A review by bookishmillennial
The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World by Antony Loewenstein

challenging dark emotional informative sad slow-paced
This was written and published *before* October 7, 2023. I want to get that out of the way before anyone wants to argue that ethnic cleansing and genocide is a form of self-defense. The atrocities you will read about trace back decades & it’s absolutely abhorrent.

Verso provided free e-copies of this book & I’m unsure if they still are, but I highly recommend this book regardless of how you get a copy!

This book draws out exactly how Israel has supported past and current genocides and not only how Israel is actively committing a genocide against Palestinians, but the global impacts of this occupation. It’s eye-opening and honestly, it disheartened me a bit to see how far Israel’s reach goes.

This book explained Israel’s role in monumentally devastating violence in so many other countries, including Romania, Haiti, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Argentina, Colombia, South Africa, Rwanda, Chile, and more.

I simply became more and more disillusioned of any good faith or will of Israel as Loewenstein outlined each of these horrible revelations (to me, someone who continues to learn). I also felt less & less convinced that this was *complicated*, as so many people have argued. Genuinely seems like the age-old case of prioritizing greed & power under the guise of “protection”

“Israel’s claim to be a thriving democracy in the heart of the Middle East is challenged by the facts. All media outlets in Israel, along with publishers and authors, must submit stories related to foreign affairs and security to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) chief military censor before publication. No other Western country has such a system. It’s an archaic regulation that began soon after Israel was born. The censor has the power to entirely block the story or partially redact it.”
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