THE PALESTINE LABORATORY: HOW ISRAEL EXPORTS THE TECHNOLOGY OF OCCUPATION AROUND THE WORLD
By Antony Loewenstein
Macmillan, Rs 699
This book by the independent journalist, Antony Loewenstein, predates the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel by a few months. But Tel Aviv’s response is proving the author right in real-time. The Palestine Laboratory unveils in eye-opening detail how Israel has, over the past decades, turned the West Asia crisis into an opportunity and made its “architecture of control” a global export that insulates Tel Aviv from opprobrium. Sample this: “Selling the NSO Group phone-hacking tool Pegasus and a host of other high-tech weaponry is the kind of arms policy that ensures alliance and friendship whether from authoritarian or democratic states.’’ The rest of the world, including the United States of America, appears helpless in the face of Israel’s relentless campaign in Gaza — what Loewenstein bills as “‘battle testing’ of weapons on Palestinians’’.
Citing declassified documents and threading together details available in the public domain, Loewenstein writes that many of these countries take the moral high ground about nations like India buying Russian oil and contributing to Putin’s war in Ukraine but have kept Israel’s coffers full through the occupation — “Israel is a key player in the EU battle to both militarise its borders and deter new arrivals, a policy that hugely accelerated after the massive influx of migrants in 2015, principally due to the wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Loewenstein’s book also explains how Israel has managed to not only maintain the occupation but also turn it into a business opportunity. After the Six-Day War in 1967, “militarism became the country’s guiding principle and it’s lived with it ever since; ending the conflict with the Palestinians is bad for business…’’ According to the author, even though Israel portrays itself as an island of democracy in a region ruled by autocrats, Tel Aviv has sold weapons and surveillance technology to repressive regimes across the globe, including Guatemala, El Salvador, Myanmar and even Iran under the Shah.
In a way, the book explains Israel’s response to October 7 as more than just retribution. The October 7 attack caught Israel unawares despite all the surveillance technology at its disposal and the encirclement of Gaza with a 65 km high-tech border that includes radar systems, maritime sensors, and a network of underground sensors. The Hamas attack showed that all this can be neutralised and the massive intelligence failure spoke poorly of Israel’s spyware. But Israel’s response has taken the attention away from these failures and rebuilt the reputation of its military and intelligence ware in the market. The recent pager blasts that are widely perceived to be the handiwork of Israel — although the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, has denied any involvement — is another show-stopper.
The book also dwells on the “inherent bias of Silicon Valley firms” extending beyond social media to mapping apps; Loewenstein points out that they “contain a minimal amount of data about the Palestinian landscape”. Loewenstein maps the selectivity of social media sites in moderating content to the disadvantage of the Palestinians, drawing attention, once again, to how a different standard was employed when Russia attacked Ukraine. “Many other repressive regimes favoured by the US have not been censored in the same circumstances.’’
By the time the book arrived in India, it warranted a preface to factor in the October 7 attacks. Titled “The Gaza Laboratory”, Loewenstein throws light on the chinks in Israel’s high-tech armour. He analyses the October 7 attack thus: “What went so wrong on October 7 for Israel was a combination of hi-tech arrogance, a belief that Israel’s surveillance apparatus was impenetrable, and the intelligence agencies’ fatal blindness to clear signs that Hamas was preparing a major attack. Israel’s encircling of Gaza with a suite of fences, drones and listening devices was always predicated on the deluded belief that Palestinians would acquiesce to their imprisonment.’’