Antony Loewenstein's Blog, page 14

Sky News interview on the need for Jewish dissent in a time of war

My interview with Murdoch’s Sky News on why Jewish dissent has never been more important during Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza and beyond.

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Strong Jewish voice opposing ethnically cleansing Gaza

Jewish Council of Australia is a great organisation, I’m on its Advisory Committee, and I’m proud that we just released this strong statement:

The Jewish Council of Australia strongly condemns Donald Trump’s suggestion the United States will ‘take over’ the Gaza Strip and move Palestinian people elsewhere. We furthermore condemn the cynical use of humanitarian language by Trump to justify his egregious plan. This language  adds insult to injury given the mounting evidence collected by human rights organisations about Israel’s gross violations of International Humanitarian Law in its 15-months long attack on the Gaza strip. Palestinians have a right to return and a right to remain in Gaza.

Dr Max Kaiser, Executive Officer, Jewish Council of Australia, said: 

‘Donald Trump’s declaration that the United States should ‘take over’ Gaza and ‘own it’ is a plan for ethnic cleansing. This reflects the most extreme and dangerous elements of Israel’s far-right agenda. Forced displacement of Gaza’s population would be a blatant violation of international law and an assault on the fundamental rights of Palestinians.

We unequivocally condemn Trump’s rhetoric and the push to erase Palestinian presence from their homeland. The idea that the US or any other power can claim ownership of Gaza is a grotesque colonial fantasy, one that disregards the suffering of millions and paves the way for further violence.

Palestinians have the right to return to their homes, to rebuild their lives, and to determine their own future. We call on the Australian government to reject this dangerous rhetoric and reaffirm its commitment to international law and Palestinian self-determination.’

Antony Loewenstein, independent journalist, author of The Palestine Laboratory , and Jewish Council of Australia Advisory Committee member, said:

‘The ethnic cleansing of Palestine has been a long-term dream of the Israeli Right and it’s a view shared by many in the Israeli public and Jewish Diaspora. We must stand against the forced removal of Palestinians from Gaza, the West Bank or Israel itself. What Trump and Netanyahu are proposing will not bring Israel security but in fact the opposite; growing global outrage against Jewish supremacy in Palestine dressed up as a humanitarian act.’

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CNN interview on Trump’s desire to remove Palestinians from Gaza

My CNN interview on Israel and Trump’s preposterous idea to take Palestinians out of Gaza.

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Al Jazeera English interview on Trump + Israel’s plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza

My interview on Al Jazeera English about Donald Trump and Netanyahu’s devious idea to remove Palestinians from Gaza.

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Breaking Points interview on the Palestine lab documentary

My interview on the popular YouTube news channel, Breaking Points, about my new film series, The Palestine Laboratory.

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Israeli-led AI caused carnage in Gaza

With the broadcast of my new film series, The Palestine Laboratory, South China Morning Post columnist Alex Ho writes about supposedly ethical US/Israeli AI versus the authoritarian Chinese AI model:

Predictably, the backlash against China’s DeepSeek has begun in America. But the most outlandish criticism must be the one trying to distinguish “authoritarian AI” from “democratic AI”.

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, the main rival of OpenAI, wrote on his personal website: “[China is] an authoritarian government that has committed human rights violations, has behaved aggressively on the world stage, and will be far more unfettered in these actions if they’re able to match the US in AI. Export controls are one of our most powerful tools for preventing this …”

Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO, wrote in The Washington Post: “We face a strategic choice about what kind of world we are going to live in: Will it be one in which the United States and allied nations advance a global AI that spreads the technology’s benefits and opens access to it, or an authoritarian one, in which nations or movements that don’t share our values use AI to cement and expand their power?”

But of course they would say that. DeepSeek’s two main AI platforms could potentially undermine their whole business model. They charge a fraction of the costs of using more advanced versions of Anthropic’s Claude AI and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The US firms’ software are closed, meaning no one except their engineers can view, modify or build on them.

DeepSeek’s is open-sourced; outside researchers and programmers can modify and build on its software. That’s why, as reported in Nature, the science journal, “scientists are flocking to DeepSeek-R1, a cheap and powerful AI ‘reasoning’ model” – from using it to assist with mathematical proofs to visualising data and building more effective cognitive-neuroscientific models.

Silicon Valley’s techno-lords used to argue for the universal benefits of being open and transparent. Now their richest and most powerful have jumped on Washington’s bandwagon about hi-tech being a priority of national security against “autocratic” China. They have become an integral part of America’s defence-intelligence industrial complex.

