Guests: Gideon Levy, Dr Khaled Dawas and Maha Hussaini

The Palestine Laboratory Podcast is Drop Site’s first investigative series, looking into how Israel is using Palestinian territories as a testing ground to develop its occupation-enforcing tech industry. Hosted by investigative journalist Antony Loewenstein and based on his recent book, this podcast series examines how Israel is reshaping conflict and population control globally. What happens in Palestine never stays there. 

Credits
Host: Antony Loewenstein
Series Producer: Elle Marsh
Producer: Bethany Atkinson-Quinton
Production & Sound Engineering: Tim Jenkins
Field Recording: Cinnamon Nippard
Studio Recordings at 2SER: Michael Jones and Jonathan Chang
Original Music: Ara Koufax 
Music Direction: Sunless Studio
Podcast Artwork: Debashish Chakrabarty
Special Thanks: Anu Hasbold
Additional music in the series is from: Use Knife, Muqata'a & The Album Leaf

[THEME MUSIC PLAYS]

Antony: Welcome back to the Palestine Laboratory podcast. I’m Antony Loewenstein. In the years leading up to October 7, 2023, I was investigating how Israel was using the occupied Palestinian territories to test weapons and surveillance tools before selling them globally, all while claiming to be one the world's most moral armies.

[Archive Recording] The Israeli Army is going to lengths that no other army has done to prevent civilian casualties. No other army. 

[Applause]

What's happened since in Gaza has utterly disgusted me. We've seen the massive acceleration of new weapons and new surveillance technology on civilians. The acceleration of the Palestine lab is happening in real time. The result is what Palestinians have long feared: an excuse for Israel to ethnically cleanse and destroy vast parts of Gaza, rendering it unlivable. 

Maha: They don't just target this one room or one apartment. They knock down the entire building over the heads of their residents.

This series started at the beginning of the 20th century, where the kernel of Israel's modern-day military mindset began and then took us into a post-9/11 world. In the last 17 years, there have been six major Israeli bombardments on the Gaza Strip. And since 2007, the territory has been under an Israeli and Egyptian-imposed blockade, cutting the population off from the outside world to create what is essentially the world's largest open-air prison. 

Mariam: It was planned, it was designed, for Gaza to be used as a workshop. 

Today, Israel is one of the top ten weapons exporters and their security, defense and surveillance sectors are one of the biggest in the world. The Israeli army has become such a huge part of day-to-day life that things like mandatory conscription and army bases inside universities are just standard practice.

Haim: This is a society that is built around the army, that thinks around the army, that serves the army. 

Antony: In this final episode, we’re looking at what’s happened since October 7. How Israel is increasingly automating and outsourcing the violence of war to machines and artificial intelligence, and we’ll hear from people on the ground in Gaza who are finding humanity amidst it all. Now more than ever, we must understand and uncover what Israel is developing and exporting and how it’s fueling conflict and government control around the world. What happens in Gaza won’t stay there. Episode 4: After October 7.

[MUSIC PLAYS]

It’s November 14, 2023, just over a month into Israel’s latest war, and the death toll of Palestinians in Gaza since October 7 has surpassed 11,000 people. 

That morning, Israeli forces surround Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital where thousands of Palestinian civilians shelter. 

[Archive Recording] For the first time, the Israeli Defense Forces confirmed they have moved into Gaza's largest hospital, which is filled with hundreds of patients and staff including babies.

Antony: Medical staff inside the besieged hospital report the deaths of three premature babies after power generators that were keeping the incubators going run out of fuel. 

[Archive Recording] Doctor, Head of Burns Unit at Al Shifa hospital: It’s more of a war zone where it’s continuous bombing, shooting, drones are within the hospital area targeting and shooting anyone moving between the buildings. The ambulances are not allowed to move in or out of the hospital. Whoever tries to move will be killed.

Antony: In the West Bank, the death toll of Palestinians “killed in incidents” involving Israeli security forces reaches 176 since October 7. Human Rights Watch issues yet another report alleging Israel is committing war crimes.  

On this very same day, dozens of Israeli military and tech companies are in Europe attending one of the world's largest national security expos in Paris. At this Milipol expo, being hosted in France’s largest exhibition centre, Israeli companies display their wares to an estimated 30,000 attendees from over 130 countries. Items on show include remote-controlled shooters made by the Israeli company SmartShooter*, which has trialled out their suite of weapons and tech across Palestinian territories, including at checkpoints in the occupied West Bank and in Gaza since the war began.

[Archive Recording] Shmuel Rabinovitz, Smart Shooter Operational Expert: We revolutionized the infantry world. Whatever the soldier’s level of experience, whatever mission, our system allows to hit only the chosen target, terrorists, or other target, in order to avoid collateral damage.

[Archive Recording] Michael Mor, CEO and Founder of SmartShooter: It doesn’t matter if we shoot well or not, the system fixes all my faults.

Antony: A number of these Israeli companies were openly saying to media that the Gaza war wasn't posing a problem for them. In fact, it was the opposite. It was a key selling point that some of these tools and weapons of war had been battle-tested and therefore more attractive to overseas clients. 

According to Haaretz, facial recognition firm CoreSight* quote “showcased its tech through videos of hostages and terrorists” and “was also involved in search and rescue efforts.” Another company Cybabra* quote “showed its skills by mapping pro-Hamas influence campaigns." In April of this year, the Israeli pavilion at Singapore's Air Show was given prominence and inaugurated by the Defense Ministry’s director general. Haaretz reported Asian clients took interest in Israeli systems and weaponry that was, quote, “backed up by evidence fresh from the battlefields in Gaza and Lebanon.”

Morality and humanity aside, if we just look at this from a national-security perspective, just over one month before the expo, Israel’s cyber, intelligence and defense sector, which claims to be world leading, completely failed. On October 7, Hamas militants broke through the defense barrier separating Gaza and Israel. It was the deadliest attack on a single day in Israel’s entire history. 

Hamas’s military wing is basically a guerrilla armed force. The political and military group, which was established in the late 1980s as an Islamic resistance movement, took control of Gaza in 2007 after winning a 2006 election. Since then, they’ve amassed around 40,000 fighters.

According to Al Jazeera’s investigations unit, in the lead up to October 7, Hamas was posting training videos of their forces online. Israeli intelligence units were documenting suspicious activity by the group and even obtained a detailed copy of its invasion plans prior to the attack. A woman at Israel's intelligence collection agency repeatedly raised the flag that Hamas was planning a major attack. But her concerns were dismissed by superiors.  

[Archive Recording] Washington Post Video The resistance is now inside the occupied territories. 

Antony: Despite the warning signs, in the early hours of the morning on October 7, Hamas successfully breached Israel’s “Iron Wall” defense system at least 30 times. The wall had recently received a $1 billion upgrade, including increased surveillance technology along the perimeter. 

[Archive Recording] More than 1,000 fighters from Hamas broke through the 20-foot- high barrier that has long separated Israel from Gaza’s civilians and the militants of Hamas.

Antony: Hamas targeted and dismantled surveillance towers along the border, raiding Israel's army bases before attacking nearby kibbutzes and attendees of a large outdoor music festival.

[Hamas go pro footage]

Antony: Having been into Gaza many times over the years and crossed through that barrier, it was surreal seeing Hamas GoPro footage of them literally, seemingly very easily, breaking into Israel and coming into the southern part of the country. Crucial lines of Israeli defense collapsed. The chain of command vanished. And communications were in disarray. And the tech frankly just didn’t work. 

[Archive Recording] Dr. Chuck Freilich, former Deputy national Security advisor: What happened on October 7 was a colossal intelligence and operational failure.

Antony: The Hamas attack on October 7 resulted in over 1,100 Israelis and foreigners being killed, and around 250 being taken hostage back into Gaza. That evening Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declares war.

[Archive Recording] (In Hebrew) Citizens of Israel, we are at war. The enemy will pay an unprecedented price.

Antony: Despite the fact that Palestinians in Gaza are besieged and unable to leave, Netanyahu tells them to get out immediately.

[Archive Recording] We will exact a price that will be remembered by them and Israel’s other enemies for decades to come.

Antony: Something I think about often is that on October 7, the IDF killed some of their own personnel and Israeli civilians. The fact that this could happen just underscores the level of chaos and panic that was felt that day, but also speaks to something much more sinister.

In 1986 Israeli defense-force commanders drew up a policy that is now known as the “Hannibal Directive.” Now the doctrine ordered the use of maximum force in the event of a soldier being kidnapped or taken, even at the risk of that captive being killed. The goal of the policy was to disable the enemy from using captured hostages as leverage in future negotiations. Now while the Israeli army says it's no longer an official policy, documents and testimony obtained by Israeli media revealed that the IDF had in fact ordered the Hannibal Directive on October 7.

Gun-camera footage from Israeli Apache helicopters show numerous strikes on vehicles and individuals making their way back to Gaza where it is unclear whether they are Hamas gunman or Israeli hostages. We still don’t know the exact number of Israelis killed by its own forces on this day, but Al Jazeera’s investigations team says it found at least 19 incidents where Israel’s police and army appear to have killed Israeli citizens, including a 12-year-old. 

Since October 7, there have been several more occasions like this where Israeli forces have reportedly killed their own personnel and their own hostages in Gaza. The Hannibal Directive goes to the heart of Israeli military culture where a so-called military solution is offered when the problem isn’t solved by military means. The Hannibal Directive is a key example of Israeli military doctrine devaluing human life, and presenting force as the only answer, which is deployed in Palestine and around the world.

It's been really clear since October 7 how ill-prepared the Israeli military is to fight this war for a few reasons. One, Israel basically has pretty much lost every major war its fought for the last couple of decades. And what I mean by that is that, yes, their solution to every problem is more violence and occupation, but they have not subdued their so-called enemy. And you see in Gaza, so many Israeli soldiers posting abuses on TikTok.

[Archive Recording] IDF soldiers celebrate.

The rules of engagement are lax at best. What Israel's facing in Gaza is remarkably similar to what the U.S. faced in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yes, they're a nation with maximum overwhelming force, but when it comes to fighting an insurgency, their technological advantage is severely undermined because occupation and mass violence inevitably brings resistance. 

And so it's pretty clear that Israel will not win this war in any conventional sense and their only solution is to use maximum force against Palestinian civilians. It reminds me in a way of what the historian Haim Bresheeth-Zabner told us earlier in this series, where he says, “To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

Since the start of the war, with the full support of U.S. President Joe Biden and much of the Western world, Israel responded in a campaign of overwhelming shock and awe. The arms industry thrived. In the first month of its assault on Gaza, stocks in major defense companies such as Lockheed Martin skyrocketed. Israel says that within those early weeks, it struck at least 12,000 targets in the Palestinian territory, making it one of the most intense bombing campaigns in recent history. 

According to the Gaza Media office, the weight of explosives dropped on the Gaza Strip in the first 89 days exceeded 65,000 tons — now that's more than the weight and power of three nuclear bombs like those dropped on Hiroshima in World War II. Universities, schools, mosques, hospitals, entire neighborhoods, entire family lines - all decimated. In the first 300 days of the war, at least 40,000 Palestinians have been killed.

Gideon Levy: It's very simple. It's a punishment of Gaza. It's for taking revenge over the horrible things which happened on the seventh.

Antony: Gideon Levy is Israel’s leading dissident journalist and we first met in Tel Aviv as I was starting out as a young journalist when I was 30 years old. And his work has inspired me on this issue more than many others, and so much so that my first son’s middle name is Gideon. 

I’ve long admired his reporting on Israel’s occupation of Palestine because he’s challenged the Jewish state’s dehumanization of Palestinians.

Antony: When October 7 happened, what was the political social mood in Israel immediately in terms of what many, most believed should be done to Gaza and Gazans?

Gideon: It was a total earthquake.The main shift was not in the right. The rightwingers were always in favor of reconquering Gaza, rebuilding settlements, mass killings, I mean, everything, you name it. The real shift was in the remains of the Israeli peace camp, because there the destruction was immediate and total. People who for years believed in peace, believed in solidarity, believed in re-humanizing the Palestinians and seeing them as human beings, they lost it all within hours. “There will be never peace.” “Israel should get into Gaza.” “Israel has the right to do whatever it wants.” This was the shift.

Antony: Inside Israel, there’s been willful blindness. The reality of what happens in Gaza is not shown to them by Israeli media, and Israelis, by and large, don’t go looking for it. 

Gideon: We see nothing. We are now 24-hours-a-day, seven days a week, preoccupied only with one thing: Our suffering, our victim, the hostages, the killed soldiers, the families, only this. The fact that the world stands against us, the coming sanctions, the international court, all to show that we are innocent victims of the situation and it's all about self-pity. Nothing but this, nothing, Antony. You will open Israeli TV. You will be amazed. And therefore the media is such a criminal in this country. 

