The Palestine Laboratory
How Israel Exports the technology of occupation around the world.
The book is written by Antony Loewenstein, a Jewish Australian-German freelance investigative journalist, author, and filmmaker. I have highlighted the bits which I believe are relevant in gaining a better understanding of the current situation in Palestine.
“South Africa’s apartheid lasted 46 years. Israel’s is at 72 and counting”
The book opens with the author recalling, as a Jewish boy growing up, the intense pressure to support Israel. The overt racism against Palestinians, the cult-like pressure to support Israel’s Zionist agenda and the dominant narrative of impending fear of all Jews being under attack were all key motivations for Antony to investigate the truth.
For clarity, to any readers that are new to this topic. Judaism is a religion. Zionism is a political ideology that believes that the Jews ought to have a nation-state to call their own. In summary, Judaism + Land = Zionism. You can be Jewish without being a Zionist, but you cannot be Zionist without being Jewish. If you’d like a more in-depth background summary, I like Red_AtNights explanation in this Reddit forum.
Anyways, back to the book. The author talks about how Israel has increasingly gotten worse in its oppression against Palestine. This was evidenced by condemnation from Human Rights Watch in a report published in 2021 which stated “authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity. In certain areas, as described in this report, these deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”
As a result of this growing illiberalism on Israel’s part, its behaviour is becoming harder to deny and even harder to ignore. In 2021, a quarter of US Jews surveyed agreed that Israel was an apartheid state. Even the publisher of Haaretz, Israel’s most progressive, albeit Zionist, newspaper, admitted: “The product of Zionism, the state of Israel, is not a Jewish and democratic state but instead has become an apartheid state, plain and simple”.
Israeli Military Technology.
Israel has developed a world-class weapons industry with equipment conveniently tested on Palestinians, then marketed as “battle-tested”. The Palestine Laboratory is a signature Israeli selling point. Plainly put, it is a marketing advantage. The driving force of the defence industry is that as long as Israel is in conflict with Palestine, the longer they can sell this type of technology.
Pegasus mobile phone hacking software, built by Israeli cyber firm NSO group. Elbit Systems, Israel’s biggest defence company was showing a promotional video about killer drones, which have been used in Israel’s wars against Gaza and over the West Bank. Israel’s arms sales in 2021 were the highest on record, up 55% over the previous two years to US$11.3 billion. Europe was the biggest recipient of these weapons, even before Russia invaded Ukraine, followed by Asia and the Pacific. The result of this is that Israel is now one of the top ten weapons dealers in the world.
Israeli technology was sold as the solution to unwanted populations at the US–Mexico border where the Israeli company Elbit was a major player in repelling migrants. European governments also wanted to monitor refugees, so Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) drones were employed for the task.
In 2022, Israel installed a remote-controlled system for crowd control in Hebron, a tool with the ability to fire tear gas, sponge-tipped bullets, and stun grenades at people. It was created by the Israeli company Smart Shooter, which claims to successfully use artificial intelligence when finding targets.
The IDF uses extensive facial recognition with a growing network of cameras and mobile phones to document every Palestinian in the West Bank. Starting in 2019, Israeli soldiers used the Blue Wolf app to capture Palestinian faces, which were then compared to a massive database of images dubbed the “Facebook for Palestinians”. In 2022, Soldiers in the West Bank were instructed to enter the details and photos of at least fifty Palestinians into the Blue Wolf system every shift and were not allowed to end their shift until they did so. There was no security rationale for these actions. This is a similar set-up to what China does against the Uighurs in its Xinjiang province, using surveillance and technology to both track and intimidate the residents, though Beijing receives far more international condemnation than the Jewish state.
Another one of Israel’s innovations is the “skunk water” drone, a form of liquid emitted from a water cannon that leaves a disgusting smell on clothes and bodies for a long time. Israeli firm Aeronautics was behind this innovation, a technique that had been already used in the West Bank and Jerusalem to deter protestors.
In summary, Israel has sold so much defence equipment to so many nations that it hopes to insulate itself from any political backlash to its endless occupation of Palestine. Allies, whether real or transactional, have given Israel the protection it craves from international damnation or appearances at the International Criminal Court.
