| 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 | |
These are some of the nations to which Israel has provided military weaponry, surveillance tools, or training. This support is typically episodic, and may be only of historical interest. And in some cases (e.g. Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia), Israel supported rebels freeing their nation from a vicious colonial ruler. Its most significant collaborations are with South Africa and India. Each of those collaborations is covered at some length here. But, because of this book's wide range, neither gets the coverage it deserves. Especially worthy of more depth is Israel's co-development of nuclear weapons with South Africa.1
Washington was not initially fully aware of the extent of Israel's nuclear collaboration with South Africa, and Israel secretiveness continues to this day; its nuclear facility at Dimona has never been inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Israel is presumed to have more than 200 nuclear weapons. During the first meeting between US president Joe Biden and then Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett in August 2021, Washington reaffirmed the long-standing understanding that Washington would not pressure Israel to Join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or to give up its weapons. Israel agreed not to conduct any nuclear tests or threaten nuclear strikes while maintaining its "nuclear ambiguity." – Page 122 |
| Nation | Time Period | Notes from book |
|---|---|---|
| Time periods are approximate. | ||
| Afghanistan | 2001-2021 | "Xtend was on a roll when the US Pentagon signed a deal for dozens of its drones in 2021 that specialized in indoor and urban areas use. Xtender, which had been tested at Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, one of the biggest military installations in the world, was designed to infiltrate buildings without risking the lives of soldiers. US special forces used the company's drones in Syria and Afghanistan. Some of the more aggressive Israeli killer drones have been used in foreign war zones, including Afghanistan, where Germany, Britain, Canada, and Australia used Israeli drones to hunt the Taliban and other militants." (p. 83) |
| Argentina | 1972-1985 | "It had been a familiar story across the region from the 1970s, with Israel keen to partner with states such as Argentina, which under Juan Perón had welcomed many high-profile Nazis—even including Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann. (p. 38) |
| Azerbaijan | 2018-now | "Netanyahu visited Azerbaijan in December 2016 and President Ilham Aliyev began using Pegasus in 2018." (p. 166) |
| Bangladesh | Unknown | "The countries where Cellebrite surveillance tech has been used against critics, journalists, dissidents, or human rights workers include Botswana, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Uganda. This includes the Universal Forensic Extraction Device (UFED) hacking tool which allows the extraction of information from mobile phones. In Bangladesh the hardware was used by the Rapid Action Battalion, a notorious paramilitary unit, which has been accused of extrajudicial killings and disappearances. When this connection was exposed in 2021, the company quickly announced that sales to Bangladesh were being suspended..." (p. 170) |
| Chile | 1973-1990 | "Israel's role in Pinochet's brutality is still clouded in some mystery since Israel refuses to release a full accounting of its role, but enough documents have been released to reveal a sordid relationship between Israel and the Chilean junta. Israel did not just train Chilean personnel to aid the repression of its own people. After a US arms embargo to Chile passed the US Cogress in 1976, a cable from the US embassy in Chile on April 24, 1980, acknowledged that Israel was a major arms supplier to Pinochet. (p. 20) |
| DRC | 2015 | "Black Cube was hired in 2015 by the Democratic Republic of Congo's then President Joseph Kabila after the corporation's director, Dan Zorella, a former member of an elite IDF intelligence unit, met him to establish Operation Coltan. Its aim was to spy on his opponents, which included any family members who criticized him in private." (p. 175) |
| El Salvador | 2020-now | "El Salvador's pro-Israel leader Nayib Bukele was accused of using NSO tools to target dozens of activists and journalists who were investigating state corruption from 2020." (p. 166) |
| Guatemala | 1980-1996 | "One of the most effective waysthat Israel assisted the Guatemalan regime was the installation of a computer listening center by the private Israeli company Tadiran Israel Electronics Industries. It became operational in late 1979 or early 1980 and housed the names of at least 80 percent of the population. The Israeli media reported that the aim was to 'follow up theguerilla movement in the capital,' and there were allegations that the facility was connected to the US Army's Southern Command at Fort Gulick in the Panama Canal Zone. It was a highly sophisticated machine for its time and could detect changes in the use of power or water in private homes and therefore note anti-government activity if a printing press was in use." (pp. 39-40) |
