[“The Palestine Laboratory” outlines how Israel sells its
“battle-tested,” “field-proven” weapons and spyware to
practically anyone, no matter how malevolent. ]
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ISRAEL ARMS THE WORLD’S AUTOCRATS—WITH WEAPONS TESTED ON
PALESTINIANS  
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Sam Russek
November 24, 2023
The New Republic
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_ “The Palestine Laboratory” outlines how Israel sells its
“battle-tested,” “field-proven” weapons and spyware to
practically anyone, no matter how malevolent. _

Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP/Getty Images An Israeli soldier aims his rifle
during a November 19 raid at the Balata camp for Palestinian refugees
in the occupied West Bank., Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP/Getty Images

 

It was a genocide many of the world’s leaders tried to ignore. In
spring 1994, under the cover of war, Hutu extremists in Rwanda began
eradicating the neighboring Tutsi population, killing upward of
800,000 civilians and forcing around two million to flee the country.
At the outset of this murderous 100-day campaign, the United Nations
discouraged
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international involvement, labeling it an “internal conflict,” but
as it became clear to the Western public what was occurring, many
countries sent aid. That summer, President Bill Clinton, who had
dragged his feet despite the local U.S. Embassy warning
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of impending massacres, finally asked
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Congress for $320 million in relief; and Yossi Sarid, Israel’s
minister of environmental protection, arrived in Rwanda with a medical
aid delegation to assist survivors. Sarid’s gesture, however, was
“all for show,” according to journalist Antony Loewenstein,
because “both before and during the genocide,” even after much of
the world enacted an embargo, the Israeli government had sent weapons
to Hutu forces—Uzi submachine guns and Galil assault rifles,
grenades and ammunition, in several shipments worth millions of
dollars.

This wasn’t the first time, nor was it the last, that Israeli
weapons and tech fell into malevolent hands. In his searing account,
_The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of
Occupation Around the World,_ Loewenstein examines Israel’s modern
war exports to Augusto Pinochet’s fascist junta in Chile, the
repressive Shah of Iran, the Guatemalan genocide (where the
country’s right wing called openly
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for the “Palestinianization” of Indigenous Mayans), and, more
recently, authoritarian regimes in Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United
Arab Emirates, Hungary, India, and Azerbaijan, which earlier this year
ethnically cleansed thousands of Armenians from its southwest.

As of 2022, the United States controlled
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an estimated 40 percent of the world’s weapons exports—nearly five
times more than any other nation—but Israel, a desert country
smaller than Massachusetts, also ranks among the world’s top 10
weapons exporters, in recent years boasting record increases in its
market share, worth billions in sales. “Israel is almost unique
among self-described democracies in not calling out or sanctioning
atrocities worldwide,” Loewenstein observes. It sells to practically
anyone, and has an unnerving sales pitch: Its gear is
“battle-tested,” “field-proven”
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for use in the blockade on Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank
and then sold around the world. Promotional tapes sometimes even use
real-life video from drone strikes on military targets. Andrew
Feinstein, an expert on the illicit arms industry, who determined one
such film showed a number of Palestinian children being murdered from
above, said, “No other arms-producing country would dare show actual
footage like that.”

When Loewenstein’s book was published earlier this year it received
little coverage, but it has found new life amid the ongoing war. (The
publisher, Verso, has made it free
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download.) Because the situation in the Levant has changed so rapidly,
some of _The Palestine Laboratory_ is suddenly a touch out of date.
(For instance, Loewenstein cites a 2021 Israeli poll saying most
Jewish citizens “do not overly worry about solving the conflict with
the Palestinians.”) Most of it, however, is dizzyingly prescient. In
the West, Loewenstein argues, Israel is understood as a “thriving if
beleaguered democracy,” allied with the United States against
extremism, but look beyond the rhetoric and instead you’ll see a
belligerent ethnostate with a vested interest in arming and training
other belligerent ethnostates—a dark symbiosis upheld in the name of
geopolitical necessity and economic interests.