Antony: One opinion poll in late 2023 showed that 94% of Israeli Jews thought that the military was using either the appropriate amount of force in Gaza or not enough. 

Gideon: Because brainwash is so deep. Mistrust, hatreds, fears are so deep. The problem is that, as usual, they live in denial, and immediately they protect themselves with the notion that it is all because the world is anti-Semite. Not because we are criminals of war. It's the world's fault. 

Antony: Early Zionists in the late 1900s believed that they needed a Jewish state to escape anti-Semitism and ghettoization in Europe. And yet now, with a Jewish state, Israel shows that it believes in building higher walls, literally and metaphorically, around its ever-evolving borders. Former prime minister of the Jewish state, Naftali Bennet, said that before October 7, Israel had forgotten that it was surrounded by, quote, “the craziest terror savages on earth.” He tweeted about how Israel must continue to be a start-up nation, focusing on innovation and tech, and calling for Israel to, quote, “Be a Silicon Valley in Sparta.” (April 9, 2024) This type of hyper capitalism is becoming the norm in Israel, claiming that a thriving defense and cyber weapons industry is good for both business and security. This line of thinking inevitably leads Israel to where it finds itself today: increasingly ghettoized in the Middle East and attacking countless perceived enemies in the region, from Iran to Lebanon, Syria to Yemen, and of course, Palestine.

[MIDROLL]

I've been trying to get as much information and evidence about what Israel's doing in Gaza because I see huge evidence that in fact they're accelerating not just the Palestine laboratory but the need to make more money from the weapons and surveillance industries. Now I say that because Israel's economy's taken a hit. They're in a war. Israel’s credit rating has declined, but that hasn’t seemed to bother the nations still reliant on purchasing their military and surveillance tech. That's why Israel is going to be even more reliant on their arms and surveillance industries. Even countries that are currently speaking out against what Israel is doing in Gaza, Lebanon, and beyond, are likely to continue purchasing their tech. 

I’ve been visiting Gaza for about 15 years. But since the beginning of the 2023 war, all foreign journalists like myself have been banned from entering. Watching it all unfold from afar, I stayed in touch with friends, colleagues, and workers who were trapped in Gaza, via WhatsApp. One journalist and human-rights worker in Gaza who’s been extensively documenting human-rights violations and the weapons Israel has been testing on the ground in Gaza, is Maha Hussaini. My producer Elle and I have been speaking with her. The connection is often incredibly poor and communications are often disrupted by the reality of war.

Elle: Hi Maha?

Maha: Hello, can you hear me?

Elle: Yes, it’s a bit fuzzy but I can hear you. Where are you right now? 

Maha: I'm in Deir al Balah at the coffee shop, of course, to get internet connection, so I hope it's not very weak. As I speak to you now, I can hear background, Israeli bombardments, artillery shelling, particularly. We witnessed Israeli airstrikes and artillery shelling all the time, 24/7, here in Deir al Balah. 

Antony: As well as being a journalist, Maha is a strategy director at Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based organization with a large presence in Gaza. Since the beginning of the war, Maha, her family, and her cat, Tom, have been displaced multiple times, but she has continued to work amid power and connection outages, food and medical shortages, and the constant threat of bombing and gunfire.

Maha: I'm here now, as a journalist, human-rights worker, and also a victim of this attack actually. You are constantly worried about your own safety. You wake up every morning, thinking that this will be your last day of reporting or this would be your last day of work because you are aware that you are one of the main targets, actually, and I do not exaggerate when I say I'm one of the main targets, as a human-rights worker and a journalist. So, yeah, I'm aware that I'm doing a job that would cost me my life and not just my life, the life of those people staying with me and in my shelter, including my family. The extended family is also staying with us because we're staying in houses that, for example, house 70 people at once. 

Antony: Since the start of the war, at least 108 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed and often deliberately targeted by Israel in the Gaza Strip. This makes it the deadliest war for journalists in modern history. But Maha says despite the risks, those on the frontlines are the ones who need to tell this story.

Maha: No one can convey the message better than the people who are actually enduring the suffering. I feel that it is my duty now more than ever to report on these violations and to continue my work despite all these hardships and risks, because I feel that there are so many parts, so many details, so many stories that are not reported online in the international media. I meet people every day, I interview them every day, and there are stories that must be seen, must be heard. There are voices who are being silenced. 

Antony: Maha has reported on countless conflicts in Gaza and documented grievous human-rights abuses committed by Israeli forces. These Include the IDF’s use of weapons such as white phosphorus in civilian areas which the IDF has been accused of using since 2009. Now white phosphorus is a weapon that’s internationally banned from being used in densely populated areas, due to its ability to cause severe burns, often down to the bone. Israel repeatedly claims that this time around, it’s acting in accordance with international law. However, huge amounts of collected evidence contradicting this claim reveal that this is a boldfaced lie. 

On the 20th of May, 2024, the International Criminal Court’s top prosecutor announced it was seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and top figures in Hamas’s political and military wings including the Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar. 

[Archive Recording] The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor Karim Khan: The crimes include starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. Willfully causing great suffering. Serious injury to body or health. Or cruel treatment. Willful killing or murder and intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population.

Antony: Accused of war crimes, Netanyahu labelled the court’s findings absurd and anti-semitic. That same month, civilians were being forced to flee Rafah in southern Gaza, Maha collected witness reports of white phosphorus, once again, being used in a heavily populated civilian area.

Maha: Since the beginning of this attack, we have documented several cases of Israel’s use of unconventional weapons. I Interviewed a woman who said that she witnessed white phosphorus being fired on their neighborhood in Rafah by Israeli forces, only to force them out of the city towards Khan Younis and other areas.

Antony: The human-rights organization Maha works for has also called for a thorough investigation into whether the IDF has been using banned thermal weapons in Gaza since October 7. These thermal weapons, which are also known as “vacuum bombs,” can reportedly produce such high heat that victims’ bodies evaporate. 

Maha: They don't just target this one room or one apartment. They knock down the entire building over the heads of their residents. And this cannot be done, but with unconventional weapons with very high destructive powers.

Antony: Since the war began, Israel’s biggest supplier of weapons, the United States, has sent tens of thousands of weapons to Israel. The U.S. accelerated its arms deliveries to Israel to the point where a senior Pentagon official said that they sometimes struggled to find sufficient cargo aircraft to deliver them. In December last year, a U.S. intelligence assessment found that nearly half of the Israeli munitions dropped on Gaza were imprecise quote “dumb bombs.” The use of such weapons, like white phosphorus, dumb bombs, and, potentially, thermal weapons, are just a couple of examples that reveal the kind of destructive and indiscriminate warfare Israel is unleashing on the Palestinian population. More international investigations are needed, but, once again, no outside journalists or investigators have been allowed in to assess the evidence.

[MUSIC PLAYS]

Maha believes that the IDF is increasingly replacing its soldiers with machines, and she’s right, they’re using facial recognition, biometric data and artificial intelligence. A major investigation by the Israeli outlet +972 Magazine and Local Call revealed the IDF was outsourcing some decision making to an AI program known as “Lavender.” The program was designed to identify and mark suspected Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters and then generate bombing targets. In the first weeks of war, the program generated a kill list of roughly 37,000 suspected militants. Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, who broke the story, explains how the system works. 

[Archive Recording]  Yuval Abraham: Now the way it works is, the machine scanned most of the population in Gaza, collecting, surveilling information, and it gave each individual a rating from 1-100 based on how likely the machine thought that individual belonged to a military wing. Now sources said, and this is very very important, that this machine, when they were using it, the IDF knew that in approximately 10 percent of the cases, it was making what was regarded as errors. So it was marking people who were complete civilians.

Antony: What’s clear is that military personnel were seemingly only there to rubber stamp the machine’s decisions, devoting roughly 20 seconds to every AI-generated target — just to make sure the target is male — before authorizing the attack. One Israeli intelligence source admitted that they had personally authorized the bombing of hundreds of private homes of alleged junior Hamas operatives marked by the AI program. The killing of civilians and entire families was viewed as quote “collateral damage” and “frankly acceptable.” Another former intelligence officer said the AI system facilitated “a mass assassination factory.”

[Archive Recording] Yuval Abraham: When a child is killed in Gaza, it’s because somebody made a decision that this killing was worth it to hit another target.

Antony: It just reminds me of this quote from Ursula Le Guin: “A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.” 

[MIDROLL]

Antony: On the ground, Maha and others have been documenting the Israeli use of quadcopters. These are large remote control drones, about one meter in diameter and they are often fitted with weaponry. They are developed of course by Israeli military industries. Maha documented how initially the drones were being deployed as a tool to surveil the population and direct evacuation orders. Later, Maha discovered that quadcopters were being used in fact to also kill Palestinians and to conduct psychological warfare. 

Maha: I've been reporting on Israel's use of quadcopter since the beginning of this attack, and we have been witnessing the increasing use of these quadcopter drones over the entire of the Gaza Strip. In the first months of this year, Israeli quadcopters played sounds but they were only threats and orders to evacuate certain areas to the residents, particularly over schools, which were turned into displacement centers. But, lately, these quadcopters are actually, doing another job, which is very bizarre and very, disturbing, let’s say, and distressing. Israeli forces use these quadcopters over a refugee camp at the center from Gaza Strip. And these quadcaptors, at midnight, they were playing, sounds of babies crying, women shouting, and screaming and calling for help. 

[Archive Recording] Quadcopter Audio

Maha: One of the witnesses who witnessed these quadcopters playing these sounds. She said that they were sitting at home. They didn't at first think that these were, quadcopters, of course. They thought that actually they were children screaming or babies, infants, particularly, crying on the street. And they were asking, what was happening? What was going on? So they went out. And they were targeted and killed.

[MUSIC PLAYS]

Maha: We have reported at least seven people being killed by this new strategy and new policy. Israel is, has followed. So, yeah, I guess that this is a new stage of psychological war that needs also to be investigated. 

Antony: The human cost of this new stage of warfare is immense. For those who aren’t killed, these new weapons still leave its victims changed forever.

Antony: Tell me a little bit about seeing injuries from say quadcopters, a weapon that's not, at least yet, extensively used globally, but I suspect will be. 

Dr. Dawas: We had a day, particularly of several bullet injuries coming in. And in one particular man, I pulled out the bullet from his bladder. And the story I'm told by the relatives of the patient is this was a quadcopter that was hovering in that area, firing, they said, indiscriminately at the time. And these stories were being repeated to us on a regular basis. 

Antony: This is Dr. Khaled Dawas, a British Palestinian who worked in Gaza’s hospitals. Since the beginning of the war, over 90,000 Palestinians have been injured.

Dr. Dawas: The injuries I saw were amputations from explosives. I saw horrendous injuries to the abdomen and in the chest from bullets and from shrapnel. I saw lots of burn patients in the emergency department.

Antony: His is just one of the testimonies I've collected about new Israeli tactics and weapons who report this kind of indiscriminate targeting and torture at the hands of Israeli forces.

Dr. Dawas: This man is a wheelchair-bound man. He has a long term chronic condition of his spine, which means he's unable to walk. He was put in handcuffs and blindfolded for weeks on end and he has two nasty pressure sores on both hips, you can see the bone. 

Antony: Yeah and I mean as you said, these stories are just replicated over and over and over again, we don't even know the scale of it. Except that it's huge.

Antony: Hearing and seeing these utterly dystopian tools of war being used in Gaza is so shocking. And yet, in some ways, we can't be surprised because Israel has been using Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem, for years as a testing ground for these kinds of tools of war. And I don't think in many ways that that sense of horror really has been understood by enough people around the world — that these weapons of war that Israel is using are not simply going to be staying in Gaza. At some arms fairs already, those quadcopters are on sale, and there are a lot of nations who are going to want to buy those weapons. 

Business for the developers of drones and quadcopters in Israel and overseas are doing really well. One Tel Aviv startup, Xtend, which is the creator of an AI drone operating system that has been tested and deployed by the Israeli army in Gaza, raised $40 million US in capital since October 7. 

On Tuesday the 17th of September, 2024, Israel announced it was broadening the aims of the war to include its fight against the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah. Hours later, hundreds of pagers used by the group simultaneously exploded across Lebanon, killing multiple people, including children, and injuring more than 2,800 people. The next day, dozens more were killed and hundreds injured in another attack after walkie-talkies detonated in Beirut and southern Lebanon.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel was entering a new era in the war. But the pager and walkie talkie attacks signal a disturbing new era for warfare everywhere. Israel has shown a proof of concept, advanced tech and production with endless possibilities, creating a new generation of potential weapons in mobile devices or any number of home appliances. They’re expanding the realm of what is technically possible and what is considered acceptable in warfare. Speaking to my sources in Israel, many global intelligence services are looking with alarm at what Israel has done, but also excitement at what they could achieve against perceived enemies.

