‘The Palestine Laboratory’ by Antony Loewenstein

It’s strange that this book is at the same both aposite and urgent on the one hand, and rather overtaken by events on the other. It was written in 2023, before October 7 at a time of blithe confidence on the part of the Israeli government that Palestine had been ‘contained’ and when, Loewenstein would argue, it benefited Israel to have a proving ground for their technologies of surveillance and repression. I’m not sure that it’s still the case now. The supremacy of these technologies was found lacking on October 7, when men on motorbikes proved the vulnerabilities in high-tech solutions, and although the Israeli response demonstrates the sophistication of their weapons, the outcomes are just as blunt and primitive as war has ever been over centuries.

In this book Loewenstein argues that:

Israel is still often framed as a thriving if beleaguerered democracy and a key ally in the battle against extremism. Its status as a leading defense exporter is legendary, willing to militarily assist, arm, or train the majority of nations on earth…. Israel has perfected and led the “global pacification industry”, a term coined by Israeli-American writer and academic Jeff Halper in his book War against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification. He explains that the occupation is not a financial burden on the state but the exact opposite, both in terms of Palestine being an invaluable testing ground for new equipment on behalf of a global military hegemon serving other militaries across the globe (p. 206, 207)

He argues that Palestine has acted as a type of laboratory in which technologies and strategies can be ‘tried out’ on a subject population and then exported to other countries. Missile technology, facial recognition surveillance, software infiltration, concrete walls, drones – all have been tested on Gaza and the West Bank and their “success” has bolstered the Israeli arms industry. Israeli ubiquity across the whole arms manufacturing chain means that even countries wishing to distance themselves from it are implicated by the inclusion of small components in their technology purchases, as the Australian government tried to claim . The ‘War on Terror’ turbo-charged Western anxieties about terrorism, softening resistance amongst governments and their electors to surveillance and border militarization technologies that would have been rejected in the past. At the same time, Israel has been willing to sell their technology to any government that wished to purchase it, with no questions asked about the purpose to which it would be deployed.

The book ranges widely over different governments and regimes in order to bolster its argument. I found myself rather confused by the chapter titles, which seemed to signpost a progression of the argument, but which bore little relation to the material in the chapter. There are seven chapters:

1. Selling Weapons to Anybody Who Wants Them
2. September 11 Was Good for Business
3. Preventing an Outbreak of Peace
4. Selling Israel Occupation to the World
5. The Enduring Appeal of Israeli Domination
6. Israeli Mass Surveillance in the Brain of Your Phone
7. Social Media Companies Don’t Like Palestinians.

Of these chapters, Chapters 1, 2 4 and 5 were all variations on the same theme: that Israel could boast of the success of its military industry through its deployment against Palestinians, and it was prepared to sell it to anyone who wanted it. He draws on evidence from all over the world, but all to the same end. Chapters 6 and 7 were probably the most closely related to their titles, where he describes Israeli software development and its influence over social media companies to shut down Palestinian voices. I think that Chapter 3 ‘Preventing an Outbreak of Peace’ is probably the most pertinent to recent events as we see the implacability of the right wing of the Israeli government against any form of ceasefire, and Loewenstein’s book has caused me to see that there is an economic, as well as political, impetus for this. But the actual chapter 3 in his book said nothing about Palestine or peace, instead it was just a repetition of the preceding chapters, using other countries as examples.

There was one insight in particular that I took from the book. I had often wondered why far-right demonstrations in recent years have featured Israeli flags. Loewenstein argues that this is not through any affinity with Israel or Judaism – in fact, the opposite- but because Israel is a prime example of an ethnostate which has succeeded in emasculating a minority (or so they thought) through technology, brute force and surveillance without attracting world censure. And this is the methodology and example that Israel is exporting to dictators throughout the world.

So, an interesting book, exhaustively researched and exhausting to read, that was let down by a structure that promised a more nuanced argument than it delivered.

My rating: 7/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library.