“Our friends can kill and maim with impunity,” Loewenstein writes,
referring to friends of the U.S. and the U.K.: Saudi Arabia, Egypt,
and Israel. On November 21, a hostage exchange agreement paused the
Israeli siege of Gaza for at least four days, but the war’s end is
far from visible. As people across the globe report feeling the world
is becoming more dangerous, modern warfare industries have grown right
along with the number of nativist governments, not to mention the
refugees they spurn. Beyond its own project of so-called Palestinian
containment, Israel considers its role arming the world’s autocrats
and border agencies and producing spyware key to its continued
existence, just as the technology itself helps other states achieve
their own definitions of “security”—however bloody—in an ever
destabilizing world.

How to summarize nearly a century of Zionist and Palestinian bloodshed
and peacekeeping—of industrialization and expulsion, the birth of a
“rules-based international order,” war, occupation, the dot-com
boom? Loewenstein begins with his own story: He grew up in a
“liberal Zionist” community in Melbourne—his grandparents had
fled the Nazis in 1939, arriving in Australia as refugees—but he
grew uncomfortable with both “the explicit racism against
Palestinians that I heard and knee-jerk support for all Israeli
actions.” This discomfort led him to the Israel “beat,” so to
speak, which he has covered, living in Israel on and off, for more
than a decade. “It made sense to view Israel as a safe haven in case
of future strife for the Jewish people,” he remembers thinking, but
one man’s safety was another’s death knell.

“It’s either the civil rights in some country or Israel’s right
to exist,” said Eli Pinko, the former head of Israel’s Defense
Export Control Agency, in 2021. “I would like to see each of you
face this dilemma and say: ‘No, we will champion human rights in the
other country.’” Under this ethos, the Israeli economy quickly
“abandoned oranges for hand grenades,” as one critic memorably
quipped. After the Six-Day War in 1967, when the 19-year-old nation
launched a preemptive strike on its neighbors—taking over the West
Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights—a new era in
Israeli politics began. The actions set the country, Loewenstein says,
“on a military path that has never stopped,” though, to be fair,
Israel wasn’t the only one. Just six years before, Dwight Eisenhower
had warned of the dangers of an American military-industrial complex
in his farewell address. It would be a mistake to consider that clunky
term as merely representing a national problem. Instead, these two
complexes, American and Israeli, developed interdependently within a
broader system.

Arm in arm with them was South Africa. Some pundits bristle when
critics compare modern Israel to the old apartheid state, arguing that
the particulars are different. What’s undeniable, however, is that
in the 1970s Israel cemented a military and security agreement with
South Africa that endured secretly for decades. Anton Liel, the head
of Israel’s foreign ministry desk in South Africa in the 1980s,
wrote recently that Israel “created the South African Arms
industry” and, in turn, South Africa helped finance Israel’s
technology: “When we were developing things together we usually gave
the know-how and they gave the money.” This partnership enabled
Israel to develop its nuclear arsenal, Loewenstein says; it became the
only country in the region with its own nuclear arms. (Despite pleas
from nonproliferation groups, the U.S. lets Turkey hold around 50 of
its nukes, within spitting distance of Russia and Iran.)

Israel was the last nation in the world with strong ties to the
apartheid regime. An old South African government yearbook explained
what bonded the two countries “above all else”: Both are
“situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark
peoples.” Decades later, caught on a hot mic, Netanyahu echoed the
sentiment in a meeting with far-right Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor
Orbán: “Europe ends in Israel. East of Israel, there’s no more
Europe.”

In the same conversation, Netanyahu admonished
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the European Union, Israel’s greatest economic partner, for placing
milquetoast conditions on trade to incentivize peace talks with
Palestinians—conditions that hadn’t stalled the EU’s increased
reliance on Israeli border technology but were nonetheless, to
Netanyahu, a slap in the face. Indeed, for whatever pearl clutching
may exist among some European politicians about how Israel treats
Palestinians, the EU had little trouble justifying the use of
Israel’s border tech against migration from Syria, Libya, and
Afghanistan. More recently, countries like Germany have boosted their
weapons sales to Israel to support its war effort. “Palestinians
were the guinea pigs for Israeli technology and surveillance,”
Loewenstein argues, and the EU viewed these containment tools “as an
achievement to be copied in its own territory.”