Something that I talk a lot about is the Palestinianization of global conflict. And what I mean by that is that the way that Israel treats the Palestinians in Palestine allows many other countries to treat their own minority populations in a similar way: to isolate them, put them into tent cities, and limit their access to electricity and clean water. And that's why the Palestine Laboratory's so attractive to so many nations: Because those states have seen that Israel is doing it and getting away with it. 

[MUSIC]

Although there are some signs in some parts of the world that Israel is facing global isolation, it's also worth saying that in other parts of the globe, where the right and the far-right are in the ascendancy, Israel's support has never been stronger. You have in 2024 senior Israeli government ministers openly meeting with far-right leaders in Europe, going to conferences, shaking hands, hugging them. Those groups and those parties say what Israel's doing in Gaza is a model.

For example, in May 2024, Israel’s diaspora minister received a warm reception at a far-right conference in Spain, when he said that the Gaza war, “is an existential battle for the future of Western civilization against radical Islam.” Far-right leaders who spoke at the event included Marine Le Pen, Georgia Meloni, Viktor Orban, Javier Milei and Santiago Abascal. Far-right groups around the world support what Israel is doing. Their hatred and contempt for Muslims, for Palestinians, is so deep and so great that they do accept the Israeli narrative which says, we're fighting a war here, so you don't have to fight it there.

Even in my own home country, the Australian government — which, in theory, through statements and UN votes has supported calls to peace and urged Israel to “show restraint” in Gaza — in practice has continued to assist Israel’s status quo and expand its business dealings with major Israeli defense companies. The U.S. spy base Pine Gap, located in the center of Australia in the desert, feeds real-time intelligence to the U.S., who then pass it to Israel. In February 2024, the federal Australian government awarded Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest defense company, and one that is financially benefiting from the Gaza war, a fresh contract worth $917 million Australian dollars. That’s about $600 million. 

More and more countries, including Australia, continue to buy Israel's cyber, surveillance and military hardware. So what we’re seeing is surveillance and the militarization of public spaces on the rise globally. 

[Archive Recording] As protests sweep across the U.S., it's becoming increasingly clear that law enforcement has become more militarized. Treating the people they're supposed to serve and protect as a hostile foreign population.

The world then saw the U.S. police deploy brutal tactics across the country against pro-Palestine protesters occupying U.S. universities from early 2024. 

[Archive Recording] It was something never seen on the campus of Emory University Thursday as pro-Palestinian protesters and those against the Atlanta training facility went head to head with law enforcement.

[Chanting]

You’re on camera!

[Archive Recording] Protest is not a crime! Free, free Palestine!

Antony: In the U.S., thousands of police officers have trained with Israel’s military and police forces since the early 2000’s. 

[Archive Recording] Protesters as they are being arrested: You’re hurting me, let go! Free Palestine, free Atalanta.

Antony: The Palestine Laboratory keeps looping back on itself. And will continue to grow and expand if it’s not stopped.

Antony: Do you worry that the potential of sanctions and isolation from some circles is potentially countered by other parts of the world? India. Parts of Europe which become even more supportive of Israel because of what they're doing in Gaza.

Gideon: Look, even those countries will have to respond also to popular sentiments. If you take India, you know, finally, there is also a public opinion in India. There is a media in India. People are watching TV. People are seeing what's going on. So I don't say that tomorrow India will stop to be the biggest client of Israel as it is now, in terms of arm deals. But, you know, I can't see that it can continue like this when the public opinion in civil societies are so strong and you see that they are stalled. You see it everywhere in Europe, in the United States, in Asia, everywhere. It must have an effect. Will they stop buying weapons from Israel? Totally stop? Or supplying Israel? Not at all. It will be a process. But this process started already. It really started. I mean, you can feel it.

[MUSIC PLAYS]

[Archive Recording] UK protesters chant: From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free

Gideon: People are stoked over Gaza more than anything else now in the international arena. 

[Archive Recording] Japanese protesters chant: Free free Gaza

Gideon: There’s a very strong wave against Israel. 

[Archive Recording] Chicago protesters: What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now! And if we don’t get it? Shut it down!

Maha: For the first time, in life, in history, we feel that we are not abandoned by the peoples around the world. For the first time, we witnessed that people can see and hear the suffering happening here. And they admit that there is injustice happening.

[Archive Recording] Crowds chant: Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now!

Antony: What we've seen since October 7 really is a global explosion in support for Palestine. Public protests, the size of which we haven't seen in decades, really, since the protest against the Iraq war in 2002 and 03, and a growing awareness that what's happening in Palestine will not stay there. This is across the world, the Western world, global South and these protests aren't going to suddenly disappear. Particularly young people 18 to 35, according to public opinion polls, have become in some ways so enraged with what Israel's been doing in Gaza and their political leaders that have supported and armed it, that they will keep protesting and fighting until Palestine is free.

Boycott, divestment and sanctions, a movement that started in Palestine in 2005, is surging around the world. Many in Israel and Palestine argue that without massive outside economic, political, and cultural pressure, akin to the global campaign against apartheid South Africa, the situation in Palestine will never change as it's unlikely to come from within Israel.

Gideon: I mean, this government has to go, because it's really rotten and dysfunctional. But it's not a problem of the government. It's not like Israel was a paradise and then Netanyahu came and destroyed everything. Or Israel was a liberal country giving freedom to everyone, equality, justice and then came this demon and destroyed everything. No. We are living in an impossible situation from day one. The establishment of this state was accompanied with sins and we are paying the price of these sins until this very moment, because we were never ready to take accountability on the first since we did. 

Antony: Israel keeps selling the rest of the world a story, one where the unknown and the outside is dangerous. That to be safe, you must build a fortress, ghettoize yourself, put higher walls up, and use machines to guard the gate. Stockpile your weapons, be prepared to fight, and eliminate the enemy at all costs. The rest of the world keeps buying this story.

But there’s another story, one that can't be bought and sold. Palestinian journalist in Gaza Maha documents the ongoing genocide and war crimes that Israel is committing there. But she’s also been documenting and sharing real stories from within the war zone. 

She sends through a video of a group of Palestinians who have just been displaced, again, as forces move into Rafah, in southern Gaza, and they’ve found time to play volleyball on the beach. And then another of kids flying a white and red kite. She shares with the outside world a picture of a pastel yellow home, bombed out and windowless, grey rubble surrounds it. As Israel dropped bombs on the strip, the family returned to their home and gave it a fresh coat of paint. 

Maha: You know, these are my favorite kinds of stories to share. There are people here that love life who are also clinging to life. I like to observe these stories, observe these details, amidst this insanity we're living. And I witness them every day. People here in Gaza are actually people who love life, who want to live, and who do not want to die this way. There is so much that they, they need to witness in their lives, especially the children, who we say that, half of all these, victims of Israel’s genocide, are children.

Antony: The story Maha wants to tell is one of humanity and a search for peace, where Palestinians are seen as deserving equal rights, self determination, safety, where they’re not abandoned by the rest of the world. The Palestine Laboratory is not inevitable.

Maha: We are longing for peace. We are longing for a normal life and we are clinging to life, in every way possible. And this is a typically a Palestinian attitude. Because we've been living decades under this suffering and I think it's time now for Palestinians to try to improve their lives and to live the life they are dreaming up, even under this genocide, under this occupation, and under this strangling siege. 

Antony: The Palestine Laboratory Podcast is hosted by me, Antony Loewenstein. 

The series is produced by Elle Marsh and Bethany Atkinson-Quinton, production and sound engineering by Tim Jenkins. 

Studio recordings at 2SER in Sydney with Michael Jones and Jonathan Chang. 

Field production by Cinnamon Nippard. 

Original music in this series is by Ara Koufax and music direction by Sunless Studio. 

This last track is Window by The Album Leaf. A special thanks to our guests Gideon, Maha, and Khaled. 

This is an independent podcast brought to you by Drop Site News. To support Drop Site's journalism and get 20 percent off a subscription, visit dropsitenews.com slash palestinelab

Thanks for listening.

-END-

*We reached out to all the companies mentioned in this podcast, but we didn’t receive a response from them.

Guests: Jez Heywood, Andrew Feinstein, Mona Shtaya, Mariam Dawas

The Palestine Laboratory Podcast is Drop Site’s first investigative series, looking into how Israel is using Palestinian territories as a testing ground to develop its occupation-enforcing tech industry. Hosted by investigative journalist Antony Loewenstein and based on his recent book, this podcast series examines how Israel is reshaping conflict and population control globally. What happens in Palestine never stays there. 

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Credits
Host: Antony Loewenstein
Series Producer: Elle Marsh
Producer: Bethany Atkinson-Quinton
Production & Sound Engineering: Tim Jenkins
Field Recording: Cinnamon Nippard
Studio Recordings at 2SER: Michael Jones and Jonathan Chang
Original Music: Ara Koufax 
Music Direction: Sunless Studio
Podcast Artwork: Debashish Chakrabarty
Special Thanks: Anu Hasbold
Additional music in the series is from: Use Knife, Muqata'a & The Album Leaf

[MUSIC PLAYS]

Antony: Welcome back. I’m Antony Loewenstein and this is The Palestine Laboratory Podcast. 

In the last episode we looked at how after the 1967 Six-Day-War, Israel sought to establish diplomatic power by selling its “battle-tested” weapons in Palestine around the world to anyone who wanted them.

In this episode, we’ll be looking at the surveillance tech that comes out of Israel and how Israel and its defense industries profit in the wake of 9/11.

Andrew: In order to be able to do the business they do, they rely on government to ensure that their citizenry is permanently terrified.

Antony: In the occupied West Bank, checkpoints, cameras, surveillance towers, and phone hacking, are a part of daily life for all Palestinians.

Mariam: We know in Gaza that we are spied on by drones and by mobiles. We know that. But we don't have any other choice. 

Antony: But what happens in Palestine doesn’t stay there. Private Israeli companies market these repressive tools to states around the world, claiming that they have the answers to address global insecurity. What this means in practice is higher walls, tighter borders, greater surveillance of refugees, facial recognition, drones, smart fences, and biometric databases.

Antony: We've seen helicopters flying nearby, patrol cars, and almost certainly they're looking at us from the cameras on the fixed towers.

Antony: But does this actually make us safer? And can democracy exist in a society under mass surveillance? Episode 3: Privatizing the Occupation. 

[Seatbelt clicks in] 

Antony: I’m just going to turn the engine on and get the heater because it's really, really cold, winter in Sydney.

Antony: After years of living in Palestine, in 2020, my partner Ali and I left East Jerusalem and moved back to Australia. Back at home, I continued to research Israel’s surveillance and security tech industry and learned that the tech made by Israeli firms was also being used here.

Antony: So we are just crossing the Harbor Bridge in Sydney, and we're going towards North Sydney, where pretty much unbeknownst to most people, there is an office for the Israeli company Cellebrite. 

Antony: Cellebrite is a multi-billion-dollar digital intelligence company with its headquarters in Tel Aviv, but they also operate all over the world, including here in Australia.

Antony: What we're seeing is high-rise buildings. With corporate offices really in North Sydney. It's not a part of the city I come to very often.

Antony: The company is staffed by many former Israeli military and intelligence officers and is known for selling technology that allows governments, police, and intelligence agencies to access and hack data.

Antony: Jez, hi, great to meet you.

Jez: Good to meet you!

Antony: Thank you so much for coming.

Jez: No worries. No worries.

Antony: It’s wonderful to see you.

Antony: Jez Heywood is a quiet, passionate man with nervous energy. He’s the president of the Australian Unemployed Workers Union. He spends his days advocating for unemployed people who are dealing with the welfare system.

Jez: I did walk into the foyer before.
Antony: Okay.
Jez: And it's not listed on the screen that says.
Antony: How interesting, which I'm sure is not accidental.

Antony: The Australian government agency Services Australia, which administers welfare to people like students, the unemployed, and single parents, has used Cellebrite’s tools and has been publicly accused of accessing welfare recipients’ data. 

One welfare recipient and mother, Julie, had been receiving carer payments for her 17-year-old autistic son since 2014. Local media outlet IT News reported last year how after the government agency accessed her phone and laptop data, she was accused of being in a relationship. Services Australia alleged she was overpaid and demanded she pay the agency $80,000 Australian dollars. That’s over $51,000 U.S. Dollars. 

Julie's lawyers believed Cellebrite software was used to access her phone.

Antony: What does that do to those people? The people you often deal with everyday with your job. 

Jez: It terrifies them. You know, and so you're already financially strapped. You're stressed about, how are you going to pay your bills? How are you going to afford your medication? And then you've got this government with its creeping data tentacles slowly wiggling into every aspect of your life. 

Antony: And it's not just being used here in Australia. Cellebrite is marketed to countries all across the globe. Cellebrite has allegedly sold its wares to Uganda’s brutal dictatorship and to Chinese authorities, where border guards in Tibet have reportedly used it to search people's WeChat accounts. 

[Archive Recording] Across Russia there have been many thousands of arrests. Russian social media accounts. Some posts more cryptic than others because the stakes are so high.

Antony: In 2022, it was confirmed that Russia’s “Investigative Committee” was continuing to use Cellebrite’s tech on anti-Putin activists.  

[Archive Recording] By late afternoon, nearly 4,000 people had already been detained in  53 cities across the length and breadth of Russia. 

Antony: Despite Ugandan authorities admitting in 2022 that they had acquired Cellebrite’s phone-hacking tools, when we reached out to the company for comment, they said quote “Uganda is a banned country that we do not sell to.” 

One former Cellebrite employee wrote anonymously in the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, saying the company had lied to them. They wrote, quote, “I can say from personal experience that the company does nothing to prevent the abuse of its products by customers.” In their statement to us, Cellebrite also said they no longer sell to Russia or China and that the company is quote “committed to creating a safer world.” 

This track record has not impacted Cellebrite finding clients here in Australia at all. At the time of this recording, Australian government agencies had secured 153 contracts with Cellebrite. 

Jez: it's always creeping further and further into everybody's lives. And we're talking about the most vulnerable members of society here. Yet the government is using the tools of an oppressive, genocidal apartheid regime to, you know, claw back a few dollars from desperately poor people. 

Antony: Now Cellebrite is just one of many Israeli security firms that has set up shop around the world, and as we touched on in the first episode of this series, while these are private companies, many are staffed by former IDF intelligence officers. 

To understand the expansion and proliferation of companies like Cellebrite, it’s worth going back to the early 2000s.

[MUSIC PLAYS]

On the evening after the September 11 terror attacks in 2001 on New York and Washington, Benjamin Netanyahu, who was at this time Israel’s former prime minister and soon to be its foreign minister, was asked by a U.S. reporte what the attack meant for relations between the U.S. and Israel. In the interview, he immediately replied, quote, “It’s very good.” Then he quickly corrected himself, saying, quote, “Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.” 

[Archive Recording] Israel has been on the front line of fighting terrorism for a long time. And in fact, we've been fighting this kind of militancy, which has its roots in centuries of resentment against the West. 

Antony: For many, 9/11 was a moment that drew the U.S. and Israel’s bond even closer than before.

[Archive Recording] Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them. Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there.

[Archive Recording] It's as close an alliance as you can have. And we will help in any way that we can. 

Antony: It turbocharged Israel's defense sector and internationalized the war on terror. Other countries began to turn to the Jewish state to claimed that it had been fighting terror for decades. 

[Archive Recording] So for these militants, they don't hate America because of Israel. They hate Israel because of America, because they see Israel as an outpost of Western values and the very freedoms and liberalism in the larger sense of societal freedoms that they despise. Because of that, Israel has been fighting at the cutting edge between this terrorist militancy and the West.  

Antony: Only a few short months after the September 11 attacks, U.S. law enforcement delegates attended their first official training expedition to Israel to exchange quote “best practices” in “counter-terrorism.” But military tactics weren't all they got from Israel. In many ways, the Bush administration adopted a similar rhetoric around terrorism that Israel had been using for decades.

[Archive Recording] They understand what some of us have been trying to say for so long that the threat of international terrorism is not tactical. It's not a minor thing, that it actually threatens our way of life and our civilization. 

Antony: Before the 2000s, many Israeli defense companies involved were government-owned. This began to change after 9/11. With support from the state, Israel’s private-security industry boomed. Companies were encouraged to form close ties with America’s emerging cyber and security industries. 

Current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who through the 2000s served in a number of major ministerial roles and then later became prime minister again himself, when he talks about this period, Netanyahu explains how through government reforms, the state supported their military personnel to create profitable private security companies.

[Archive Recording] So the policy we have is keep taxes low and keep regulations low. Minimize regulations. There is no industry more susceptible and more inviting of regulations than cybersecurity. It's like weapons. It is a weapon! 

Antony: Benjamin Netanyahu is Israel's longest-serving prime minister. He’s also Israel's fourth-richest politician. The son of a famous “revisionist Zionist” historian, Netanyahu went to school in Philadelphia in the U.S. before returning to Israel in 1967 to join the IDF. The right-wing leader rejects the idea completely that Palestinians should have their own state, and touts a type of Jewish supremacist thinking that is now shared by an increasing number of Israelis. 

As a strong supporter of the capitalist free market, Netanyahu saw the war on terror after 9/11 as the perfect business opportunity for the state of Israel and its high-tech defense sector. And since the early 2000s he played a critical role in privitazing Israel’s economy and growing its defense establishment. He says he wants to be remembered quote, “as the defender of Israel and the liberator of its economy”.

Andrew Feinstein: The reason Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel would have been such a huge proponent of the war on terror is because of Israel's role in the global arms trade. 

Antony: Andrew Feinstein is a leading expert in the global arms trade. He talks about how the arms industry and security state capitalized on and accelerated in the wake of 9/11. 

Andrew: So probably a better place to talk about why the war on terror was so important for the arms industry. Better than me as a source would be some of the arms dealers I've interviewed over the years. So these are people who are constantly making money out of the arms trade. And they all acknowledged to me that in order to be able to do the business they do, they rely on governments to ensure that their citizenry is permanently terrified. So they need a threat. They need at least one enemy, preferably more than one enemy. And this is the way that governments and individual politicians justify ever-increasing budgets for defense, and thus for the purchase of weaponry or the sale of weaponry.

Andrew is an incredibly interesting man. He wears many hats: He’s a campaigner and author of “The Shadow World,” a book on the global arms industry. He left office in South Africa to expose massive corruption in the government there and has been working with a team of researchers ever since to investigate this shadowy arms trade. 

Andrew: Amnesty International often says the global trade in weapons is less regulated than the global trade in bananas. And very sadly, that's true.

[MUSIC PLAYS]

Andrew: I know of no other trade that has this reality, that there is regulation in place, and it's consistently and systematically ignored by those who have an obligation to enforce it. And it's for that reason that we talk about the global arms trade as the least regulated of all the international trades. One of the primary reasons for this lack of regulation is not only to give executive arms of government absolute carte blanche in terms of who they do and don't export arms to. But because this trade is by far the most corrupt of global trades, accounting for around 40% of all corruption in all global trade. What allows it to operate in this illegal way? Because that is what it is. It operates in a corrupt, illegal manner. And it's the fact that everything that happens on an arms deal is hidden behind a veil of national-security-imposed secrecy.

Antony: What the U.S.-led war on terror created after 9/11 in many, many countries across Europe, the Western world, and, frankly, much of the global South, was the so-called justification for a massive expansion of military and security spending. 

Andrew: Now I'm not for one moment suggesting that 9/11 was in any way some sort of creation of this national security elite. But when 9/11 happened, they did realize that this was what they required. But in order for it to benefit the defense industry, the militarist mindset, they needed to respond to it in a particular way. They decided to give it this name of the global war on terror. And what does that mean? That means we are in a permanent state of war, and anybody can be an enemy. 

Antony: Before 9/11, many Western states and repressive states already had a system of mass surveillance. But after 9/11, this accelerated. Mostly really because there was a political decision that huge amounts of  populations were suspect. Could be Muslims in America. Palestinians in Palestine. Tamils in Sri Lanka. In many, many countries, there were so-called justifications for a huge expansion of mass surveillance, which also came at a time of the digital revolution where it was much easier to surveil people. 

Andrew: 9/11 was an absolutely pivotal moment in Israel's political economic development. Because here suddenly we saw defense budgets skyrocket to levels that we never thought imaginable. But this provided the moment where the focus could move, to an extent, perhaps more than in any other country besides possibly the United States of America, towards national security, defense, and homeland security.

Antony: As David Lyon, a Scottish sociologist and expert on surveillance studies, has written, 9/11 was a quote, “wholesale reimagining of what societies would look like in the 21st century.” In this reimagined society, mass population surveillance, security, and border patrol was now a necessity. 

[MIDROLL] 

This drive for “security” is starkly visible in Israel’s policies. They maintain that these measures are essential to prevent potential attacks. And nowhere is this more evident than in the West Bank. This occupied Palestinian territory is where some of the toughest surveillance and border-patrol measures are trialled. For the estimated 3 million Palestinians living in the West Bank, which is roughly the size of Delaware in the U.S., militarized life and mass surveillance has become normalized. The Palestinian territory has been under military rule since Israel occupied the region in 1967. Within this militarized zone, a lot of private Israeli tech and security firms operate and test out their gear.

Now the West Bank includes places like Bethlehem and Hebron. It's a relatively small place, populated largely by Palestinians, but also, of course, increasing amounts of Jewish settlers, many of whom are fundamentalists. I first visited the West Bank nearly 20 years ago. And so many people see this area as a war zone, but actually it's also a place of beauty and tranquillity. It has striking landscapes with rolling hills and huge areas populated by its famous olive groves. Now some don't realize that Jerusalem is just down the road, but to get to most towns in the West Bank, you have to go through Israeli checkpoints. And these checkpoints control every aspect of Palestinian life. While the global war on terror reshaped security policies worldwide, here it is deeply personal and pervasive.

Mona: Living in the West Bank on a daily basis is a complex story whenever you want to tell it to someone who doesn't live here, because living here means you are watched in every single moment.

Mona Shtaya is a Palestinian digital rights activist, and her work focuses on surveillance using an intersectional lens between Palestine and different countries around the world. 

Mona: So I live in the occupied Palestinian territory in the West Bank. I grew up in Salfit, which is a small city, and, in the past few years, I moved to Ramallah. So I am based in Ramallah right now, and maybe I should tell you how it's means when you move between different cities in the West Bank, especially when you have family in another city and you live in a different city. When you move in the streets between cities, you can observe and witness the different, heavy loaded, military checkpoints that we pass through. So if I want to visit my mum in another city in Salfit, for example, I have to pass at least through two checkpoints. There are soldiers, and they're standing there most of the time. They're stopping us for hours whenever we're passing.

Antony: She says it shouldn’t take her more than 40 minutes to get there, but in reality it takes her a lot longer. According to the United Nations, there are approximately 645 checkpoints and roadblocks set up across the West Bank and East Jerusalem that restrict the movement of Palestinians. Of more than 30 checkpoints that connect Israel with the West Bank and Gaza, it’s estimated that roughly half have been fully or partially privatized, being operated and staffed by private security personnel. 

Mona: It's not like private sector and government sector. It's not. It's a loop that feeds into each other and that produces every day new technologies that serve the main interest, which is make the population control of people easier.

Antony: In 2020, a new surveillance program called Blue Wolf began to be rolled out across the West Bank. The software takes photos of Palestinian faces and matches them to a database. And like all good apps, it's been gamified, according to the Washington Post, in 2020 Israeli military units competed for prizes to collect the most pictures of Palestinians. 

Mona: They call it the Palestinian Facebook or Facebook for Palestinians, where they are profiling Palestinians, putting our data back in the wolf pack server that what they call it's. And it's about profiling, linking you with your family members. It's about collective punishment, because when you are linked with other people in your family or in your society, it's not like you are just a singular human being. You might be denied your right to get a health permit to go to Jerusalem, for example, just because one of your family members might be, according to the Israeli system, a security threat.

Antony: According to Amnesty International and many other human rights bodies, Israel is increasingly relying on facial recognition in the occupied West Bank to track and restrict the passage of Palestinians. 

Mona: For someone who's in the field, we know that there is also the facial recognition, where we are profiled, where we are dehumanized. We are merely numbers, we are merely data. And it aims, at the end of the day, to create this feeling of panopticon, where you feel that you are watched wherever you walk, wherever you go, and you quote unquote, “behave at your best.” 

Antony: She hears stories about how Palestinian women inside their homes don’t feel comfortable to take off their hijab.

Mona: It's not only about finding soldiers on those checkpoints. You can see CCTV cameras. You can see how those CCTV cameras are affixed everywhere, getting all the angles on that checkpoint. You can see how they are controlling or militarizing our civic spaces, our normal streets, our on the ground places. And whenever we're speaking about that, it's just to spread the fear. So here we're speaking about a whole surveillance system.

Antony: Unit 8200, which is Israel's intelligence arm equivalent of the US’s NSA, listens to and monitors all communications with Palestinians in the occupied territories. So Palestinians know that what they post online — Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, whatever it may be — who they’re speaking to, who they are communicating with, both within Palestine and globally, is being listened to and monitored. 

Mona: They started also checking your phone whenever you are passing. And I'm not saying they are checking every single phone. But they are checking phones. So you might be beaten, arrested, based on what they find on your phone. And you know we want to see what's going on with our people in the Gaza Strip. So we are watching the news. So if you have such kind of content on your phone you would be criminalized, which is insane and terrifying. 

Antony: I don't think there’s really any doubt that if you ask, and I have over the years, Palestinians under occupation, do we live in a system of freedom? The answer, of course, is absolutely not. 

Mona: The chilling effect is killing us, is preventing us from mobilizing and organizing ourselves. And to have this Palestinian discourse about what we want and how should we think about the day after or the Palestinian future, because of the whole chilling effect that threatens us all the time.  

Antony: This intense level of surveillance that Mona and other Palestians face comes from Israel’s belief that anyone could be a potential terrorist. So everyone needs to be monitored and controlled. And of course, this isn’t just happening in the West Bank. It’s even worse in Gaza.

Now, I've been visiting Gaza since 2009, and it's always a very surreal experience. I entered from the Israeli side. It's about an hour and a quarter from Jerusalem, and when you arrive in this huge warehouse and whenever I went in there, I always had to go through lots of security. The Israeli officials would always say to me, based on my name, are you Jewish, yes I am, why are you going in there, you’re going to be killed, it’s full of terrorists. I said, I'm a journalist. That's what I do. And then to go from Israel into Gaza, there's this long, long, almost like a cage that you walk along. And on either side you can see through the cage. I remember distinctly seeing from 2009, every year I've been there since, just destroyed homes, Palestinian homes that have been bombed by Israeli wars over the last 15 or so years. 

As intense as it was for me to cross from Israel into Gaza, Mariam Dawas, my Palestinian friend who was living in Gaza until earlier this year, told me about what it's like for her to cross into Israel. You might remember her from episode one. 

Mariam: We have been deprived our rights of everything, like movement, travel, medical treatment. I don't think that people know much about this, but we are really isolated. I cannot go to Jerusalem. I cannot to go to the West Bank. I cannot go to anywhere in Palestine. 

Antony: In 2013, as part of her Masters in International Relations, Mariam got the chance to New York to study abroad for a semester. But to get her American visa, she was required to go to the American consulate in Jerusalem. The main way to enter Israel from Gaza was through the Erez crossing at the northern end of the strip. She applied for a permit to enter Jerusalum from Gaza and waited two months just for a response. Then she was told that if she wanted to enter Jerusalem to get her visa, she needed to go to the Erez crossing for a security interview with Israeli authorities.

Mariam: I was really terrified to go through a security interview because I've asked some people what happens there. They told me it's a nightmare. 

At first Mariam wasn’t even sure she should go through with it.

Mariam: But then I have been encouraged by the program and by my friends. You have nothing to worry about. You can go and try your luck. And I did, which I regret. I was dehumanized, humiliated. 

Antony: From the moment Mariam arrived at her security interview, she was treated as a suspect.

Mariam: They took all my clothes off. They took a machine that was going on my body to see what I'm hiding. And then they asked me, they asked me to put a number. They didn't take my phone. They only asked me to put a number on my phone and then turn it off which I did, I have to. And then they took me to another place out of Erez crossing, under the ground. And then you go up to another building. You don't know where you are. If you disappear, no one will ever know where you are. And then, they made me wait and wait and wait in a dark room with no chairs, And they were playing on your mental condition. 

Antony: An Israeli officer finally arrived to interrogate her. 

Mariam: He told me that we have nothing on you. But you are entering the Israeli state. And everyone who enters the Israeli state, we have to make sure that he is not a terrorist.

On the advice of others in Gaza, Mariam had left her smartphone at home. She was told if she didn’t want officers going through all her personal photos then she should bring along a different phone. But it didn’t matter, it seemed like the officer knew everything anyway. 

Mariam: He told me about the last message I got even though he didn't get my phone. He told me, who's that one? Who sent you that message? He's your relative, your cousin? And it was my fiance. And then I was asking myself, how did he know? He didn't take my phone. My phone is just with me, you know? And then he asked me to work with him. He told me, what are you going to do in U.S.? And I told him that I'm going to do my Masters in International Relations. He told me that what if we can make you do your Masters, we give you a scholarship, and you come back and work with us through international organisations? I told him, no, I'm not going to do this. He told me why? I told him I'm not a spy. I told him because you’re making it an unlivable place.

[MUSIC PLAYS]

Mariam: Could you permit anyone to do what has been done to me? If you are entering any place in this world, would you accept that? I don't. 

So he changed the subject, and he showed me some pictures of people who seemed familiar to me. He told me, don't lie. If you know them, tell me. I told him. I don't know them, they seem familiar and maybe they are from the neighborhood around me. But I don't know their names but they seem familiar.

And then after all of that, he sent me back to Gaza. And I didn't go to Jerusalem. I went the next day. And I got an email in Hebrew and a Facebook account that added me that had no friends, only me, and it was in Hebrew. I was really terrified because I'm not going to spy, that's for sure. But they can control you to that extent that they can. I know. Some stories that they can force you to, if they have anything on you, they can force you to do. So I only thanked God that they. Don't have anything on me. 

Antony: Various Israeli intelligence veterans from the notorious Unit 8200 have admitted that the work of the Unit involves extortion, harassment, and threats. They’ve blackmailed gay Palestinians, threatened Palestinians with health issues, or cut off essential medical care if they did not comply. Another anonymous former Israeli Intelligence officer I spoke to told me how he realized the occupation was not about self defense or security. Instead he saw Israel was ruling a civilian population with no rights under a military dictatorship. 

Mariam: We know in Gaza that we are spied on by drones and by mobiles. We know that. But we don't have any other choice. 

Antony: As we now know, what's developed and tested in Palestine, doesn’t stay there. This surveillance tech is exported to countries all around the world, especially those looking to get tough on border security. 

Antony: We've seen helicopters flying nearby, patrol cars, and almost certainly they're looking at us from the cameras on the fixed towers. 

Antony: I’ve been travelling the world documenting the spread of this type of tech and one of the places it exists is on the U.S.-Mexico border. 

Antony: I'm standing literally underneath one of the Elbit integrated fixed towers. It's about 10 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, and there's around 50 of these all across Arizona. And they talk to each other. The towers speak to each other it’s about surveillance, monitoring.

Antony: These massive towers are set up with the sole purpose of tracking who goes in and out of the U.S.. And of course, they’re built by Elbit, Israel’s biggest defense company.* 

Antony: It's almost, on the one hand, feels like quite benign because the towers themselves are not weapons, and yet it's hard not to feel like they're part of this massive militarization of the U.S. border.

Antony: And it’s not just migrants they monitor. Native Americans often say that they don't feel safe or private in their own territory. That is land that is historically theirs, and that these surveillance towers make privacy an impossibility. This is not simply something that came into place during a Republican administration. In fact, it began during a Democratic administration many years ago during the Obama era, continued during the Trump era and it's been finalized during the Biden era. 

Another example of how Israeli surveillance tech is used by Western countries is the European Union. In the last few years, they’ve massively reduced their use of patrol boats and instead, deployed unarmed Israeli drones to monitor people from Africa and the Middle East trying to cross the Mediterranean by boat.The result has been a huge spike in drownings of principally Black and brown people, numbering in the thousands. 

The border industrial complex is soaring. It's estimated to be worth next year around $68 billion. U.S.-Mexico border, so-called “fortress Europe,” Australia, the UK — and Israel is profiting from its massive growing border security industry, using the West Bank and Gaza as examples of just how tough you can be on border control. 

We seem to be moving to a world in the 21st century where there's not really the concept of a global community. It's very much us versus them. There's never been more people moving around the world looking for safety than now, since World War II. We're in an unprecedented era, and rather than addressing that logically and sanely, in fact, what the West is increasingly is doing, with tech bought from Israeli companies that's been tried and tested in Palestine, is trying to keep people out and surveil entire populations. 

But the impact of this is not that societies are made safer. In fact, what it does is it makes societies more paranoid and insecure. And mass surveillance is a tool used by anyone in political office to target their enemies or, frankly, their own populations.

Mona: The whole surveillance state is profitable. You are creating a profitable colonial system where people are not only dehumanized, are not only downgraded, are not only oppressed because they are occupied. It's more than that. Unfortunately, different, oppressive regimes around the world are getting those systems or technologies, because there is a whole chain of violence around the world where we're oppressors are collaborating to oppress people for different reasons.

Antony: In the next episode of The Palestine Laboratory, we’ll investigate October 7. We’ll look at the Hamas attack on Israel and the Jewish state’s brutal response. We’ll also uncover how Israel has been live-testing new weapons and forms of surveillance in Gaza and trying to sell them at global arms fairs. 

[CREDIT MUSIC PLAYS]

The Palestine Laboratory Podcast is hosted by me, Antony Loewenstein.

The series is produced by Elle Marsh and Bethany Atkinson-Quinton. Production and sound engineering by Tim Jenkins. 

Studio recordings at 2SER in Sydney with Michael Jones and Jonathan Chang. Field production by Cinnamon Nippard.

Original music in this series is by Ara Koufax and music direction by Sunless Studio. This last track is Coupe d'état, by Use Knife remixed by Muqata’a. 

A special thanks to Anu Hasbold, and our guests for this episode Jez, Mariam, Mona and Andrew.

This is an independent podcast brought to you by Drop Site News. To support Drop Site's journalism and get 20 percent off a subscription, visit dropsitenews.com slash palestinelab.

Thanks for listening.

-END-

* We asked Elbit Systems for comment regarding the company’s technology on the US/Mexico border and they didn’t respond

Guests: Daniel Silberman and Sasha Polakow-Suransky

The Palestine Laboratory Podcast is Drop Site’s first investigative series, looking into how Israel is using Palestinian territories as a testing ground to develop its occupation-enforcing tech industry. Hosted by investigative journalist Antony Loewenstein and based on his recent book, this podcast series examines how Israel is reshaping conflict and population control globally. What happens in Palestine never stays there. 

Subscribe now

Credits
Host: Antony Loewenstein
Series Producer: Elle Marsh
Producer: Bethany Atkinson-Quinton
Production & Sound Engineering: Tim Jenkins
Field Recording: Cinnamon Nippard
Studio Recordings at 2SER: Michael Jones and Jonathan Chang
Original Music: Ara Koufax 
Music Direction: Sunless Studio
Podcast Artwork: Debashish Chakrabarty
Special Thanks: Anu Hasbold
Additional music in the series is from: Use Knife, Muqata'a & The Album Leaf

[MUSIC PLAYS]

Daniel: Finding out about Israel's involvement in aiding the military regime in Chile. It was very painful. Basically, in a metaphoric way, I can say that an Israeli bullet killed my father.

Antony: Welcome back, I’m Antony Leowenstein and this is The Palestine Laboratory. In the first episode, we looked at how Israel’s early leaders used the military to shape the country, borrowing repressive tools from the British.

Haim: This is a society that is built around the army, that thinks around the army, that serves the army.

Antony: We also heard from Palestinians, like my friend Mariam, about Israel’s long history of testing weapons.

Mariam: People in Gaza know when it's Apache. They know when it's F-16. 

Antony: Today, we'll explore how this military mindset has influenced Israel's relationships with other countries. Many people know how the U.S. supported and armed a huge number of repressive regimes after World War II. But what is far less known is that Israel was doing virtually the same thing.

Daniel: Basically, if you take a globe and you spin the globe, wherever you put your finger on it, most likely we sold our arms over there. 

Antony: We’ll look at the way the young Israeli state began befriending dictators, human-rights abusers, drug traffickers, and even anti-semites. These relationships would prop up Israel as a  diplomatic and military power, and helped it evade criticism of its treatment of Palestinians. When it comes to Israel’s involvement in a truly daunting amount of oppressive regimes, the details are still largely being kept hidden by Israel under the guise of ‘security’ concerns. But there are people out there fighting to get the truth. Episode 2: How to make friends.

Daniel: My name is Daniel Silberman. I'm originally from Chile. My family is from Chile, and we moved to Israel when I was ten years old. Because of the political situation in Chile.

Antony: On September 11, 1973, Daniel Silberman was six years old and living with his family in the northern part of Chile when the country's democratically elected government was overthrown in a swift and brutal military coup.

Daniel: It wasn’t a total surprise for many, because there was political turmoil. But for me, personally, as a six year old, it was a complete surprise. Something that changed my life completely and forever. 

