are perpetuating the cycles of violence and the destabilization of countries in the majority of the world, and thus all of the oppressions we are currently seeing are all interrelated.
I'm reminded of a popular quote: "If you're not angry, then you're not paying attention."
There is no reason we should remain blithely ignorant of all of these war crimes, not when everything is readily available to us in this digital (*cough* surveillance) age. So I urge everyone to pick up a copy of this excellent book, read it, and do your own research if so required.
Thank you to Verso Books for making this ebook available for free right when Israel's latest ethnic cleansing exercise started in October 2023; it has been a valuable reference, and I hope more people can be made aware of Israel's & other countries' war crimes throughout the entire world.
-----------------------------
SELECTED QUOTES:
i. Israel’s deteriorating image in many Western nations has had little impact on the desire by mainstream Israelis to continue the occupation, the key source of disquiet from London to New York. If anything, it has made Israeli Jews more belligerent and determined to maintain the status quo because there has been virtually no political, military, or diplomatic price for doing so. The post-9/11 war on terror reinforced Israel’s decades-long practice of helping other states fight their own battles against unwanted populations. It was done with arguably less embarrassment because now the world’s only superpower was doing exactly the same thing, regardless of whether it was led by a Democrat or Republican president.
ii. The November 2012 Israeli bombardment of Gaza, called Operation Pillar of Defense, was a seven-day war that killed 174 Palestinians and 6 Israelis and injured thousands more. While the death toll in that operation was relatively low, Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in 2008 and early 2009 saw the death of 1,400 Gazans. That conflict saw a revolution in how the IDF portrayed the war across its multiple social media platforms. Worried that public opinion in some Western nations was turning against Israeli military actions, the so-called instawar was a coordinated enterprise to live-tweet military operations and infographics, produced to proudly announce the killing of Hamas members or the arrest of Palestinian “terrorists.” These productions sometimes had the feel of a Hollywood-style, big-budget action film.
iii. Israel’s social media strategy is a sophisticated attempt to link the Jewish state’s operations with Western values, or at least those policies supporting a militarized response to terrorism (or resistance, depending on your perspective), hoping to engender it to global audiences. “Social media is a warzone for us here in Israel,” said Lt. Col. (Ret.) Avital Leibovich, creator of the IDF social media unit and director of the American Jewish Committee in Israel, during 2014’s Operation Protective Edge. It was a seven-week battle between Israel and Hamas that killed more than 2,250 Palestinians, many of them civilians, including 500 children, and 70 Israelis, most of whom were soldiers. (Note: So to the people who are posting and reposting/sharing things for the Palestinian's cause: you're doing great, sweetie.)
iv. The next Israeli experiment was tested in real time during the Great March of Return, when Gazans protested alongside the fence with Israel. Starting in March 2018, it gained massive global attention as Palestinians peacefully demanded an end to the siege on Gaza and the right to return to lands stolen by Israel. Between March 2018 and December 2019, 223 Palestinians were killed, most of whom were civilians, and eight thousand were shot by snipers, some left with life-changing injuries. The IDF tweeted (but then deleted) on March 31: “Yesterday we saw 30,000 people; we arrived prepared and with precise reinforcements. Nothing was carried out uncontrolled; everything was accurate and measured, and we know where every bullet landed.”
[...] The Great March of Return was both a lab and showroom. The most sophisticated new weapon used against the Palestinian protesters was the “Sea of Tears,” a drone that dropped tear gas canisters on a desired area. Despite Israeli claims of accuracy, a tent full of Palestinian women and children had tear gas dropped onto them, as did groups of reporters. Israeli police started using drones that dropped tear gas grenades on protestors in the West Bank in April 2021. One month later, Israel announced that a fleet of drones would be used to track riots and protests as well as areas damaged by rockets fired from Gaza. Israel announced in 2022 that it approved the use of armed drones for “targeted killings” in the West Bank.
