The Palestine Laboratory Quotes

“Ethnonationalist ideology grows when accountable democracy withers. Israel is the ultimate model and goal.”
― Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

“One of those prominent Jewish dissidents was Ronnie Kasrils, who served as the minister for intelligence between 2004 and 2008 under an ANC government. He told the Guardian that the comparison between the two nations wasn’t accidental. “Israelis claim that they are the chosen people, the elect of God, and find a biblical justification for their racism and Zionist exclusivity,” he said. “This is just like the Afrikaners of apartheid South Africa, who also had the biblical notion that the land was their God-given right. Like the Zionists who claimed that Palestine in the 1940s was ‘a land without people for a people without land,’ so the Afrikaner settlers spread the myth that there were no black people in South Africa when they first settled in the 17th century. They conquered by force of arms and terror and the provocation of a series of bloody colonial wars of conquest.”
― Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

“This kind of dehumanization is the inevitable result of endless occupation. It is also an export asset. What’s appealing to growing numbers of regimes globally is learning how Israel gets away with politicide. That term was adapted to Israel/Palestine by the late Israeli scholar and professor of sociology Baruch Kimmerling, who argued in 2003 that Israel’s domestic and foreign policy is “largely oriented towards one major goal: the politicide of the Palestinian people. By politicide I mean a process that has, as its ultimate goal, the dissolution of the Palestinian people’s existence as a legitimate social, political, and economic entity. This process may also but not necessarily include their partial or complete ethnic cleansing from the territory known as the Land of Israel.”
― Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

“The driving forces of this [defense] industry is that they want the conflict with the Palestinians to go forever. Moral considerations are never considered when Israel aids dictatorships. It’s about money and being a powerful nation.”
― Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

“Israel’s constant drone surveillance over Gaza also impressed President Vladimir Putin. Moscow needed reliable surveillance drones after it lost many planes during its war in 2008 against Georgia in South Ossetia. Tbilisi had used Israeli drones, and years later Moscow decided to follow suit. Having seen Israeli operations over Gaza, Russia licensed the Israeli Aerospace Industries Searcher II, renamed “Forpost” by its new owners, and it became a key asset in Russian support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.33 Israel trained Russian pilots to operate the drones. Russia and Israel maintained a close relationship during the Syrian civil war despite the former supporting Assad and the latter worrying about the growing presence of Russian allies Iran and Hizbollah in the country. This led Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (and Naftali Bennett) to routinely attack Iranian and Syrian military positions in Syria to stop the transfer of weapons to Hizbollah. However, Moscow usually turned a blind eye to these attacks, assisted by a de-escalation hotline between the two governments.”
― Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

“Working with present-day genocidal regimes doesn’t bother Israel but it has also refused to publicly acknowledge past genocides. The Armenian genocide, formally recognized by US President Joe Biden in 2021, occurred in 1915 and 1916. Due to relations with Turkey, Israel has refused to recognize the Armenian genocide, and declassified documents prove that Israeli officials worked for decades to pressure countries and individuals around the world who wanted to do so.”
― Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

“Exact figures are impossible to obtain, since the state never releases them, but today there are over three hundred multinational companies and six thousand start-ups that employ hundreds of thousands of people. Sales are booming, with defense exports reaching an all-time high in 2021 of US$11.3 billion, having risen 55 percent in two years. Israel’s cybersecurity firms are also soaring, with US$8.8 billion raised in one hundred deals in 2021. In the same year, Israeli cyber companies took in 40 percent of the world’s funding in the sector.”
― Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

“A book was published in 2021 that had received financial backing from Elbit. The Bulgarian Army and the Rescue of Bulgaria’s Jews, 1941–1944 is a revisionist history that falsely claims that the Bulgarian state saved Jews during World War Two. Elbit wanted to get a foothold in the Bulgarian arms market. Raz Segal and Amos Goldberg, “Distorting the Holocaust to Boost the International Arms Trade,” Nation, July 26, 2022.”
― Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

“Elbit, the biggest private arms manufacturer in Israel today. Established in 1966, it quickly became an essential supplier of equipment for Israeli tanks and aircraft. Years later it had become a major exporter of weapons to both democracies and despots, working closely with the US military and a host of other nations to develop a range of equipment, from drones to night vision googles and land surveillance systems to deadly high-tech munitions. Elbit is still today intimately tied to the Israeli security establishment, and has even moved into the book publishing industry.”
― Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

“The extent of the carnage inflicted on the Palestinian population was incalculable. Between 1947 and 1949, at least 750,000 civilians out of a population of 1.9 million were forcibly expelled and made refugees beyond the borders of the new state. Palestinians call it the Nakba, the catastrophe. Over seven months, 531 villages were destroyed and 15,000 people were killed. The remaining Palestinians suffered beatings, rape, and internment.”
― Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