 
 
So has the U.S. Today, Israeli surveillance tools on our border with
Mexico (and Guatemala’s border with Honduras) are used to choke out
migration from Latin America. Indeed, post-9/11, Israel became a kind
of North Star for many U.S. policies. In late November 2001, the CIA
drafted a memo
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on the “Israeli example” as a possible basis for arguing
“torture was necessary.” It was also among the 20-plus countries
that helped
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transport “war on terror” detainees to CIA black sites.

That said, the relationship between the two countries is more
contentious than many realize. Leaks from the NSA whistleblower Edward
Snowden illustrate this: In the 2000s, for instance, at around the
same time the NSA was sending the Israeli government private emails
and phone calls from Palestinian and Arab Americans—leading
relatives who lived in occupied Palestine to potentially “become
targets,” as Loewenstein writes—other documents show that agents
believed our alliance was “a constant challenge,” “arguably
tilted heavily in favor of Israeli security concerns.” Given the
U.S. security state’s fervor after 9/11, this state of affairs
stung. “Nevertheless,” the report continues, “the survival of
the state of Israel is a paramount goal of US Middle East policy.”

Additional top-secret documents listed Israel as the “third most
aggressive intelligence service _against_ the US” (emphasis mine),
grouped in with China, Iran, Russia, and reflecting growing U.S.
concern with Israel’s cyberwarfare capabilities—and that “trust
issues” plague the two agencies’ relationship. To this day, we
continue to exclude our so-called “greatest ally” from the “Five
Eyes” alliance between the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and
the U.K., an intelligence-sharing compact Loewenstein calls “the
most secretive and intrusive” in the world—perhaps for good
reason.

In November 2021, the Biden administration took a rare step by
blacklisting two Israeli surveillance firms, the NSO Group and
Candiru, that have deep ties to the Israeli state. NSO in particular,
and its spyware, Pegasus, which can remotely and covertly harvest
essentially everything on your phone, had fallen into hot water upon
being traced back to the brutal assassination
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of Jamal Khashoggi (the Saudis purchased Pegasus with the approval of
Israeli authorities in 2017) and the persecution of journalists and
human rights activists around the world. While Biden’s move was
welcome, Loewenstein remarks, the likely reason behind it was that
“an Israeli company was encroaching on American technological
supremacy.” Ironically, NSO recently hired
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a new lobbyist in Washington: Stewart Baker, a former general counsel
of the NSA.

If you know where to look, the alliance between our two countries
appears deeply strained despite claims to the contrary, and yet a
certain harmony remains. _The Palestine Laboratory_ is an invaluable
primer on how the West enables Israel’s occupation and weapons
sales, how Israel enables the West’s border-fortifying spree, and
the careful policing required—both discursive and literal—to
maintain this balance, where no one but our enemies are deemed hostile
and our friends get away with brutality practically unscathed.
(Loewenstein shows too how Israeli surveillance companies meticulously
track social media, pressuring companies like Facebook to censor
keywords like “resistance” and “martyr.”)

“The worst-case scenario,” Loewenstein writes in his conclusion,
“is ethnic cleansing against occupied Palestinians, or population
transfer, forcible expulsion under the guise of national security.”
Today, we’re witnessing exactly that, with (at the time of writing)
more than 11,000 killed in Gaza and an ongoing evacuation of its
northern region ordered by Israel. On Wednesday, after reaching a
brief truce with Hamas, Netanyahu told
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“nonsense talk” that the fighting would stop after hostages were
returned, emphasizing that this was merely one of many “stages” of
the war. In mid-November, in what we might consider an addendum to his
book, Loewenstein appeared
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Now!_ to discuss the ongoing war. “Israel is already, as we speak
… live-testing
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new weapons in Gaza,” he said, likely referring to a new laser- and
GPS-guided mortar bomb called “Iron Sting,” manufactured by the
Israeli firm Elbit Systems—the same company that, with government
approval, helped
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militarize the U.S.–Mexico border, armed
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Myanmar’s military junta even after its violent coup, and supported
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Azerbaijan’s ethnic cleansing with state-of-the-art drones.

Our friends, to put it simply, have been busy.

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Sam Russek [[link removed]] @samrussek
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Sam Russek is a reporter-researcher at _The New Republic_.

* Israel/Palestine; Israeli Weapons Sales; US Military Industrial
Complex;
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