Money over Morals
Israel’s profit-making approach to war has historically been money over morals. The sheer number of dictatorships with whom Israel has had relations is staggering. Israel was complicit in Pinochet’s regime in Chile where at least 5000 were killed and more than 30,000 were tortured during his reign of terror between 1973 and 1990. It later transpired (thanks to released CIA docs) that Israel did not just train Chilean personnel to aid the repression of its people, it was a major arms supplier to Pinochet.
During the Rwandan genocide, the Israeli government dispatched a medical team to assist survivors in Rwanda, however, the mission was all for show and in reality, the government had shipped weapons to the brutal Hutu regime which had killed 800,000 Tutsis in 100 days. In the shipments were Uzi submachine guns and hand grenades, both before and during the genocide.
In Indonesia, despite the death of at least half a million people as part of an anti-communist government purge, Israel developed close ties with General Suharto, who took full power in 1967. Romania, under tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu, who was openly anti-semitic BTW did not stop Israel from developing friendly relations for the sake of cash monies. In the aftermath of the 1967 war, Israel hatched a deal with Paraguay, then a dictatorship that provided a home to nazi war criminals (including the infamous Dr. Joseph Mengele, AKA the angel of death who experimented on and butchered hundreds of Jews in Auschwitz). The proposed deal involved paying 60,000 Palestinians in Gaza (10% of the entire population) to move to Paraguay.
One of the most notorious massacres of the Guatemalan regime occurred at Dos Erres in December 1982. Following the slaughter of three hundred villagers, their skulls were smashed with sledgehammers and bodies were thrown down a well. The 1999 UN Truth Commission, after visiting the area to exhume the bodies, detailed in its forensics report that “all ballistic evidence recovered corresponded to bullet fragments from firearms and pods of Galil rifles, made in Israel.”.
In 2015 a United Nations report confirmed that Israeli weapons were fueling South Sudan’s civil war and in 2018, Myanmar was accused by the United Nations 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 though, and in 2015 a secret delegation from Myanmar visited Israel’s defence industries and naval and air bases to negotiate deals for drones, a mobile phone-hacking system, rifles, military training, and warships. What takes the piss even more, is that the same year Israel signed an education pact with Myanmar that allowed both nations to “cooperate to develop programs for the teaching of the Holocaust and its lessons of the negative consequences of intolerance, racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia.” Thankfully, public pressure forced the Israelis to abandon the pact the following year.
In 2019, Israeli lawyer, Eitay Mack filed a freedom of information request to gain documents from the Ministry of Defence about its relationship with Haiti under the Dictator Duvalier but the request was denied by the Israeli courts. Tel Aviv District Court Judge, Hagai Brenner, when rejecting the request in February 2021 claimed that releasing the documents could AND I QUOTE “Greatly embarrass the state”. Although aiding ethnonationalist regimes was not the sole focus of Israeli foreign policy, countless examples show how other nations aiming to target one ethnic group over another was a constant feature in the list of states that Israel armed and trained. As a result, Israel’s image as a state of Holocaust survivors in need of protection has gradually eroded and grown into an imperialist militarist arm of the West.
Israelification
Following 9/11, the US looked to Israel as the pinnacle of counter-terrorism, since it has been ‘fighting Islamic terrorism’ for decades (i.e., occupying Palestine). Since the initiation of the ‘War on Terror’ there has been a steady Israelification of US security services. In 2008, Netanyahu gave a speech at Israel’s Bar Ilan University and affirmed this sentiment stating “We are benefitting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Tours and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq”.
Israelificatoin came in the form of Israel offering training programs via the ADL (Anti-Defamation League) which primarily targets critics of the Jewish state. This program is marketed to police forces to repress dissent and teaches them things like the ‘fatal knee on the neck’ technique.
After the murder of George Floyd by Derrick Chauvin, the ADL senior management recommended ending the program in a draft memo “In light of very real police brutality at the hands of militarised police forces in the US, we must ask ourselves difficult questions like whether we are contributing to the problem. We must ask ourselves why it is necessary for American Police, enforcing American laws, would need to meet with members of the Israeli military. We must ask ourselves, if, upon returning home, those we train are more likely to use force”.
