My interview in US outlet, Jacobin, about my new book, The Palestine Laboratory. The conversation, conducted by Mattha Busby, covered a wide range of areas from Israeli spying to the role of the Zionist lobby:
Wars and occupations have long been testing grounds for technology, science, and surveillance. In a domain mostly controlled by the oppressor, subject populations are sure to find ingenious ways to rise up — but their captors also find new ways to subjugate them. This is the reality in the occupied Palestinian territories, where Israel has maintained the longest occupation in modern times — fifty-six years and counting.
The Israeli state — and its closely aligned military-industrial complex — writes its own rule book. Its soldiers watch as extremist Jewish settlers launch pogroms against Palestinians in the West Bank. Over one thousand Palestinians are held in indefinite detention without charge in Israeli jails.
Palestinian access to water is used as “a potent state-controlled weaponfor the settler movement.” Meanwhile, Israeli arms companies promote their weapons with real footage in which Palestinian children are left injured.
But in the court of international opinion, the tide is turning against Israel. In May, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories denounced the “apartheid” system over which “colonial power” Israel rules Palestinians. Tens of millions of dollars are sent from the United States by registered charities to bankroll illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, but the New York State Assembly will soon consider a bill that would prevent the tax-deductible practice.
As journalist, author, and filmmaker Antony Loewenstein writes in his latest book, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, this permanent occupation has allowed Israel to “perfect the architecture of control” through weaponry, surveillance, and other means. He told Jacobin’s Mattha Busby how Israel is exporting this technology of death to democracies and despots around the world, clad with its ethno-nationalist ideology.
Read the whole article: Israel Has Turned the Occupied Territories Into a Laboratory for State Terror