Takeaways - Antony Loewenstein's The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports The Technology Of Occupation Around The World
While Antony Loewenstein’s work is relatively short, The Palestine Laboratory is no less a devastating indictment of how Israel uses weaponry and systems of surveillance to control, abuse, and kill Palestinians in Gaza and The West Bank. It delves deeply into the intertwined relationship that Israel has with their own defense industry as well as with their surveillance technology industry, and when these products are sold — to pretty much any bidder with cash — it helps the country garner support globally for diplomatic favors.
Here are four key takeaways from The Palestine Laboratory:
While condemning the attacks of October 7th, 2023, by Hamas that took the lives of 1,200 innocent Israelis, Loewenstein digs deeper by returning to the 1948 Nakba, an event he writes that “still resonates with Palestinians today (x).”
In addition, Loewenstein himself is overwhelmed by the gruesome response of Israel to October 7th, a scorched-earth approach, where at least 90,000 Palestinians have now died. (That’s a grossly inaccurate number, as we do not know the full scale of death, given those who are still buried beneath the rubble.)Israel’s attack on Palestinians has also allowed them to do more testing of new weapons, proof of which can easily be found on social media. This testing of weaponry has proven to have lethal repercussions at a mass scale. One Israeli intelligence officer said, “[It’s a] mass-assassination factory (xii).”
Israeli’s arms deals goes hand-in-hand with its development as an ethnonationalist state (something, incidentally, that was not a foregone conclusion. To read more on that rise of a militaristic form of Zionism, see Jonathan Graubart’s Jewish Self-Determination beyond Zionism: Lessons from Hannah Arendt and Other Pariahs). As a result, this form of the state subjugates, arrests, tortures, and kills Palestinians as they have no place in it. In short, Israel is an apartheid state. Those are not my words, but those of B’Tselem, Israel’s most well-known human rights organization. In 2021, they wrote that there is a “regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. This is apartheid (2).” Furthermore, Loewentstein notes, “A quarter of US Jews in a 2021 survey agreed that Israel was an apartheid state (2).”
Even the far right, with the likes of Michael Spencer here in the U.S., have positive things to say about the nation-state. Spencer has even called himself a “White Zionist (2).”
One expert on the arms industry, Andrew Feinstein, explained that he attended a
Paris Air Show in 2009 where Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest defense company, showed footage of film of a drone strike that killed innocent Palestinians, including children, as a way to advertise their products. Imagine if, as Feinstein explained, companies like Lockheed Martin or another U.S. defense company showed “actual footage of bombing innocent civilians in Yemen or a drone strike anywhere in the Middle East (8).”
A burgeoning defense industry coincided with the rise of Zionist militarism even before Israel’s actual founding. The perfect location for developing these weapons and testing them out became one place: The Palestine Laboratory.
With the birth of Israel came incalculable suffering for the Palestinians. As Loewenstein notes, “Between 1947 and 1949, at least 750,000 civilians out of a population of 1.9 million were forcibly expelled and made refugees beyond the borders of the new state . . . Over seven months, 531 villages were destroyed and 15,000 people were killed. The remaining Palestinians suffered beatings, rape, and internment (25).”
Meanwhile, Israel was already selling its defense products abroad by the 1950s. By the mid-1960s, they were selling to both “democracies and despots.” (26) At that point in time, Israel sold arms to places like Iran and apartheid South Africa. They continue to sell arms and surveillance technologies to nefarious despotic nations to this day.
In short, Israel has become one of the top 10 arms exporters in the world, and operates with a realpolitik logic when developing these brokered relationships abroad.
As Chapter 4 notes, Israel sells the notion of “occupation” to the rest of the world through their arms products and surveillance technologies. For example, the EU has partnerships with Israeli defense companies to use drones against those attempting to reach their shores. That’s not the only technology that the EU has purchased. With the EU’s enthusiasm for drones, defense weaponry, and surveillance technologies, it raises serious questions about its claims to uphold human rights, especially for migrants.
As you can see, I have much to say about the content of this book. Loewenstein wrestles with his own beliefs as someone who was raised as a “liberal Zionist,” and explains what solutions he has in mind for the region.
One of the most chilling conclusions is how ethnonationalist models, like that of Israel, pose as a danger to democracies abroad. We have seen the onslaught of this ideology crop up in a multitudes of places (most worryingly, the US), as Loewenstein warns. Such a model should neither be revered nor be a goal. That’s why a critical eye of Israel’s past as a nation-state and how it functions today becomes a necessity.