“A survey in 2021 conducted by Jewish Electorate Institute, a group led by leading Jewish Democrats, found that 34 percent of Jews agreed that “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is similar to racism in the United States,” 25 percent agreed that “Israel is an apartheid state,” and 22 percent agreed that “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians.” A 2022 survey by the major pro-Israel lobby group, the American Jewish Committee, confirmed this trend. Nearly 44 percent of young Jewish Americans didn’t feel very connected to Israel and more than one in five millennial American Jews backed one democratic state in Israel and Palestine. Another study in the same year, conducted by Pew Research Center, found that young Americans under the age of thirty viewed both Israelis and Palestinians equally favorably.”
― Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

“Israel’s claim to be a thriving democracy in the heart of the Middle East is challenged by the facts. All media outlets in Israel, along with publishers and authors, must submit stories related to foreign affairs and security to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) chief military censor before publication. No other Western country has such a system. It’s an archaic regulation that began soon after Israel was born. The censor has the power to entirely block the story or partially redact it.3 What’s deemed valid is highly questionable, since the priorities of the national security establishment will be very different to what’s required for a healthy, democratic state. This contradiction was clear when Israel’s chief censor, Ariella Ben Avraham, left her position in 2020 and took a job with the country’s leading cyber-surveillance company, NSO Group.”
― Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

“I don’t care what the Gentiles do with the arms. The main thing is that the Jews profit. Israeli advisor in Guatemala from the 1980s”
― Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

“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 sanction initiatives would be taken against other human rights abusers, such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel—all friends of Washington and London. Our friends can kill and maim with impunity.”
― Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

“The worst case scenario, long feared but never realized, is ethnic cleansing against occupied Palestinians or population transfer, forcible expulsion under the guise of national security.”
― Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

“The logic of rapacious capitalism without oversight is a key barrier to curtailment of mass surveillance.”
― Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

“The impact of Frontex using drones to locate refugees has caused the loss of many lives at sea. And that's exactly the point.”
― Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

“It is arguable whether drone attacks, launched by drone pilots against people who have no idea what's coming, are even war at all but something more grotesque; dehumanisation of those targeted because there is no real, human contact between the attacker and victim. Israel and the US instead celebrate these killings by releasing drone footage to the media.”
― Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

“It is a desire to militarily destroy an opponent but also erase its history and ability to remember what has been lost.”
― Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

“NSO named its prize product after the winged horse in Greek mythology because the founders thought that it was akin to a Trojan horse flying through the air and into a mobile phone.”
― Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

“Trump’s presidency rightly caused outrage in large sections of the mainstream media, from his hard-right border policies to separation of young children from their parents. But as despicable as these policies were, little of that anger is expressed when they cover similar Israeli policies. In 2019 Trump reportedly suggested to his aides that to stop migrants entering the US, border guards should shoot them in the leg to slow them down and electrify the fence with sharp spikes on top to pierce human flesh.66 He later asked whether it was possible to build a water-filled trench around the border with snakes and alligators.”
― Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

“The close relationship between Arizona and Israel long proceeded Donald Trump’s presidency. One journalist called the area the “Palestine-Mexico border” due to both nations sharing the same surveillance companies and co-operation.64 Tucson Mayor Jonathan Rothschild, who left office in 2019 after spending years welcoming Israel’s high-tech companies to build a home in Arizona, once said, “If you go to Israel and you come to Southern Arizona and close your eyes and spin yourself a few times you might not be able to tell the difference.”65 The reasons behind the collaboration are tied to two geographic spaces defined by some as vast and unoccupied and therefore deserving of colonization and control. It’s the settler-colonial mentality. Israel is helped by the fact that it’s a bipartisan American political belief that backing the Jewish state is akin to necessary religious doctrine. Arizona, like Palestine, is thus a testing ground. “Arizona is meant to be a showcase for technology before it expands across the country,” Tucson-based journalist and author Todd Miller told me. “Before 9/11, there was Border Patrol presence on Native American territory, but now it’s hugely expanded with surveillance technology. Native Americans are being racially profiled at border patrol checkpoints.” For the border profiteers, Palestinians and Native Americans are both equally deserving of monitoring. It was therefore not surprising that autonomous surveillance robots started appearing on both the Israel/Gaza border and US–Mexico border in 2021 and 2022.”
― Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

“But if Chinese technology and its ideology is a threat the world, why is Israel not viewed in the same way? It is inarguable that Israel, a nation with a tiny population compared to China, has sold more of this equipment and impacted more people, and yet the outrage around Israeli actions is muted. It is clear that this is because Israel is an ally of the West and therefore not an official “enemy,” while Beijing is now designated as a national security threat and therefore must be targeted in a multitude of ways. It shows both a lack of care for populations suffering under Israeli-designed surveillance and selective outrage about high-tech monitoring. Both nations are behaving despicably toward their unwanted populations, but only one is sanctioned and demonized.”
― Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

