It is the autumn of 2009 at the Paris Air Show, and Elbit Systems, the most influential Israeli military company, is putting out a video to promote the lethal abilities of its drones.

The video is showing a drone that kills Palestinians in Gaza. A year later, a journalist covering military affairs reveals that the video was actually taken while the Israeli drone was killing innocent Palestinians, including children, in the then recent conflict in the Gaza Strip.

This is just one of many episodes that Australian author Antony Lowenstein writes about in his recently published “The Palestine Laboratory,” an invitation to reflect on Israel’s shameless show of military might and racial aggression.

He details how Israel has been using its occupation of the Palestinian Territories as “an ideal marketing tool” for its arms industry and its creed of oppression.

“The Palestinian Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World” was published earlier this year by Verso in London “in solidarity with Palestinians and Israelis fighting for a just future.”

A journalist by profession who was born in Australia to a Jewish family and with grandparents who escaped the Nazis in Germany in the late 1930s, Lowenstein first arrived in the Middle East in 2005, still believing at the time in the two-state solution.

However, having lived to see the daily Israeli humiliation of the Palestinians, a reflection of a creed based on “Jewish supremacy” that is being practised particularly under current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a firm believer in the occupation and oppression of the Palestinians, Lowenstein now believes in a one-state solution where all live on an equal footing.

He argues that right from the onset Israel was a state designed to serve Western interests in the Middle East at the expense of the Palestinian people. He notes that the foundation of Israel took the lives of 750,000 Palestinians out of a population of 1.9 million in the years between 1947 and 1949.

Israeli crimes during the Palestinian Nakba, he writes, were unaccountable. This was the basis of an Israeli defence policy in which oppression and killing became normalised.

Israel became keen on developing a huge arms industry that it then kept upgrading. By the 1950s, Lowenstein writes, Israel had a viable enough defence sector that it started selling arms beyond its borders. It used the massive reparations it received from West Germany in 1952 to build and consolidate this sector, including “indigenous weapons” that it said were required because of its isolation in the Middle East among “enemies”.

Later, the military sector became central to the Israeli economy and its foreign propaganda purposes. Lowenstein shows how Israeli leaders, and some US politicians, have managed to portray the Israeli occupation of Palestine as part of the war on terror and to present the Israeli oppression and killing of Palestinians as a part of this war that Israel is leading in its capacity as “the frontline between the free and civil world and radical Islam,” as former Israeli prime minister Neftali Bennett put it.

The claim that Israel is taking the lead in the fight against terror was preceded by another claim during the Cold War that it was taking the lead in the fight against communism, especially in the Middle East.

In both contexts, Lowenstein stresses, weapons, and later spyware technology, have been essential players, just as they were associated with claims of self-defence against anti-Semitism.

Israel used its lethal arms to avert attention, and maybe reprisals, from its often-brutal occupation, which always came at a very high cost to Palestinian lives. This was the case in the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila Refugee Camps in Lebanon in 1982, for example, for which former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon was found responsible by the Kahan Commission “though he never paid a price for his actions.” 

 

OCCUPATION: Unlike in the late 1960s when Israel received a lot of criticism for its occupation of Palestinian and Arab land after the 1967 War, in the 21st century the occupation of Palestinian territories and the humiliation of the Palestinians has apparently been no handicap for the closer ties that many countries, including some Arab states, are seeking with Israel.

At the same time, Netanyahu has been open in his lack of interest in anything like Palestinian rights and in his ignoring the racist remarks made by some of his allies, including Israeli Minister Bezalel Smotich’s statement to Arab members of the Knesset that they are “only there” because former Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion “did not finish the job”.

Lowenstein blames Netanyahu for the aggressive promotion of an ideology that ignores democracy, multiculturalism, and human rights in favour of aggression and military domination.

“Netanyahuism,” which has gained popularity in many parts of the world, is based on a ruling creed that combines military might and economic and technological strength. Israel, Lowenstein writes, promoted itself in the 2000s as a “start-up nation,” and after more than seven decades of Israeli occupation its ideology of domination has appeal in some parts of the world.

Irrespective of its policies of aggression, separation, and population exchange, Israel seems to be looked up to as a model by some. Lowenstein refers to the 2022 statement by Ukrainian leader Volodymir Zelensky that he wishes to see Ukraine as “a big Israel.” In the same year, the NATO-backed think tank the Atlantic Council published a paper on the same lines.

In 2001, Lowenstein writes, US police were sent to Israel for training on how the country deals with suspected terrorists. Since then, 1,000 US police officers, with the help of pro-Israel groups in the US, have gone on “counter-terrorism” training in Israel. This came after years of secretive Israeli-US military cooperation under which Israel conducted military intelligence acts on behalf of the US in Latin America.

During these years, Lowenstein says, the promotion of Israeli superiority has been made possible due to high-precision Israeli weapons and Israeli spyware like Pegasus. Both have proven to be useful to non-democratic regimes all over the world, from Eastern Europe to Latin America and from Africa to the Middle East, Lowenstein argues.

It was Ben-Gurion, Lowenstein says, who decided that Israel should sell weapons to all countries if there was no objection from its Foreign Ministry. With a foreign ministry geared towards making Israel a model, this has been going on non-stop.

As early as the introduction to his book, Lowenstein writes that with the exception of official enemies like North Korea, Iran, and Syria, Israel’s “immoral” arms industry and Israeli spyware technology are sold worldwide irrespective of how these arms are going to be used.

Israel uses them in its occupation of Palestinian land, while many of the buyers use them for oppression.