US-Israeli AI technologies were widely implicated in identifying bombing and human targets in the Gaza war that has been denounced as a genocide by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and several UN agencies.

“Gaza has been the ultimate showroom for the most sophisticated forms of Israeli defence, surveillance and killing machines”, Antony Loewenstein, author of the global bestseller The Palestine Laboratory, told me. “AI-driven warfare is a key part of this arsenal, partly delegating the act of state-sanctioned murder to a machine, but we should never forget that what’s led to mass death in Gaza, unleashed by the Israelis, is a desire of the Israeli government, military and much of the Israel public that Palestinians deserve neither life nor dignity.”

In The Nation magazine, influential journalist James Bamford wrote of Palantir, a darling of the AI investment craze in the US: “As one of the world’s most advanced data-mining companies, with ties to the CIA, Palantir’s ‘work’ was supplying Israel’s military and intelligence agencies with advanced and powerful targeting capabilities – the precise capabilities that allowed Israel to place three drone-fired missiles into three clearly marked aid vehicles.”

Loewenstein is the host of a new Al Jazeera English documentary series named after his book. The programme featured an interview with Meron Rapoport, who was part of an investigative team from the Israeli +972 Magazine, which first exposed the widespread use of AI-assisted targeting in the Gaza war.

The magazine also reported that “since October 7, the Israeli military has relied heavily on cloud and AI services from Microsoft and its partner OpenAI”.

Rapoport, who also cited the Israeli military use of Amazon’s cloud service, said in the documentary: “In this war, for a very junior Hamas militant, the collateral damage decided was between 15 and 20 [civilians] – his family and his neighbours could be killed in order to kill him. If it’s a senior Hamas militant, then the numbers [are] over 100, sometimes 300. And we know it happened.”

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Clips from part 1 of my film series, The Palestine Laboratory

Following the broadcast globally of my new documentary film, The Palestine Laboratory, various outlets have published some clips from part 1:

“My journey to the office should take 20 minutes but it takes me three and a half hours because of all the checkpoints”

I’ve just watched episode 1 of @antloewenstein‘s new film ‘The Palestine Laboratory’. Excellent. Well worth a watch. Find it here:https://t.co/kA5hkuWS7R https://t.co/gxLMgYURMv pic.twitter.com/DS4rJ8B7QR

— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) January 31, 2025

In this clip from ep. 1 of @antloewenstein’s new documentary series for Al Jazeera, Loewenstein speaks with Israel Ziv (Former IDF General), Meron Rapoport (Editor at +972 Magazine), and @paulbiggar (Co-founder of Tech for Palestine) about how Israel’s military uses AI technology… pic.twitter.com/wDtw5LQYkz

— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) February 1, 2025

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Al Jazeera English (@aljazeeraenglish)

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The Palestine Laboratory film part 1

This is part 1 of my documentary series, The Palestine Laboratory, made with the UK production company Black Leaf Films and director Dan Davies. It broadcast globally on Al Jazeera English.

This episode digs deep into how Israel uses the occupied, Palestinian Territories as a testing ground for the newest weapons and surveillance tech.

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The Palestine Laboratory documentary Episode 2 trailer

The world exclusive new trailer for episode 2 of my Al Jazeera English documentary series, The Palestine Laboratory, made with the extraordinary UK production company Black Leaf Films. It’s directed by the wonderful Dan Davies.

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Francesca Albanese on the Palestine lab

Francesca Albanese is the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories since 1967. She’s one of the most outspoken experts on Israel’s crimes in Gaza and beyond.

In two recent interviews, Albanese kindly mentions my book, The Palestine Laboratory, and urges people to read it.

Here’s the UK outlet, Novara Media:

Even if Israel stopped committing crimes today, it would have already put the entire human rights system in danger. Israel should be held accountable for what it has done to the Palestinians and what it has done to the world by, for example, selling weapons to dictatorships. I encourage everyone to read The Palestine Laboratory by Antony Loewenstein, a brilliant documentation that exposes how Israel has turned an entire population into a laboratory of guinea pigs on whom weapons and techniques could be tested and then sold globally. Israel is a big contributor to the militarisation of global societies.

US outlet, Zeteo:

Life at home is less intense than the public world Albanese inhabits. There are no pets because her husband “is allergic to the concept of dependence,” but plenty of books (she is rereading Antony Loewenstein’s The Palestine Laboratory) by literary figures of inspiration, including Edward Said and Primo Levi, who she feels especially close to as an Italian, and friends whom she once loved cooking for though she rarely has the time now.

 

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