‘The Palestine Laboratory’ by Antony Loewenstein is a work which lays out in well researched detail the nature of the modern Israeli state.
It reveals how the occupation of Palestine is an essential adjunct to its economic success.
Despite international law, Israel has occupied Palestine since its 1967 victory.
Loewenstein lays bare the amoral stance of Israel, extending across the oppressive spectrum.
His chapter on weapon sales quotes an Israeli advisor in Guatemala from the 1980’s, “I don’t care what the Gentiles do with the arms. The main thing is that the Jews profit.”
It was when Israel saw the potential of the weapons trade as well as the importance of developing weapons for their own use that the Palestinian laboratory was born.
“Selling Israeli occupation to the world”
In chapter 4, Loewenstein reports on the Israeli techniques for ridding itself of African immigrants and deterring the arrival of more.
That experience was then used to develop a product which could be sold to others trying to keep refugees out.
The Israeli Heron drone, which might keep aloft for up to 40 hours, became a tool used by the EU in its struggle to keep refugees from its borders.
“In 2017, Israeli drone manufacturers accounted for 60 percent of the global drone market in the previous three decades.”
Drones allow the EU to monitor the Mediterranean without being caught up in rescuer missions.
The Israeli surveillance firm Cellebrite has sold its digital data extraction devices to at least 150 countries.
It claims as 43 percent of refugees arrived in Europe with smartphones their technology can determine the migrant’s journey and recent geographical and communication history.
The Israeli arms and security industry can compete with bigger nations because its technology can be battle tested on Palestinians.
Selling Death
“The centrality of Israeli arms to the country’s economic survival is impossible to over-estimate.”
Regimes which might hate their own Jewish populations but which admire the ethno-nationalism and oppressive abilities of Israel are major customers.
The white Rhodesian regime and the apartheid South African regime were both valued customers.
In 2021 Israeli cyber companies took 40% of the world’s funding.
The Pegasus spy technology, developed to spy on Palestinians, has been used enthusiastically by the Modi extremist regime in India as well as the oppressive Saudi regime and the UAE.
Social media companies don’t like Palestinians
Chapter 7 details the disappearing posts of pro-Palestinians from social media platforms.
“Perhaps the most blatant censorship, only partially corrected later, was Facebook owned Instagram removing many posts about the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the third holiest site in Islam, when Israeli forces stormed the compound as hundreds of Palestinians prayed there in May 2021.”
WhatsApp owned by Facebook, does not take action against hate groups of violent Israeli colonists.
Facebook appointed Jordana Cutler, a former advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and chief of staff at the Israeli embassy in Washington DC to look after Israeli and Jewish affairs but there’s no Palestine representative.
Losing credibility
In 2022 an Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, warned Israel that “… the age of the Jewish state paralyzing the world when it cries “anti-Semitism” was coming to a close.”
Disruption and violence are fertile soil for Israel.
The climate crisis, the displacement of peoples, surging immigration and surging temperatures will benefit Israeli border surveillance, drones and facial recognition and smart fences.
At the same time the extreme right has taken control of Israeli government with its belief that: “The Palestinians need to be monitored, imprisoned, tortured, and killed.”
But change may be occurring.
There is evidence that human rights are becoming important investment considerations, as important as climate change, and this is not good news for the occupiers of Palestine.
“Losing its reputation as a pariah nation, with public opinion in many countries steadily turning against the Jewish state, will be impossible without a radical change in its behavior and defense policies.”
Herzl knew that Palestine was already inhabited and that the Zionist project was a colonial project, quite acceptable in nineteenth century Europe. He thought that liberal values would be stronger than ethnic supremacy in his Utopia.
The present Israeli Government reflects the Ideology of Geyer rather than the Utopian Herzl
Extremists in the Netanyahu Cabinet have made it clear what they think of Palestinian lives and the right of the people to their land.
They have described them as animals, talked about obliterating them and transferring them into the Sinai or Lebanon.
Netanyahu, an American immigrant, is similar to the founder of the racist party Herzl envisaged in his utopian novel “Altneuland” (The Old New Land)., who he calls “Geyer” (carrion eating bird).
Published in 1902, it describes the 1923 election campaign in the Zionist state, focused upon the rights of its non-Jewish inhabitants.
It shows that Herzl, the Father of Zionism, was fully a
ware that the land was not empty and was inhabited by Arabs.
Herzl’s state recognised that all inhabitants, regardless of religion, race or gender, enjoyed equal rights and the right to vote.
However a new racist party is portrayed, led by Geyer, a character based on the Viennese anti-Semitic leader Karl Lueger. He wanted to remove the right of all non-Jews to vote.
“In “Altneuland,” in contrast, Herzl combined an ideal society with political realism.”
He had experienced racism in Europe and he knew that Jews could also be racists. He was however confident that the Zionist state would, in contrast to Europe, defeat such ideas.
The principles of equality and liberalism would be victorious.
Herzl envisioned an inclusive state that would be both Jewish and democratic, both a Jewish nation state and a state of all its citizens. Some Arabs would serve in key posts.
“While Geyer claims the exclusivity of citizens’ rights for Jews, the liberals justify giving equal rights to the Arab inhabitants based on liberal, universal principles and on Jewish sources. (“Ye shall have one ordinance, both for the stranger and for him that was born in the land” – Numbers 9:14). [Shlomo Avineri 9 Feb 2009 Haare
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Geyer has won for the time being.