“Neither China nor Israel needs the other to repress their unwanted minorities, since both have spent years developing techniques to do so, and yet their collaboration and collusion is increasing.42 A burgeoning defense relationship surged at the end of the Cold War, solidified by Israel’s selling of weapons to Beijing after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, when many other nations imposed an arms embargo. Israeli company Magal Security Systems, builder of high-tech fences and walls along Israel’s southern and northern borders and the long separation wall between Israel and the West Bank, has installed detection systems at China’s airports.”
― Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

“Chinese techno-authoritarianism scares the West. The language used is dystopian, and the fear heightened. Readers or viewers are meant to take away the idea that Beijing under President Xi Jinping is destined to create a global infrastructure of control, a unique threat to the world and incomparable to any other nation. Take a September 2020 article in the Atlantic in which journalist Ross Anderson painted a petrifying image of China wanting to have worldwide domination of artificial intelligence. “In the near future,” he wrote, “every person who enters a public space could be identified, instantly, by AI matching them to an ocean of personal data, including their every text communication, and their body’s one-of-a-kind protein-construction schema.” He noted that algorithms will soon be able to gather a multitude of data points, such as reading habits, purchases, travel records, and friends, as well as predict political opposition before it occurs.”
― Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

“For Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, Israel controls the population registry, leaving them at the mercy of Israeli occupation whims. Israel has controlled this registry since 1967 with absolute power over granting Palestinian passports and ID cards and impacting whether they’re allowed to enter or exit the territory.32 Because Israel no longer processes Palestinian family reunification requests, thousands of Palestinians live as noncitizens and can’t access jobs, healthcare, proper education, or the legal system. Indian officials fear a Palestinian-style insurgency against its rule in Kashmir, or at least claim that they do to justify harsh countermeasures. During the conflict between Israel and Hamas in May 2021, a mural in Srinagar with the words “We are Palestine” appeared and the local graffiti artist Mudasir Gul was forced to deface his own work before being arrested. Twenty Kashmiris were arrested for demonstrating in support of Palestine.”
― Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

“Unsurprisingly, the nation’s xenophobia has seeped into popular culture. Bollywood, long known for its extensive Muslim involvement across the entire industry, is being forced to toe the anti-Islam perspective. Many in Bollywood happily pushed the hard-line Hindu nationalist agenda, releasing films that openly celebrated the actions of the Indian armed forces. In a similar vein, the Israeli series Fauda, which features undercover Israeli agents in the West Bank, has been hugely popular among right-wing Indians, looking for a sugar hit of war on terror and anti-Islamist propaganda in a slickly produced format. During the May 2020 Covid-19 lockdown, the right-wing economist Subramanian Swamy, who sits on the BJP national executive, tweeted that he loved Fauda.28 The post-9/11 “war on terror” suited both India and Israel in their plans to pacify their respective unwanted populations. To this end, Israel trained Indian forces in counterinsurgency. Following a 2014 agreement between Israel and India, pledging to cooperate on “public and homeland security,” countless Indian officers, special forces, pilots, and commandoes visited Israel for training. In 2020, Israel refused to screen Indian police officers to determine if they had committed any abuses in India. Israeli human rights advocate Eitay Mack and a range of other activists petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court in 2020 to demand that Israel stop training Indian police officers who “blind, murder, rape, torture and hide civilians in Kashmir.” The court rejected the request, and in the words of the three justices, “without detracting from the importance of the issue of human rights violations in Kashmir.”
― Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

“The growth of mutual respect went hand in hand as Hindu nationalism became dominant. Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, the founding father of the Hindu nationalist paramilitary organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), was an admirer of Nazism. Hindu fundamentalism and hatred of Muslims is at the heart of BJP thinking. A pioneer of this ideology, Veer Savarkar, wrote that India’s model for its “Muslim problem” should be how the Nazis managed their “Jewish problem.” The RSS has evolved since its founding but an admiration of Nazism remains in some contemporary sections of the party.”
― Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

“The relationship between the two nations goes back a long way, but it was not always so cozy. India did not recognize Israel until 1950. Years earlier, writing in 1938, Mahatma Gandhi explained that the “cry for the national home of the Jews” was something he opposed. “Palestine belongs to the Arabs,” he wrote. Until 1992, therefore, India saw itself as a leading member of the Non-Aligned Movement, identifying its own struggle for identity in ideological affinity with Palestine.”
― Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

“Near the end of South Africa’s apartheid regime and the first democratic election in 1994, Israel was one of the last nations to maintain a relationship with the white minority regime. The Israeli defense establishment had long become entranced by its own propaganda and believed that apartheid would last forever. Nelson Mandela took notice. In a 1993 speech to the delegates of the Socialist International, Mandela said, “The people of South Africa will never forget the support of the state of Israel to the apartheid regime.”
― Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World