Lowenstein refers to a “sordid” relationship between Israel and Chile in the 1970s, when Chile’s dictator Augusto Pinochet encouraged Iranian purchases of Israeli weapons under the then Shah who supplied Israel with oil. There were also earlier sales of arms to Burma in the 1950s.

According to Lowenstein, Israeli sales of weaponry and spyware have been rising sharply despite a growing awareness worldwide, including within Jewish communities, that Israel is not the safe haven for Jews it once promised to be, but instead is an apartheid state.

He refers to a 2021 report by B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, in which Israel was called an “apartheid state,” and to a survey conducted in the same year in the US that showed that a quarter of US Jews also view Israel as “an apartheid state.”

 In 2021, Lowenstein adds, Amos Schocken, the publisher of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, said that “Israel has become an apartheid state.”

However, in the same year Israeli arms sales “were the highest on record, surging 55 per cent over the previous two years.” The total sales of Israel’s arms industry in that year was $115 billion, with Europe being the number one recipient.

 

The list of buyers is long, with countries all over the world, including Germany and Turkey. “The result is that Israel is one of the top ten [arms] dealers in the world,” he writes, irrespective of its deteriorating political image as a self-proclaimed democracy.

WEAPONS: According to Lowenstein, while Netanyahu has promoted this policy, it has always been present.

In the 1990s, Israel did not condemn Serbian war crimes, including the bombing of a supermarket in the heart of Sarajevo, the genocide in Rwanda, or, later, the Russian war on Ukraine. The latter has also depended on Israeli arms sales and increased demand for Israeli cyber-firms.

Ayelet Shaked, the Israeli minister of the Interior, “has been unashamed at seeing an opportunity in a moment of crisis,” Lowenstein writes.  

With the increase in demand, there has been an increase in production and development, with the Palestinian Territories serving as the laboratory for testing advanced lethal weapons and spying techniques.

“Gaza is now the perfect laboratory for the Israeli ingenuity in domination,” Lowenstein writes. “It is the ultimate ethno-nationalist dream, keeping Palestinians indefinitely imprisoned,” he adds.

“Today, its population has been put in a forced experiment of control where the latest technology and techniques are tested,” with the strong presence of social media being part of the show.

The recent Israeli wars on Gaza, Lowenstein argues, have become wars “of spectacle” with the Israeli army investing the money and resources to make it come across as powerful and devastating as possible.

“The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) introduced new weapons and paraded them in front of different defence media outlets during the 2014 Gaza war,” Lowenstein notes. The next batch of weapons was tested by the Israeli military during the 2018 Palestinian Great Return March, he says. On its Twitter account, the IDF wrote, “we know where every bullet landed.”

This, Lowenstein says, is not just about impunity in the face of international law, but about the wish to show off new military capacity and a level of precision in attacks on peaceful Palestinian protesters that ended with Israel killing over 200 Palestinians and leaving hundreds more injured, some with life-long disabilities.

 “The Great March of Return was both a lab and a showroom,” mostly for Israeli weapons, but also at times for weapons Israel imported and worked with, including a Chinese-made drone that was found to “neutralise all dangers to [Israeli] forces” and to help these forces reach far more places than ever before.

“Battle tested over Gaza,” Lowenstein writes, has become a badge of honour, even in cases where Hamas has been able to inflict damage in return. The Israeli drones used in Gaza have been sent to other countries for the killing of other people elsewhere in the world, including in the East Mediterranean where refugees have lost their lives.

All the while, the “unstated goal of the IDF social-media strategy is weaponising Jewish trauma in the service of perpetuating occupation… and [suggesting that] Palestinians have no right to be angry about their plight and their trauma is non-existent.”

“Resisting occupation is thus rendered illegitimate,” he writes.

Lowenstein argues that more horror is expected to come from the Israeli weapons used against the Palestinians and other oppressed people all over the world. More sophisticated spyware is expected to be developed in Israel and sold worldwide to be used against activists and freedom fighters in many countries.

The only way to stop this unlimited horror, Lowenstein argues, is for Israel to be brought to pay for its crimes.

“Without a huge campaign of isolating Israel over its human rights abuses, or some targeted court cases against Israeli weapons firms that sell equipment to repressive states, the industry will continue to thrive” and with it gross violations and crimes.

He says that the previously poor public reaction in protesting against the involvement of large multinationals with the Israeli weapons industry is to blame for the continued cooperation between these and the Israeli military.

“Censure must happen if the Palestinian laboratory is to lose its lustre,” he says. Otherwise, Israel will continue to sell death and misery all over the world and will continue to exercise its aggressive oppression of the Palestinian people and its occupation of the Palestinian territories.

He quotes Israeli human rights defenders as suggesting that the time has come to hear of the agony that many around the world have faced at the hands of dictators in alliance with Israel. The Israeli population must look at the crimes of its regime in this light, he says.

Lowenstein’s book, of 257 pages, is not just about a legal or for that matter moral argument. It is very much about real life. It brings names and dates from the past and contextualises them within the unfolding story of Gaza under occupation and under attack. It is full of other aspects of the complex story of Israeli hegemony exercised in the name of religion.

The author has contributed articles to newspapers around the world. He is the maker or co-maker of several documentaries. His work is committed to uncovering the evils of capitalism and occupation and of Zionism as a mixture of the two.

His “The Palestine Laboratory” has been endorsed by leading figures such as Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, Gideon Levy, Eyal Weizman and other Jewish defenders of equal rights for all.

 

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* A version of this article appears in print in the 2 November, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly