The Palestine Laboratory

Synopsis

** Winner of the 2023 Walkley Book Award for Non-fiction Journalism **** Shortlisted for the 2023 Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing **Israel's military industrial complex uses the occupied, Palestinian territories as a testing ground for weaponry and surveillance technology that they then export around the world to despots and democracies. For more than 50 years, occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has given the Israeli state invaluable experience in controlling an “enemy” population, the Palestinians. It's here that they have perfected the architecture of control.Best-selling journalist Antony Loewenstein, author of Disaster Capitalism, uncovers this largely hidden world in a global investigation with secret documents, revealing interviews and on-the-ground reporting. This book shows in-depth, for the first time, how Palestine has become the perfect laboratory for the Israeli military-techno complex: surveillance, home demolitions, indefinite incarceration and brutality to the hi-tech tools that drive the 'Start-up Nation'. From the Pegasus software that hacked Jeff Bezos' and Jamal Khashoggi's phones, the weapons sold to the Myanmar army that has murdered thousands of Rohingyas and drones used by the European Union to monitor refugees in the Mediterranean who are left to drown. Israel has become a global leader in spying technology and defence hardware that fuels the globe's most brutal conflicts. As ethno-nationalism grows in the 21st century, Israel has built the ultimate model.“A sad and sordid record of how "the light unto the nations" became the purveyor of the means of violence and brutal repression from Guatemala to Myanmar and wherever else the opportunity arose.” - Noam Chomsky“A sharp exposé of how Israel's suppression of Palestine has translated into lucrative anti-terrorist systems that the Israeli government exports globally...[An] eye-opening delineation of the alarming ramifications of Israel's status as an 'ethnonationalist state.” - Kirkus Reviews