Birth of the Jewish state of Israel
The history of Zionist militarism began before the state of Israel formed. The backers of a Jewish state immediately recognised the benefits of developing weapons for their own benefit and then selling and promoting them to a global market. The Palestine laboratory was born. The birth of Israel in 1948 was a miracle for many Jews around the world and a catastrophe for Palestinians. On 14th May 1948, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel, the first in 2000 years. On the same day, the US government recognised its legitimacy – however, this wasn’t a genuine and meaningful action. It was all to do with geopolitics – namely, that Western interests in the Middle East would be assured if the Jewish state was over in that area of the world.
The extent of the carnage inflicted on the Palestinian population between 1947-1949 was incalculable. At least 750,000 civilians out of a population of 1.9 million were forcibly expelled. Palestinians refer to this event as the Nakba. Over seven months, 531 villages were destroyed and 15,000 people were killed. The remaining Palestinians suffered beatings, rape and imprisoned. The lack of accountability for Israel’s actions in 1948 strengthens its beliefs that the tools of colonisation and occupation are globally attractive because few nations or international bodies have seriously tried to hold Israel accountable for the injustices caused then or after the Six-day War in 1967.
In 1967, Israel rapidly took over the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and Golan Heights which set the country on a military path which hasn’t ever stopped. Since then, Israel has served as a kind of ‘combat laboratory’ for the US. Israel has worked closely with (for) Washington for decades, often operating in places where the US preferred covert support rather than public backing. For example, Israel supported the police forces in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Costa Rica during the Cold War when the US Congress had blocked US agencies from officially doing so.
Zionism
The father of Zionism, Theodore Herzl, wrote in his seminal 1896 pamphlet, ‘The Jewish State’ “There (in Palestine) we shall be a sector of the wall of Europe against Asia, we shall serve as the outpost of civilisation against barbarism”. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barah, used similar rhetoric describing Israel a “villa in the middle of a jungle” arguing that Israel was a civilised nation among Muslim savages in the Middle East.
The reason behind Israel’s engagement with Lebanon was justified at the time as based on national security grounds. However, the real reason, detailed in Thomas Friedman’s book ‘From Beirut to Jerusalem’ is that the PLO Research Centre (which had no guns or fighters) contained something far more dangerous to Israel – books about Palestine, old records and land deeds belonging to Palestinians families, photographs and historical archives about Arab life in Palestine and most importantly, maps of pre-1948 Palestine with every Arab village on it before the state of Israel came into being and erased most of them. The Research Centre held most of Palestine’s credentials of being a nation and was a key target for Israel.
This Israeli Starting to Look Bad
The world is taking notice of Israel whose image is deteriorating in many Western nations. In America, a survey conducted in 2021 by the Jewish Electorate Institute found that 34% of Jews agreed that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is similar to racism in the United States. 25% agreed that Israel is an apartheid state and 22% agreed that Israel is committing genocide.
Unit 8200 is the intelligence unit of the IDF and is the Israeli equivalent of America’s National Security Agency (NSA). In 2014, an open letter written by its veterans was sent to PM Benjamin Netanyahu and Chief of Staff Benny Gantz, forty-three reserve soldiers explained why they refused to serve in the occupied territories. It read in part:
“The Palestinian population under military rule is completely exposed to espionage and surveillance by Israeli intelligence. While there are severe limitations on the surveillance of Israeli citizens, the Palestinians are not afforded this protection. There’s no distinction between Palestinians who are, and are not, involved in violence. Information that is collected and stored harms innocent people. It is used for political persecution and to create divisions within Palestinian society by recruiting collaborators and driving parts of Palestinian society against itself.”
In 2021, Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to US Secretary of State Colin Powell, declared that Israel might not exist in twenty years’ time because it is a “strategic liability of the first order for the United States” and becoming an “apartheid state.”