[...] A report by the Israeli group, Coalition of Women for Peace, stressed that the Israeli use of drones “fits into a worldwide pattern: though today aimed primarily against Palestinians, similar technology will likely be marketed and sold to oppress others worldwide. The ISF [Israeli Security Forces] maintains that such tactics ultimately hurt fewer people, yet they indeed are more unpredictable.”21 It wasn’t until 2022 that Israel officially acknowledged that it used assault drones (though Palestinians have known for years).
v. Although the Israeli-licensed drones were not firing any missiles, piloted Russian jets working alongside them fired missiles after receiving intelligence, yet both Russia and Israel escaped international sanction. These drones did not directly kill anyone, and therefore were not legally classified as a weapon. This was a loophole being exploited by many nation-states because surveillance technology was moving much faster than laws could be written or enforced. Neither Russia nor Israel has ever faced accountability for their strange coalition in Syria.
vi. The Snowden documents show how the Israelis received quantities of intelligence and data sharing from the US, Canada, and the UK, much of which they use to fight what they call “Palestinian terrorism.” But the UK and the US also view the Jewish state as a threat to regional stability due to its belligerent policies toward Iran and activities across the Middle East. The National Intelligence Estimate has alleged that Israel is “the third most aggressive intelligence service against the US.”
vii. With tens of thousands of African refugees fleeing persecution in Eritrea and Sudan in the last decade seeking shelter in Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu’s regime aimed to bribe, cajole, and negotiate secretly with repressive African states to send people back. Israeli business leaders and politicians pressured South Sudan, Chad, and Central African Republic to accept African refugees, with Israel giving unenforceable promises to protect them in these nations. The Israeli government even considered forcibly returning Sudanese migrants, giving them a small amount of money and recruiting them to a Darfuri militia to fight Sudan, an outfit that was to be initially trained on Ugandan soil.
Most of these plans failed, but countless Africans were returned to Africa from Israel after receiving a nominal amount of money, US$3,500. They arrived in unfamiliar African nations, Uganda and Rwanda, and were forced to fend for themselves. Israel struck deals with these nations, either selling them weapons or securing diplomatic support for them in international forums.
[...] It is acceptable and mainstream to hate Africans in Israel. In March 2018, one of Israel’s two chief rabbis, Yitzhak Yosef, called black people “monkeys” and the Hebrew version of the word “nigger” during his weekly sermon. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, both advisors to then US President Donald Trump, were blessed by the rabbi when they visited Israel in May 2018. The rabbi paid no professional price for his racism because it was shared by so many others.
February 11, 2025
تنطلق المساحة الجغرافية للكتاب من فلسطين، قطاع غزة بالتحديد، إلى تشيلي السبعينيات، وإندونسيا، روسيا والصين كذلك وأوكرانيا، وإفريقيا زمن الفصل العنصري في روديسيا وجنوب إفريقيا، وميانمار والهند ودول الخليج، وطبعًا سوق الإتحاد الأوروبي الواسع، وتذهب وجهة نظر لونشتاين، إلى أن إسرائيل لا يسوئها على الإطلاق أن تظهر بسمت الدولة المتوحشة، فتلك الخصلة بالتحديد هي ذات الفعالية الأهم والأكبر في تسويق منتجها الأساسي العسكري التقني المتطور.. ونتبع في هذا الكتاب رحلة تطور تلك التجارة التي فلسطين مختبرها الأساسي إلى زمن صدور الكتاب في 2023، وتلك ميزة إضافية هي حداثة الكتاب، حيث أننا نواكب نوعًا آخر من انواع تحالف الهيمنة بين الصهيونية الاستعمارية ورأس المال والنيوليبرالية بصورتها التي نعيشها الآن، فالكتاب في فصله الأخير يتحدث عن علاقة "ميتافيرس" وأخواتها بقضية فلسطين ولعبة الخوارزميات التي استحدثت كسلاح من أسلحة الحرب، ولكن ستكون حلقة تامر المسحال في ما خفيّ أعظم "الفضاء المغلق" أكثر إفادة في هذا الشأن لمن أراد أن يستزيد في تلك النقطة بالتحديد. في النهاية، متن قدمه لونشتاين يعبر عن ما يتوجب على الصحافي ذو الضمير أن ينوء به في هذا العالم، هناك طبعًا في الغرب، أما صحافتنا وصحفييّنا فكفاهم صراعهم اليومي مع أكل العيّش بالجبن
June 10, 2024
“Ethnonationalist ideology grows when accountable democracy withers.”