Antony: In the early hours of that morning, the military junta besieged and bombed the presidential palace in the country's capital, Santiago.

[Archive Recording] Sounds of the Presidential Palace being bombed.

[Archive Recording] Allende’s last words broadcast from the Presidential Palace: Viva Chile! 

Antony: By that afternoon, the socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, was dead. 

[Archive Recording] Sounds of Presidential Palace being bombed.

[Archive Recording] Reporter: The buildings all around are high and close in on the little palace. Yet they’re scarcely touched. This was pinpoint bombing of such astonishing accuracy that even an Israeli I met here was filled with admiration. 

Antony: General Augusto Pinochet was installed as Chile's new ruler, and he would go on to lead an authoritarian military dictatorship for 17 years. 

[Archive Recording] The army is devoting all its time and its considerable force to hunting down the remaining Marxists and Allende sympathizers. Arrests continue day and night. The ever-increasing number of prisoners are kept here at the National Stadium, which is an enormous building and needs to be for its new purpose. 

Daniel: The very first days were very cruel days. Bodies were found floating in the river every day. There was a curfew between, I believe, 8 p.m. or 9 p.m. until 6 a.m. and people that were found outside were first shot, then questions were asked.  

Antony: Daniel’s father, David Silberman, was an engineer who was managing a major copper mine in northern Chile. As a supporter and friend of the socialist president Salvador Allende, he decided to turn himself in to the regime after many of the mine workers were killed by the army. Daniel’s father hoped that he might be saved because he had done nothing wrong. Instead, he was sentenced to 13 years in prison. 

Daniel: It was a terrible situation for many people, and it's basically a situation that tore apart families, communities. There was a really, really, terror, feeling in the streets. 

Antony: Now outside of jail, Daniel’s family were followed by the secret police. Their close friends and cousins would see the family on the street and walk the other way.

Daniel: As a kid, it was terrible. You couldn't understand. For example, the fact that certain stores in the neighborhood wouldn't allow us to enter the store even. Let alone to buy something in the store. We were marked. People would call us communist as if it was like a curse. And that's it. That's enough to say you're not welcome here.

Antony: Inside prison, Daniel’s father’s condition was deteriorating. He was subject to frequent beatings and torture, including electric shocks on his genitals. But the family still held out hope that he might be released soon. Like many in Chile’s Jewish community, Israel’s embassy was offering the family asylum and safe passage out of the country.

Daniel: My grandparents very quickly they left for Israel. So the idea was that they were waiting for us to also come to Israel. The plan and the hope was that my father would be indeed released and would be allowed to go to Israel.

Antony: Near the end of 1974, Daniel’s mother thought she had finally succeeded in securing her husband’s release. And the one condition offered by Pinochet’s regime was if David was released, the entire family would have to go into exile. But instead David Silberman disappeared.

[MUSIC PLAYS]

Daniel: He was kidnaped from jail by the military police. I should say it's the DINA, which was the organization, the secret police, the organization that was in charge of eliminating all the people from the previous regime.

Antony: For three years, Chilean officials, prison guards, and officers, told the family lies about where David was. They’d get a call from a prison guard saying he was spotted at this jail or that they’d seen him being transferred.

Daniel: There comes a point where you add one point to another and you understand that that person is no longer alive. But there was never a declaration, a formal declaration. Just a series of events that you can understand. And basically, he is considered a missing person since October of 1974. 

Antony: According to the Chilean Ministry of Justice, over 40,000 people were executed, detained, disappeared, or tortured as political prisoners during Pinochet’s rule.

Daniel: Once my mom understood that he is no longer alive, it was time for us to leave Chile. Because it also was dangerous for us. So we arrived to Israel. 

Antony: Fifty-one years on, families like Daniel’s are still looking for answers about what happened to their loved ones. 

Daniel: With the research of many different humanitarian agencies in Chile, we found out that he was most likely murdered two weeks after he was kidnaped from jail in 1974. So on one hand, you say, you know, I'm happy that he suffered less. But on the other hand, you say from 1974 until 1977, all those phone calls that we would receive, claiming that he's been seen here, there and then the offer to release him while he's already dead two years ago? No. It's almost sinister. Who would go into those efforts of tormenting the widow, telling her that there's hope that they're going to release him. And you ask yourself why he was treated this way?

Antony: So far in this story, Israel comes across as relatively benign. On the surface, Israeli authorities claimed they were assisting the small Jewish-Chilean community escape the Pinochet dictatorship that they alleged they did not support. But then in 1999, formerly classified documents revealed the U.S.’s backing of the military dictatorship and the 1973 coup. Among these documents was evidence of Israel’s ties to Pinochet’s regime. Israel did not just train Chilean personnel to aid the repression of its own people, but was the major arms supplier to the state. After a U.S. arms embargo against Chile passed the U.S. Congress in 1976, a cable from the U.S. Embassy in Chile in 1980, acknowledged that Israel was a major arms supplier to Pinochet. 

A declassified document from 1988 says, quote, “Chile values Israel's willingness and ability to sell battle-tested military equipment, modify and modernize older items, and provide services and training. Chile, in turn, has supported Israel on a number of votes in the UN that Tel Aviv considered vital.”  In that CIA document from 1988, it said, quote, “including acceptance of the Israeli delegation's credentials for the UN General Assembly.” The reason these documents are revealing is it uses a language that could be relevant as much today as then: that Israel is selling weapons to get money, but also trying to get international support for a brutal occupation of Palestine. 

Much like we talked about in the last episode, the concept of the Palestine Laboratory was alive and well in the 1970s and 80s in Chile as the country bought and deployed weapons on its own people that had first been tested on Palestinians.

Daniel: Finding out about Israel's involvement in aiding the military regime in Chile, it was very painful. Because on one hand, I will always be thankful to Israel for giving us a second chance. For allowing me to grow up normally, I would say, and raise a family of my own and live a decent life. But on the other hand, when I was exposed to the information that Israel provided military aid to Chile -- and when we say military aid, it's not only arms, military equipment, it's also training. And training in interrogation systems. So you say you know what's going on here? Basically, in a metaphoric way, an Israeli bullet killed my father. 

Antony: In 2015, Daniel joined other survivors of Pinochet’s regime and filed a legal suit in Israel with human rights lawyer Eitay Mack. The suit demanded that the country’s authorities reveal its ties to the Chilean junta, and this was a landmark case, because no one really had seriously ever tried to get accountability for Israeli actions in Chile after 1973. 

Now at first, the Israeli government said that there was no correspondence between Israel and Chile during Pinochet’s rule. Then they backtracked on this claim and eventually acknowledged that there were, in fact, 19,000 relevant documents in the archive, but that they couldn’t release the information as they simply didn’t have the manpower to redact the documents. 

Daniel: After a year, we indeed received 12 pages of a correspondence about a delegation of eight Chilean doctors that they wanted to come to visit in Israel. And the whole correspondence was okay, they can come, but who will pay for them? Make it clear that Israel is not going to pay for their expenses, they need to pay. It was a farce. I mean, we're asking for documents about our families and this is the documents you are giving us?

For me, it was important to be part of this legal suit for two reasons. One is on a personal level because the name of my father could be mentioned in those papers, and we could come about a new piece of information that will allow us to understand where exactly he was killed, by whom. But I also have to be honest and say that our goal was also to fight against the Israeli policy of selling arms without considering the moral issue. Basically, if you take a globe and you spin the globe. Wherever you put your finger on it. Most likely, we sold our arms over there. 

Antony: Daniel says he’s continuing to try to find out the truth of Israel's involvement with the dictatorship. But Israel's complicity in Chile’s brutal regime is not just a one-off occurrence. Israel has pretty much always had an open policy of selling weapons to basically anyone who wanted them, including to Germany less than 15 years after the Holocaust. 

[MUSIC PLAYS]

Antony: Today, there is extensive documentation that Israel was knowingly selling arms to Argentina’s brutal anti-Semitic dictatorship.

[Archive Recording] There were many opponents of the military junta who were kidnapped and killed for raising their voice against the system. These people, some 30,000 or more, are known as the disappeared.

Antony: Training and arming death squads in Colombia.

[Archive Recording] To defeat the guerillas, the generals men threw away the rulebook so that rightwing death squads could operate freely.

Antony: Sending bullets, rifles, and grenades during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

[Archive Recording] It is said to be the fastest pace of genocide in human history. Israel provided the rifles, ammunition, and grenades that made it all possible.

Antony: Supporting Sri Lanka’s Special Task Force, a brutal unit of the Sri Lankan police during its civil war.

[Archive Recording] As the students disregarded continuous requests to hold the protests in a peaceful manner, the police had to resort to other measures to disperse the crowd.

Antony: Selling weapons and surveillance tech to Myanmar’s military even after it had committed genocide against its Muslim Rohinga population.

[Archive Recording] The International Court of Justice has ruled that Myanmar must take all possible measures to prevent its military from carrying out genocide.

And literally this year, teaching India’s state police violent tactics deployed against protesting farmers.

[Archive Recording] A drone at one point dropped tear gas on the protesters and police have put up barricades as tens of thousands of farmers and people have travelled into the capital in tractors and trucks.

[Archive Recording] It's almost like a warzone, because there is a consistent -- oh my gosh. Oh my god. This is where, tear gas has gone off, this is almost suffocating.

Antony: The list goes on and on and on. And what this shows is that nothing has really changed for decades. 

[MIDROLL]

You might be thinking, how did Israel, this tiny nation, end up cooperating and assisting with so many brutal dictatorships? Exactly how did Israel get here? 

In 1967, there was the Six Day War, where Israel fought some of its Arab neighbours and this marked a turning point for Israel inside Palestine and in terms of its relationships with other countries around the world. Israeli history can be split really into two eras: before and after 1967. Before 1967, Israeli policy wasn't noble, but gave the rhetorical impression of sometimes opposing repression. Many Israelis then and now viewed Zionism as a liberation struggle. 

For example, in 1963, the Foreign minister Golda Meir, told the United Nations that Israel, quote, naturally opposes policies of apartheid, colonialism, and racial or religious discrimination wherever they existed. Israel bonded with newly independent African states enjoying their post-colonial freedoms. 

[MUSIC PLAYS]

[Archive Recording] June 5, 1967, around 300 Israeli aircraft, mainly French-built fighter bombers, prepared to launch the most decisive air strike in history. Their target: the air forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. 

Antony: The international community saw Israel aggressively and rapidly take over and occupy the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. 

[Archive Recording] The news flashes clarified the situation. It soon became apparent that the Middle East power patterns of a decade were being changed in a matter of hours. 

Antony: Within six days, Israel had tripled its size, and now controlled far more territory, and occupied Palestinians. By the end of the war, Israel had expelled another 300,000 Palestinians from their home, including around 130,000 who had already been displaced in 1948.

[Archive Recording] With total command of the skies, Israeli fighters can now give tactical support to their soldiers as they advance across the desert.

Antony: 1967 was a turning point, and Israel really has never been the same since. It both empowered the most extreme radical Messianic Jews to start building settlements, which began very soon after the war concluded. Israel was receiving a lot of condemnation for its colonization of Palestine, but to offset that, they had to make deals -- arms deals and training deals -- with various nations who were inspired by what Israel was doing in the occupied territories and wanted to get a taste of that in their own country. 

A key context here for what's happening with Israel and the world is the Cold War. Some of the world, of course, aligned itself with Washington and others with Moscow. And that global split continued for years, where Israel felt it needed to make friends with more Western-friendly nations opposed to more Soviet-backed states that often supported Palestinian struggle, liberation and resistance. And I think a lot of the Israeli backing of repressive states, particularly since 1967, they claimed, was to make friends in a world that was often very hostile to them. 

This policy wasn’t just about gaining diplomatic support or growing a profitable arms industry. It was also about sharing an ideological framework, creating alliances between like-minded nations. And there's no better example of this than Israel and apartheid South Africa, a brutal regime that existed between 1948 and 1994.

[SINGING]

Antony: Life in apartheid South Africa was brutal. There was one rule for whites and one rule for blacks. 

[Archive Recording] Though blacks were officially citizens of South Africa, they could only come to white areas if they had work and they had to live in separate townships outside the white cities. 

Antony: The black population were herded into Bantustans, essentially, these black townships. And their labor was used, exploitatively, by the South African state. When many Israeli leaders went to South Africa during this period in the 70s and 80s, they're inspired by what South Africa was doing and wanted to bring some of that back to the occupation of Palestine.

Sasha: They were united in a sense of what I call minority survivalism, the sense that the Arabs want to push us into the sea, the Blacks want to push us into the sea, and we will do anything to resist that. 

Antony: Journalist and author of “The Unspoken Alliance,” Sasha Polakow-Suransky, spent years researching the secret relationship between the two countries. 