Setting up the Laboratory
The most literal example of separatism is the encirclement of Gaza, trapping more than 2 million Palestinians behind high fences, under constant drone surveillance, infrequent missile attacks, and largely closed borders enforced by Israel and Egypt. The barrier around the territory was first built in 1994 and has undergone a range of upgrades since (though it was destroyed by Palestinians in 2001). Today its population has been placed in a forced experiment of control where the latest technology and techniques are tested.
For Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, Israel controls the population registry, leaving them at the mercy of Israeli occupation whims. Israel has controlled this registry since 1967 with absolute power over granting Palestinian passports and ID cards and impacting whether they’re allowed to enter or exit the territory. Because Israel no longer processes Palestinian family reunification requests, thousands of Palestinians live as noncitizens and can’t access jobs, healthcare, proper education, or the legal system.
The author talks of his time living in Israel and travelling across the West Bank daily, he recalls “Many checkpoints through which Palestinians are forced to travel to access their schools, workplaces, or Israel if they are fortunate enough to get one of the few work permits handed out by the Jewish state, use facial recognition technology and biometric details to document their every move.”
AnyVision is an Israeli start-up that secretly monitors Palestinians across the West Bank with a range of cameras, the locations of which are not acknowledged by the company or Israel. Artificial intelligence thus merges with biometrics and facial recognition at Israeli checkpoints throughout the West Bank (which BTW there are 593 checkpoints and roadblocks across the West Bank according to the UN). AnyVision claims that its technology does not discriminate based on race or gender and that it creates only “ethical” products. When asked by NBC News in 2019 about its work in the West Bank, CEO Eylon Etshtein initially threatened to sue them, denied there even was an occupation, and accused the NBC reporter of being paid by Palestinian activists. He later apologised for his outburst…
Killing or injuring Palestinians should be as easy as ordering pizza. That was the logic behind an Israeli military–designed app in 2020 that allowed a commander in the field to send details about a target on an electronic device to troops who would then quickly neutralise that Palestinian. The colonel who worked on the project, Oren Matzliach, told the Israel Defense website that the strike would be “like ordering a book on Amazon or a pizza in a pizzeria using your smartphone.”.
South Africa and Israel
There was no better political, military, diplomatic, and ideological alliance between like-minded nations than Israel and apartheid South Africa. The South African Jewish community was strongly pro-Israel and became the biggest financial backer of Israel per capita after 1948. One of the key architects of apartheid in South Africa, former prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd, wrote in the Rand Daily Mail in 1961 that “Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state” after taking Palestine from the Arabs who “had lived there for a thousand years.”
Near the end of South Africa’s apartheid regime and the first democratic election in 1994, Israel was one of the last nations to maintain a relationship with the white minority regime. Nelson Mandela took notice. In a 1993 speech to the delegates of the Socialist International, Mandela said, “The people of South Africa will never forget the support of the state of Israel to the apartheid regime.”
Terrible Technologies.
In 2021, nearly two hundred Facebook employees signed an open letter demanding that the company take steps to ensure that Palestinian voices were protected. A year later, Facebook released a report which found that Meta (the parent company) during the conflict between Israel and Hamas restricted the human rights of Palestinian users, particularly, the freedom of expression, due to “unintentional bias,”. It was revealed that far more Arabic content was deleted compared to Hebrew posts on Facebook and Instagram due to a lack of Arabic speakers, institutional bias and flawed machine learning.
This ‘unintentional bias’ in Silicon Valley is not exclusive to just social media. Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Waze show little data about the Palestinian landscape. While Israeli settlements are mostly recognised and noted on the maps, hundreds of Palestinian villages simply do not exist on them.
It was not until 2018 that Israel allowed 3G mobile phone technology to be used across the West Bank, and it is still unclear when 4G will be rolled out despite 5G being the normal network standard across the West, including Israel.
On the topic of Facebook being terrible, in Myanmar, it allowed genocidal posts to remain visible and amplified messages of hate against the Muslim minority Rohingya people. This led to army-directed mass violence against the Rohingya in 2016 and 2017. Facebook was forced to apologise in 2018 for its role in facilitating the genocide. An Amnesty International report in 2022 found that it “knew or should have known” that its algorithms increased hatred against the Rohingya in 2017 and demanded reparations from the company to those who suffered.