| Haiti | 1957-1986 | "Another example: Haiti under François 'Papa Doc' Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude 'Baby Doc' Duvalier, whose family ruled between 1957 and 1986, received Israel's Uzi machine guns, armored vehicles, and devices for placing weapons systems on aircraft. The Duvalier dynasty killed between 30,000 and 60,000 people, but despite this, to curry favor with Papa Doc, Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs had a book by him translated." (p. 35) |
| Honduras | 1980-? | "With Reagan's war on communism, and Washington's partnering with right-wing death squads from Nicaragua to Honduras and El Salvador to Panama, Israel's role was viewed as indispensable in providing both weapons and on-the-ground experience." (p. 37) |
| India | 2015-2020 | "The growing ties between Israel and India were represented in raw financial terms. Between 2015 and 2020, Israel's leading weapons export market was India, at 43 percent of total sales, and in 2020 India was Israel's largest purchaser of weaponry. In 2019, Israel was named as the eighth biggest arms dealer in the world. Israeli Heron drones fly over Kashmir, just as they fly over the Palestinian occupied terrorities." (p. 126) |
| Indonesia | 2020-2021 | "Cellebrite had sold its tools to Indonesia, a Muslim nation with no diplomatic relations to Israel, and the country had used them to target political opponents and activists, including in West Papua, as well as members of the gay community who used dating apps such as Grindr." (p. 171) |
| Mexico | 2021 | "From a private Mexican company hacking a journalist, despite NSO's claim that it sold only to governments, to advocates of a soda tax that aimed to tackle the huge amount of sugary drinks consumed by Mexicans, it was increasingly clear that the kinds of people being monitored had no connection to crime or terrorism." (p. 149) |
| Morocco | 2020-2021 | "Pegasus was used by the Moroccan regime to target its critics, including outspoken opponents of the government who ended up in prison on bogus charges. Israel and Morocco normalized ties in late 2020, with the understanding that the US would would recognize Morocco's disputed control of Western Sahara. To sweeten the deal, Israel sold kamikaze drones to Morocco and in the past has sold a missile defense system." (p. 152) |
| Myanmar | 2017-2019 | "Although Israel claimed to have stopped selling any equipment to Myanmar in 2018, the exact nature or truthfulness of such statements was unclear due to extreme secrecy around weapons dealings in Israel. The ties between the two nations remained strong, with Myanmar's ambassador to Israel being one of the few foreign dignitaries who attended a ceremony in 2017 in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc in the West Bank to commemorate fifty years of Israeli occupation. Myanmar's ambassador to Israel admitted in 2017 that Israel had imposed no restrictions on the weapons sold to them." (p. 54) |
| Nicaragua | 1979-1984 | "The brutal Somoza family ruled Nicaragua from 1936 until 1979, and Israel armed the regime until the bitter end. When the Sandanistas assumed control in the 1980s, and US President Ronald Reagan unleashed a campaign of terror in Central America in his war against communism, Israel was asked to take a much larger role in the region and join the US in its campaign against the Sandanistas. American Jewish groups, some with ties to the Somoza era, spread falsehoods about supposed anti-semitism in Nicaragua that led to even greater US and Israeli backing for the brutal contras." (p. 37) |
| The Philippines | 2022 | "In 2022 Eitay Mack wrote to the company and Israel's Defense Ministry to remind it where Cellebrite equipment had ended up, including Russia, where journalists are pursued, and the Philippines, where countless reporters have been murdered during the reign of President Rodrigo Duterte. Neither the Israeli government nor Cellebrite could claim ignorance of what might happen to sophisticated surveillance gear in the hands of autocrats." (p. 169) |
| Poland | 2017 | "Poland's anticorruption body bought Pegasus after Prime Minister Beata Szydlo met with Netanyahu in 2017." (p. 166) |
| Rhodesia | 1950-? | "Israel sold defense equipment to disreputible regimes from the outset. These states include Burma in the 1950s in its war against a communist insurgency. Its most succesful early weapon was the Uzi gun, first designed in the late 1940s shortly after the birth of Israel. It has sold Uzis in more than ninety countries and they're featured in the militaries of Sri Lanka, Rhodesia [today's Zimbabwe], Belgium, and Germany." (p. 28) |
| Romania | 2016-2022 | "Black Cube was also hired to spy on a Romainian state prosecutor in 2016. Zorella claimed that his company was working as an 'arm of' that country's intelligence service. The Israeli company had been hired by a Romainian senior official to target the country's former top corruption prosecutor. The mission failed, and three Black Cube employees, including Zorella, were given suspended sentences in a Romaianian court in 2022." (p. 176) |