Sasha: I was discouraged from pursuing this project by almost everyone. And that was not because people didn't find it interesting, but the general reaction I got from most academics, especially in Israel and South Africa, was great topic, you're not going to get anything. Everyone knows that something was going on. Everyone knows that there was some relationship. You're not going to be able to prove it.

Antony: Most of Israel's information regarding the state's history of arms deals has never been made public. The government shuts down most legal filings or requests for information, even if this information requested is decades old. Public information is further obstructed by the Israeli military censor. Journalists in Israel covering military intelligence and defense have to submit their stories to the Israeli military censor before publication. No other Western country is like this. 

Sasha: So I almost gave up because I was talking to people I respected who presumably had tried themselves at some point. But I decided to push. Israel has declassified virtually nothing about this relationship, regardless of how many years ago it was. But I did manage to get thousands of pages of documents from the South African Foreign Ministry archive and the South African Defense Ministry archive. The Israelis did try to intervene and I know even now, almost 20 years later, that I didn't get everything.

Antony: During a period where the white supremacist government was attempting to violently crush the anti-apartheid movement, Israel ignored UN resolutions that called on nations to cease selling arms to South Africa. Instead, they secretly became one of the country's major arms suppliers during its reign, including playing a key role in helping South Africa set up a nuclear-weapons program. 

Sasha: So the Israelis helped with South Africa's missile program. They helped, in terms of supplies of ammunition, bombs. They helped restore and update South Africa's fighter jets. There were training trips of South African military personnel going to Israel and vice versa. There was joint missile testing. And the most controversial part of it involves nuclear technology.

South Africa was developing a nuclear program, which it dismantled in the early 90s during the transition to democracy. But during the late 70s, early 80s, South Africa was developing its own nuclear-weapons program. They were about ten years behind Israel and the South Africans, according to the archival documents, were extremely interested in Israel's military technology as a vehicle for what they planned to build, and their nuclear program.

So you have letters between leading Israeli military officials and top generals in the Apartheid regime in South Africa writing to each other, praising each other, expressing an affinity with each other. You get the sense from their correspondence and from these declassified archival materials that this was more than just tanks and ammunition. This was about what many of them, not all of them, but many of them sensed as a shared struggle. 

Antony: In 1976, the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin invited South African Prime Minister John Vorster to visit. Voirster had been a Nazi sympathiser and a member of a fascist Afrikaner group during World War II. And yet when Vorster arrived in Israel, he was given the red-carpet treatment. It's remarkable to see footage now of Vorster visiting Yad Vashem, the country's Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, and laying a wreath to victims of the Third Reich. 

Sasha: They invited him to formal dinners with the leaders of the country. They held meetings with top government officials. And behind the scenes, he was primarily involved in discussions about this burgeoning arms trade.

The arms trade certainly was highly classified. Most of the meetings between military officials and even some Israeli ministers visiting South Africa, there was always some sort of cover story. Or it was completely secretive. And if it was known that an Israeli minister was visiting South Africa, it would be because they were fundraising for some Zionist organization and giving a speech to the local community, when in fact the primary purpose was to meet with defense officials.

Antony: The South African government’s yearbook from that year documented the growing bond between the two countries, saying, quote, “Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common. They are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples.” End quote. 

[MUSIC PLAYS]

Sasha: 1976 was also the peak of apartheid brutality in some ways. The Soweto massacre occurs in June of that year. And so just months after he goes on this red-carpet visit to Israel, you have one of the most violent and brutal incidents in the whole history of apartheid South Africa, where hundreds of schoolchildren are shot in the back, massacred for protesting against his government's educational policies.

Antony: Now in 2006, the former Israeli ambassador to South Africa, Alon Liel, told the Guardian that Israel essentially created the South African arms industry. He called the relationship between the two countries' security establishments a love affair. As well as state-owned factories exporting materials to South Africa, private Israeli factories developed a profitable industry of selling anti-riot vehicles for use against protesters in the black townships -- the so-called Bantustans. 

It's remarkable looking at South African PR today, from the 1980s when the regime was trying to promote itself as this so-called nation of equality. The advertisements that they were putting out to the world, especially to try to convince Americans to keep supporting the apartheid regime, shows blacks and whites working together harmoniously. Complete and utter delusion from the reality at the time. And this actually is very similar to many ads that Israel puts out today talking about West Bank factories, where Israelis and Palestinians work harmoniously to economically benefit both peoples. It's hard not to miss the historical irony here of two regimes, both credibly accused of apartheid, promoting themselves in a remarkably similar way. 

Now, near the end of South Africa's apartheid regime and the country's first democratic election, 1994, in which Nelson Mandela was elected as the country's first black president, Israel was one of the last nations to maintain a relationship with the white minority regime. And when you read the declassified documents from this period, Israeli officials are quite concerned about apartheid ending, and are hoping -- which in hindsight seems delusional -- that their relationship with South Africa will continue if the Black population takes control. 

[MUSIC PLAYS]

[Archive Recording] We identify with the PLO, because just like ourselves, they are fighting for the right of self-determination.

Antony: Mandela took note saying, quote, “the people of South Africa will never forget the support of the State of Israel to the apartheid regime.” 

[Archive Recording] Mandela 1990 New York: Our attitude towards any country is determined by the attitude of that country to our struggle.

[Applause]

Antony: Since the end of apartheid, South Africa has become a leading critic of Israel. With presidents, ministers, and UN delegates slamming the state for denying basic rights to Palestinians.

[Archive Recording] Israel is the only state in the world that can be called an apartheid state. We remain deeply concerned at the denial of the right to self-determination to the Palestinian people in the absence of which no other human rights can be exercised or enjoyed.

Antony: Last year, in 2023, South Africa took Israel to the International Court of Justice, alleging Israel was in violation of the Genocide Convention for its invasion of Gaza. 

[Archive Recording] The evidence of genocidal intent is not only chilling. It is also overwhelming and incontrovertible.

Antony: South Africa’s former foreign minister Naledi Pandor says the solidarity most South Africans have with the people of Palestine stems from the fact that they feel and remember the pain that they were subjected to during the apartheid regime. 

[Archive Recording] As long as the people of Palestine know we as South Africans are with them, we will strive on, we won't tire.

Antony: At many pro-Palestine rallies across the world, including in Australia. South Africa has become almost a rallying cry for this movement. And it's not unusual to have Mandela's famous quote on posters: Our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians. 

[SOUTH AFRICAN RALLY SOUNDS]

Antony: Despite Israel's attempts to keep their defense deals secret, there's a growing awareness around the world about Israel's involvement in apartheid South Africa and in other regimes. But this international awareness does not seem to be slowing Israel down. The state continues to market itself as the ideal ethnonationalist model, and is finding plenty of other interested parties who want to learn the tactics and tools Israel is developing in occupied Palestine. The model, in various forms, is being replicated in more contemporary situations, such as Myanmar and India, and inspiring the far right in the U.S., Europe, and beyond. 

In 2015, a secret delegation for Myanmar visited Israel's defense industries and bases to negotiate deals for drones, a mobile phone-hacking system, rifles, military training, and warships. This relationship continued long after Myanmar was credibly accused of committing genocide against the Muslim Rohingya minority. 

Despite an international arms embargo on Myanmar and Israel claiming that they had stopped selling equipment to the state, in 2019, senior representatives of Myanmar were seen in uniform attending Israel's biggest weapons and security conference in Tel Aviv. 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seemingly more interested in expanding the state's security industry than worrying about who buys from Israel.

[Archive Recording]  Every single country here in Israel's expanding diplomatic horizons is talking to us about cyber. They all want to share in our knowledge of cyber defense.

Antony: In 2020, Myanmar acquired a surveillance system from Israeli firm Cognyte*. The cyber system that the regime bought gives police and authorities the ability to track its citizens, from monitoring online activity, hacking devices, and extracting coded text messages. 

[Archive Recording] Cybersecurity is not merely here to stay. It's going to grow exponentially. And it reflects the fact that what we have to do is to take certain risks and allow the graduates of our security services to merge into companies with local partners and foreign partners. 

Antony: If we look at the developing relationship between India and Israel, the model emerges again. Since the Hindu-nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power in India in 2014, the two states, Israel and India, have begun cooperating extensively, signing huge arms deals and conducting military, police, and counter-terrorism training. In 2019, Modi's government suspended the Jammu and Kashmir Constitution to give India almost complete control over the disputed and occupied territory of Kashmir. Modi moved quickly to implement a plan with remarkable similarities, but also notable differences, to Israeli-controlled Palestine. And it's worth noting that many Indian officials, for many years, have publicly and privately spoken of their admiration for what Israel is doing in Palestine and their desire to replicate that in Kashmir. In May this year, one of Israel’s major defense giants, Israel Aerospace Industries*, inadvertently revealed that India was the company's largest foreign customer in 2023, buying almost $1 billion-worth of equipment from this Israeli company alone.

[MUSIC PLAYS]

Antony: When you research this issue, it's hard not to see history repeating itself over and over and over again. That nations that want to repress their own people, whether it's in Myanmar or India or Sri Lanka, or elsewhere, look to Israel as a model, not just because they want to buy weapons or training, but because they also like the idea of learning how Israel gets away with it. 

This is a theme that I found time and time again, that so many nations look to Israel and say, how do you do this? How do you get away with it? How do you essentially act in Palestine without global sanction? And I would include the actions of Israel in Gaza since October 7. When I keep seeing this happening over and over again, it makes me realize this will never stop without arms embargoes and sanctions and boycotts. It's the only way for Israelis, not just the government, but its people, to realize these kind of actions must come with a price. 

Daniel: Especially with the historical context of the Jewish people, Israel shouldn’t be selling arms and aiding countries that are creating more refugees, creating more suffering and pain.

Antony: This leaves people like Daniel Silberman wondering if Israel will ever try to end the Israel-Palestine conflict. What started out as a strategy by Israel to gain international recognition and friends now is so profitable and entrenched that how would they ever stop?

Daniel: One of the most advantages of Israel with its competitors in this industry is that Israel always can claim that the weapons that she's selling and the training that she’s selling, comes with a lot of experience. Battle experience, it’s called -- the grounds of where we get that experience is, unfortunately, Palestine. The bottom line is that the Israeli industry of arms has absolutely no interest in ever solving the Israeli-Palestine conflict. 

Antony: In the next episode of The Palestine Laboratory, we'll look at how the war on terror after  9/11 led to an explosion of private Israeli surveillance companies. We're also going to examine not just who Israel is selling to, but what they're developing, and how. And of course, as ever, all these tools of repression are first trialled in the occupied Palestinian territories. 

[Archive Recording] The three principles of winning the war on terror are the three W's: winning, winning and winning. The more victories you amass, the easier the next victory becomes.

[CREDIT MUSIC PLAYS]

Antony: The Palestine Laboratory podcast is hosted by me, Antony Loewenstein. 

The series is produced by Elle Marsh and Bethany Atkinson-Quinton. Production and sound engineering by Tim Jenkins. Studio recordings at 2SER in Sydney with Michael Jones and Jonathan Chang. Field production by Cinnamon Nippard.

Original music in the series is by Ara Koufax and music direction by Sunless Studio. This last track is Coupe d'état, by Use Knife remixed by Muqata’a. 

A special thank you to Anu Hasbold and our guests on this episode, Daniel and Sasha. You can check out Daniel Silberman’s podcast about social justice and democracy, La Manito, or read his latest book about Chilean life under Pinochet, “The Dead Hand.” 

Sasha Polakow-Suransky’s book is “The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret Relationship With Apartheid South Africa.”

I’d also like to acknowledge the work of Israeli human rights lawyer Eitay Mack who has done invaluable work over the last years uncovering Israel's defense ties with repressive states around the world.

This is an independent podcast brought to you by Drop Site News. To support Drop Site's journalism and get 20 percent off a subscription, visit dropsitenews.com slash palestinelab.

Thanks for listening.

---END--

*Disclaimer: We reached out for comment to Cognyte and Israel Aerospace Industries and received no response. 

Guests: Mariam Dawwas, Haim Brasheeth-Zabner and Ghada Karmi

Content warning: This episode contains references to violence, including weapons of warfare, which may distress some listeners.

The Palestine Laboratory Podcast is Drop Site’s first investigative series, looking into how Israel is using Palestinian territories as a testing ground to develop its occupation-enforcing tech industry. Hosted by investigative journalist Antony Loewenstein and based on his recent book, this podcast series examines how Israel is reshaping conflict and population control globally. What happens in Palestine never stays there. 

