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A review by naddie_reads
The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World by Antony Loewenstein
5.0
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:
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.
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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.