My article in global broadcaster TRT World about my new book, The Palestine Laboratory:
How many Israeli Jews are opposed to the country’s surging weapons industry, tested and perfected on occupied Palestinians?
Israel is the 10th biggest arms dealer on the planet, selling to over 130 nations, both democracies and dictatorships.
Tel Aviv has used decades of experience controlling an occupied population, the Palestinians, and monetised it by proving its drones, facial recognition tools, biometric gathering infrastructure and counter-insurgency techniques as an exportable business.
A large number of states are desperate to gain Israeli knowledge to repress their own people and surveil unwanted dissidents, journalists or human rights activists.
From Rwanda to Myanmar and Bangladesh, Israeli repressive tech has become ubiquitous in the 21st century.
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Jewish critics of Israel are also growing in number and stridency across the Western world as Israel accelerates its path towards a potential full-blown theocracy.
Avidan Freedman is an Orthodox rabbi living in an illegal West Bank settlement, Efrat. He’s organised against the Netanyahu government’s so-called judicial reforms, a mechanism to strengthen Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and peoples, and is the founder of the group, Yanshoof, an advocacy entity that aims to build Israeli support to set “moral limits on weapons exports”.
According to its website, Yanshoof is “the only organisation in Israel dedicated to promoting legal action to end Israeli weapons sales to murderous regimes.
“We believe that Israel needs to be a source of good and blessing for the world, and that a moral policy, like that which already exists in many other countries, will only serve to strengthen Israel.”
There’s a lot to like about these sentiments though they’re myopic.
Read the whole article: Israel’s deadly weapons laboratory aimed at Palestinians