| THE PALESTINE LABORATORY How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World Antony Loewenstein Verso, May 2023 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-83976-208-6 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-83976-208-X | 265pp. | HC | $29.95 | |
From the time of Israel's founding in 1948, the government of the nation has had two primary objectives: ensuring the nation's survival and making it as wealthy as possible. These objectives dovetail naturally, but they tend to conflict with concerns for himan rights. With some noteworthy exceptions, human-rights violations have not been a problem for Israel's leaders. As Ronen Bergman's 2018 book Rise and Kill First explains, its policy is to go after enemies of Israel wherever they may be. Wikipedia lists 275 incidents of assassination (some involving multiple targets) in places from Lillehammer, Norway to Montevideo, Uruguay.1
Israel accomplishes its aims by building innovative weapons systems, testing them in Gaza or the West Bank, and selling them worldwide. Its government cares little about whether the buyers are likely to use them to suppress dissent, and its roster of customers includes some of the most disreputible regimes in the world. These weapons systems include not just hardware such as guns like the Uzi, armored vehicles, fighter jets, and drones, but also surveillance software such as Pegasus. Developed and sold by the private NSO Group,2 that software is among the most effective at hacking into mobile phones and is used by a wide variety of nations from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe. Many of these nations are autocracies. The government of Israel, while proclaiming itself "the only democracy in the Middle East," is not bothered by NSO selling spyware to all comers. Although the government has close ties to NSO and other companies in the armaments business, its public stance is that there is no connection. This is convenient for both sides, as it lets Israel maintain a veneer of morality while companies profit by selling to ruthless regimes, thus bolstering Israel's economy.
The downside of this, of course, is that it undermines the ideals of Israel and its democratic allies. However, nominal democracies like the United States and Great Britain also have little problem overlooking Israel's human rights abuses, since their geopolitical aims are largely in accord with Israel's dominance in the Middle East. The hypocrisy has perpetuated the conflict in the Middle East, and it may lead to Israel's destruction. And it has kept the Palestinians in a permanent state of subjugation.
Outsourcing the occupation takes different forms and includes the Western-backed Palestinian Authority (PA) as a reliable enforcer of the status quo in the West Bank. During the late 2008 and early 2009 Gaza war, the PA brutally suppressed Palestinian protests against the conflict while Israel sent ground troops into Gaza. PA repression against its own people only grew in the following years. It now runs a police state in the West Bank while Hamas rules with brutality in Gaza. The Palestinians have few viable political alternatives. – Page 59 |
With the advent of social media as big moneymakers, Israel's repression of dissenting views has taken root in them as well. Meta's Facebook and Google's YouTube have become virtual playgrounds for the Zionist Project where videos showing IDF violence in Gaza proliferate while protests from Palestinians and others are typically deleted as "hate speech."
This book was twenty years in the making, and its author documents his case very thoroughly. The endnotes are extensive, and its index, while excellent, does omit some important entries, including the names of Honduras, Pakistan, Panama, and Thailand. Romania, while listed, is shown as page 175; it actually occurs oon page 176. There is also a list of Further Reading containing 31 entries.3 Grammatical errors are few. I give it top marks and condsider it a must read, but a keeper only for those dedicated to understanding the conflict in the Middle East.
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