| Rwanda | 1994 | "The end of the Cold War did not see any less Israeli collusion with violent autocracies. Israeli human rights lawyer Eitay Mack is trying to find out what role, if any, the Jewish state played in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. There is a long history of Israel knowing and ignoring Hutu massacres of Tutsi as far back as the 1960s. Evidence indicates that Israel continued sending weapons such as grenades, guns, and ammunition even when the genocide had started on April 6, 1994. Between 800,000 and 1 million Rwandans were massacred in the next one hundred days. Mack filed a petition in the Israeli High Court in May 2020 demanding that the government open a criminal investigation into both the arms dealers and government officials who aided and abetted the Rwandan crimes against humanity. He even had a video interview with the pilot who flew the weapons into Rwanda, but this evidence was dismissed by the court on national security grounds." (pp. 46-47) |
| South Africa | 1967-1984 | "Israel ignored the UN Security Council-imposed arms embargo on South Africa while telling the world that it was complying. The deputy director of Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Hanan Bar-On, sent a telegram to the ministry director, David Kimchi, on August 29, 1984, to explain: 'The Israeli policy ... is that we do not in any way admit [such sales] to an Israeli or to a foreign actor and certainly not to an American Congressman, even if he is considered a friend and the relationship with him is supposedly intimate.' The most secretive aspect of the relationship was the mutual support given to each other's nuclear capability. France and Britain provided essential materials in assisting Israel develop nuclear weapons and full-scale production began after the Six-Day War. With an abundant supply of uranium, South Africa had a solid base on which to build its own stockpile, but Israel provided technical expertise. According to former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe, South Africa allowed Israel to test nuclear weapons in the Indian Ocean in 1979, though Israel denied doing so. Israel even offered to sell nuclear warheads to South Africa in the 1970s (in a deal that never went ahead.)" (pp. 121-122) |
| Sri Lanka | 1984-2009 | "Israel his thus fully embraced the 'war on terror' and richly profited from it. One of the more successful though bloody counterinsurgency battles of the early twenty-first century was the Sri Lankan government's destruction of the Tamil Tigers militant group. Israel played a key, though largely unpublicized, part in Colombo's successful campaign in a civil war that killed and disappeared more than 200,000 people, mostly Tamils, over a quarter century that ended in 2009. Israel sold Kfir fighter jets and trained the Special Task Force, a brutal unit of the Sri Lankan police. Sri Lanka borrowed the Israeli playbook during the last stages of the civil war and ignored calls by NGOs, human rights organizations, and foreign governments to cease violence. The military stopped when the tamil Tigers were completely decimated and Velupillai Prabhakaran, its leader, killed." (p. 52) |
| Uganda | 2019-2021 | "Israel has a long history of arming and backing Uganda's despots. NSO's head Shalev Hulio personally visited Uganda in 2019 to seal a deal with the dictatorship worth between US$10 million and US$20 million." (p. 153) |
Israel is not Nazi Germany. Memory of the Holocaust is seared into the hearts of too many of its people for that. And yet, there are parallels. Germany felt emasculated by the Treaty of Versailles, which forbade it developing weapons of war—and provided the incentive for it to do exactly that when it had the chance. Israel too derives much of its self-worth from an arsenal of powerful weapons. And its leaders exhibit the same attitude of defiance toward the world community and a willingness to occupy territory not their own.
The situation is troubling, the more so since many other nations are also defiant of international order and turning isolationist. That is in large part why Anthony Loewenstein wrote this book.
This book is written as a warning of the frightening world that could be born if Israeli-style ethnonationalism continues its ascent in a centuryalready dominated by unaccountable state power from Russia and Israel to China and the United States. Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and the unprecedented nature of Western outrage and sanctions against it, indicates what is possible when there is unquestioning uniformity of opinion against an enemy state's actions. It's inconceivable that similar boycott, divestment, and sanctions initiatives would be taken gainst other huamn rights abusers, such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel—all friends of Washington and London. Our friends can kill and maim with impunity. – Page 212 |
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