This book is harrowing. The Palestine Laboratory focuses on how the Israeli military uses the occupied Palestinian territories as a testing ground for its weapons and surveillance technology, and then exports it to the rest of the world. Just when I thought I couldn’t discover more evil, this book proved me wrong.
The main takeaways for me:
–Israel’s usage of AI and surveillance technology is used to monitor, coerce, and threaten Palestinians (their architecture of control) and leads to further dehumanization. AI and machines/drones are enabling remote war, which leads to something more grotesque, as there’s no human contact between attacker and victim. Chilling to think about. (Some of this technology is heavily unregulated and, well, that is even more terrifying).
–Israel gets away with what it does because it exports its weapons and technology to other nations that wish to control populations in the same way. Chinese and Russian surveillance technology is condemned, yet Israel’s is not due its reputation as “ally to the West.” There needs to be global pressure and government regulations put into place for such invasive surveillance methods.
–Social media sites, including Facebook (Meta), represses the voices of the Palestinians, and yet, social media is also often the only method for Palestinians and activists to make their voices heard. Palestinian content is marked as “violent” or “incitement,” leading to digital Orientalism.
Despite the horrors of this book, I still do believe that the tides are turning–and that we will see a free Palestine in our lifetimes. As Lowenstein writes in his acknowledgements, his final parting words– “The future is not yet written.”
This book is harrowing. The Palestine Laboratory focuses on how the Israeli military uses the occupied Palestinian territories as a testing ground for its weapons and surveillance technology, and then exports it to the rest of the world. Just when I thought I couldn’t discover more evil, this book proved me wrong.
The main takeaways for me:
–Israel’s usage of AI and surveillance technology is used to monitor, coerce, and threaten Palestinians (their architecture of control) and leads to further dehumanization. AI and machines/drones are enabling remote war, which leads to something more grotesque, as there’s no human contact between attacker and victim. Chilling to think about. (Some of this technology is heavily unregulated and, well, that is even more terrifying).
–Israel gets away with what it does because it exports its weapons and technology to other nations that wish to control populations in the same way. Chinese and Russian surveillance technology is condemned, yet Israel’s is not due its reputation as “ally to the West.” There needs to be global pressure and government regulations put into place for such invasive surveillance methods.
–Social media sites, including Facebook (Meta), represses the voices of the Palestinians, and yet, social media is also often the only method for Palestinians and activists to make their voices heard. Palestinian content is marked as “violent” or “incitement,” leading to digital Orientalism.
Despite the horrors of this book, I still do believe that the tides are turning–and that we will see a free Palestine in our lifetimes. As Lowenstein writes in his acknowledgements, his final parting words– “The future is not yet written.”
January 30, 2024
I don't think I can write a proper review for this book. However, I would love to say that this book opens my eyes. From amongst others; the list of countries, list of people and agencies involved, list of events, list of causes and effects, the author did a really good job at his research. After reading this, you will find that it's impossible to say that you're still clueless of how unfair and double standard the whole thing is.
I'm glad that things are clearer for me, and I have to agree that once you know what's really going on behind the scenes, then what's happening before your eyes starts to make sense and for me personally, I get to understand more in deeper level how domination in technology and social media scarily can shift the narration with just a snap of a finger.
READ. IT.
I'm glad that things are clearer for me, and I have to agree that once you know what's really going on behind the scenes, then what's happening before your eyes starts to make sense and for me personally, I get to understand more in deeper level how domination in technology and social media scarily can shift the narration with just a snap of a finger.
READ. IT.
October 7, 2024
Tough but important read. I wanted to learn more about Palestine as prior to last year, I admittedly knew very little and am wary about my sources of knowledge being social media. This book's focus was on technology and how Israel profits off of said tech to exports around the world. I did want a little more history and I wish the chapters were laid out better hence the 4 not 5, but this was still a great read to have a better understanding of what's happening in the Middle East and a lot of the history leading up to it. It's harrowing to read this all, knowing it was published in spring 2023 and knowing what happens now.
January 30, 2025
an extremely important book documenting how israel is implicated in virtually any human rights violation happening in the world in the past decades (think south africa, russia, rwanda, you name it) by exporting "battle tested" technologies
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