Subscribe now

Credits
Host: Antony Loewenstein
Series Producer: Elle Marsh
Producer: Bethany Atkinson-Quinton
Production & Sound Engineering: Tim Jenkins
Field Recording: Cinnamon Nippard
Studio Recordings at 2SER: Michael Jones and Jonathan Chang
Original Music: Ara Koufax 
Music Direction: Sunless Studio
Podcast Artwork: Debashish Chakrabarty
Special Thanks: Anu Hasbold
Additional music in the series is from: Use Knife, Muqata'a & The Album Leaf

[THEME MUSIC PLAYS]

There’s a story Israel tells about itself, one that celebrates innovation and tech.

[Archive Recording] God brought us into a neighborhood that was surrounded by enemies, and because of that Israel has to be creative.

Of how Israel became a world leader in developing surveillance and military hardware.

[Archive Recording] In Tel Aviv, you can’t walk two blocks without coming across the offices of a high tech company, from start ups, to major international corporations, to accelerators, and everything in between. 

I’m Antony Loewenstein, an investigative journalist, and I’ve been uncovering Israel’s military and surveillance tech industry for more than a decade. And what’s missing from the story is that it's all built in the Palestine Laboratory.

[Archive Recording] Because as Loewenstein writes, Israel has developed a world-class weapons industry with equipment conveniently tested on occupied Palestinians, then marketed as battle tested, the Palestine Laboratory is a signature Israeli selling point. 

This story is as old as the state of Israel itself. But since October 7, the Palestine Laboratory is accelerating. And they’re testing new weapons in Gaza as we speak.

[Archive Recording] They are very, very near to our hospital. This is happening right now as you see.

In this four-part series, I’ll speak to people who have never spoken out before and investigate how Israel exports the technology of occupation around the world.

[Archive Recording] Three Israeli companies are profiting from the war in Gaza. These companies have experienced a significant surge in profits … Israel Aerospace Industries, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, and Elbit Systems.

How did the small state of Israel become one of the world’s leading arms and tech exporters? How did it get here and what does this mean for warfare and the future of Palestine?

[Sound of a bomb going off in Gaza]

To begin to look at these questions, we need to go back in time. 

[Archive Recording] And I therefore formally declare Israel admitted to membership in the United Nations.

Even before the state of Israel was established in 1948, when Palestine was under British colonial rule, where a small group of underground Jewish militias and influential British officers set off a chain of events that’s still in motion today. 

[Archive Recording] An Arab Palestine is a threat to Great Britain and a menace to the world. A Jewish Palestine is an asset to Great Britain and a blessing for the world.

This is The Palestine Laboratory. Episode 1: The Start Up Nation.

[DRIVING SOUNDS] 

GPS: Your destination is on the left.

Antony: It’s March 2024, in the middle of Ramadan. 

Antony: Let's park here for now. 

Antony: I’ve just arrived in a small town about an hour and a half’s drive north of Sydney to visit an old friend. 

Antony: Hi. Is everyone sleeping? Hello. So good to see you. 

Mariam: Good to see you.

Antony: I’m here to see my friend Mariam Dawwas, she has just escaped from Gaza with her five-year-old daughter and family.  

Antony: Let me show you this stuff first, and then we'll...

Mariam: We can sit here,

Antony: Let's sit here. Yeah. How are you?

Antony: Mariam is a 32-year-old journalist, fixer, and translator. We first met in 2017 in Gaza when I was covering the strangulation of the territory by both Israel and Egypt and its awful impact on Palestinians. 

Antony: Let me first off by asking the obvious. Can you introduce yourself and how you'd like to be described?  

Mariam: Hi, Antony. I'm really happy to be with you. It’s my pleasure to speak about myself. I am Mariam Dawwas. The first thing that I want to identify myself with is that I am a mom of a very beautiful young child, five years old, Sophie. I lived in Gaza for almost all of my life.

Antony: Gaza is a 25-mile-long strip of land on the Mediterranean Sea, with a population of roughly 2.3-million people. The last time I saw Mariam was in Gaza and she had me over for dinner and I remember it really well. Her family made me maqluba which is this beautiful traditional Palestinian dish. But we had to eat over candlelight because there was a typical electrical blackout. So we all ate under those lights in almost complete darkness talking about life, the world, religion.

Mariam: Gaza has a very beautiful, warm, place with all its vibes. And we have friends everywhere in Gaza. You have relatives everywhere in Gaza. So you feel that every home in Gaza City or the Gaza Strip is your home. 

Antony: But it's a home that many Gazans can’t leave due to the blockade on the strip imposed by Israel and Egypt since 2007.

Mariam: You know living in Gaza is unique, because Gaza has its own abnormal circumstances which we make some effort to adapt to. You feel that it's your home. But our problem with Gaza is that to feel home and safe, it is like a luxury that Gazans don't have. It's either you feel home or safe.

Antony: Mariam survived months of bombardment in Gaza after October 7 before escaping and coming to Australia. It's the fourth time she’s ever left Gaza. There's a lot to talk about. But there is one thing that sticks with me. 

Mariam: The population in the Gaza Strip, I'm sad to say, but they became experts in the types of weapons used. I mean, even children. 

Antony: She tells me about how children in Gaza can sometimes work out what weapons are being used in the Palestinian territory by the sound that they make.

Mariam: People in Gaza know when it's Apache. They know when it's F-16. They know when it's, you know that, a drone.

[DRONE SOUND]

Mariam: The drone it was becoming over the years, like a very normal thing of our daily lives. And we are okay with it to the extent that we thank God if it's only a drone.

Antony: In her lifetime, Mariam has lived through six major Israeli offensives on Gaza. She believes the IDF -- Israel Defence Forces -- are testing completely new weapons on the people there.

Mariam: The sound of bombing. It was incredible. I cannot describe it. I can’t find words to describe that sound. We've never experienced something like this before. I told my brother that they are using a new thing, and I was right. We knew that they have used a new kind of weapon: F-35.

Antony: These are the most advanced fighter jets ever made and it has been confirmed that Israel has been using them in Gaza since the beginning of the war, including their use to deliver 2000- pound bombs.

I’ve been hearing countless reports like Mariam’s, of everyday Palestinians witnessing & documenting the IDF testing new technology and tools of repression on the civilian population there and finding more and more ways to not just target Palestinians but use it as a model for other nations to follow. I’ve spent years investigating Israel's massive military-industrial complex, and just in case you are wondering, maybe I should explain a little bit about how I got here. 

My story is not uncommon in the Jewish diaspora. Like many other Jews, I lost huge numbers of family members during the Holocaust. My grandparents fled Nazi Germany and Austria in 1939 just before the war began and came to Australia as refugees. My father, Jeffrey Loewenstein, was born in Melbourne on the 3rd of March, 1943, which was exactly the same day as his maternal grandparents -- my great grandparents -- were being murdered in Auschwitz, the Nazi regime’s most notorious death camp. 

From a young age, at my family synagogue in Melbourne Australia, I was taught that Israel was the necessary answer to Jewish insecurity. I distinctly recall attending, after my bar-mitzvah at age 13, a regular Jewish youth group, D&M -- Deep and Meaningful -- where Israel was praised, admired and honored. It sounded like a pretty special place. I never learned what the establishment of Israel in 1948 meant for the estimated 750,000 Palestinians expelled or forced to flee, never allowed to return. This history was never talked about. 

Twenty years ago as a young journalist, I visited Israel and Palestine for the first time. And this is where I began to unpack the cognitive dissonance I saw in Israeli society.

[Antony Home Video 1] Antony: The American school here in Gaza, bombed during the war.

Antony: I began to see and report on what the occupation of a subjugated people looked like.

[Antony Home Video 2] So if the settlers move in, the state will generally allow that to happen or ignore it? 

Protestor: Well it’s not supposed to, but that’s what actually happens. 

Antony: I remember going around the West Bank with Israeli peace activists who were trying to help Palestinians farm their land. And we saw Israeli soldiers and settlers working together to physically assault Palestinians. They tried to assault us. Israeli soldiers and settlers are one and the same thing. for Palestinians, no one protects them.

[Antony Home Video 3] Protester: They are not allowed to come here but at the same the settlers have the right to come here and build houses and the army is protecting them. They are illegal people. These people are breaking the law.

Antony: This kind of grim reality that I saw and was reporting was so at odds with the fairytale version of Israel I had been sold when I was growing up. And with the image that Israel tries to portray to the world still today.  

[Archive Recording] This unique start-up nation ecosystem is something that governments, universities, and corporations around the world have tried to mimic.

Antony: Proponents say Israel is known as the world's "start-up nation," due to the country’s massive tech and industrial sector. A nation that is progressive and innovative, leading the rest of the world into a bright green future. 

[Archive Recording] Israel's 6,000 startups are central to the country's high-tech sector, a sector that represents 10 percent of the country's GDP and nearly half of its exports.

Antony: Tel Aviv and the surrounding regions have been dubbed Silicon Wadi, which means Silicon Valley in Hebrew. There are over 300 multinational companies and 6,000 start-ups that employ hundreds of thousands of people. But what’s important to note here is that Israel has one of the most highly militarized cultures in the Western world. Military conscription for most young Israelis is mandatory from the age 18. And what a soldier learns in Israel’s Defense Forces, the IDF, is then put to use when they receive a job after military service in Israel’s massive military-industrial sector.

[Archive Recording] High-tech companies are looking for real talent. They might be looking at MIT, Harvard, and Stanford. But now there's a new word: 8200.

Antony: Israel's Unit 8200 is the country's elite intelligence branch. Its main role is to monitor and track Palestinians, and it's the equivalent of America's NSA. Many members of this unit have gone on to develop leading surveillance and military-tech startups in the private sector.

[Archive Recording] This specific unit actually already is having a high impact on Innovation worldwide. Smart international companies are trying to learn from what's going on there, to learn how to improve innovation.

Antony: One of Unit 8200’s main goals is the mass monitoring of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, collecting as much of their personal and political data as possible. But media coverage of the unit is largely glowing. A Forbes story in 2016 celebrated the over-1,000 Unit 8200 alumni who had gone on to found their own start-ups.

And then there’s the arms-manufacturing industry. Israel is now in the top ten weapons dealers of the world, having sold a range of surveillance equipment and arms to at least 140 countries. According to details uncovered by Israeli human rights lawyer Eitay Mack, the Israeli government has approved every defense deal brought to it since 2007. In 2022, which are the latest publicly available figures, Israeli arms sales were the highest on record, surging to over $12 billion US dollars. 

[Archive Recording] And according to new defense-ministry figures, the surge in demand for Israeli-made weapons is due in part to Russia’s war on Ukraine. Arms sales have now doubled in the past decade.

Antony: Israel’s defense industry is only growing. In September last year, Israel signed an arms deal with Germany, worth about $3.5-billion US. The sale is the biggest-ever deal for Israel’s military industry. In 2023, exports reached a record-breaking $13.1 billion US dollars, marking the third-consecutive year that sales have broken records. And sales for 2024 are likely to increase even more. 

Israel's dependency on the arms trade has been a fixture of the state's economy for a long time. But so much of this history is either underreported, obscured, or marked as classified by the state. There's this one story that was published in The New York Times in 1986 by the paper's then-bureau chief in Jerusalem, Tom Friedman, titled “How Israel’s Economy Got Hooked on Selling Arms Abroad.” 

Now at the time, about 40 years ago now, Friedman reported that 10 percent of the workforce back then were involved in manufacturing or selling military hardware. He interviewed one of Israel's leading experts on arms sales, Aaron Kleiman, who said, quote: ''Israeli arms-manufacturers have reached such a level of production and importance within the Israeli economy that exporting weapons has become an economic imperative." End quote.

Now I have not found many articles before or since in The New York Times that have come close to explaining the Israeli reliance on trading arms and its support of autocracies. But what’s really alarming about Friedman’s report and so much other work in mainstream western press prior to and since is that not once does Friedman mention the Israeli occupation of Palestine or even the word “Palestinian.” 

[MUSIC PLAYS]

Antony: When I moved with my partner Ali to East Jerusalem in 2016, she got a job with an international human-rights organization. I began research for a new book, investigating the secrets of Israel's military and tech sectors while Israel continued to expand its brutal occupation of Palestine. There’s this clear gap in the way people understand Israel and its history. So in the middle of 2023, I finally released my book, “The Palestine Laboratory.” It was comprehensive and in-depth, but like a lot of reporting, the deeper you go, the more you begin to realize you’re only just scratching the surface. Then, October 7 happened.

When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, my first response was shock and awe, really, that such a sophisticated attack would happen, that Israeli defenses disappeared. And I knew literally from the first day when it became pretty clear that there was a huge Israeli death toll, that Israel would respond overwhelmingly and that this would be a moment akin to 9/11. 

And although Israel itself called it a 9/11 moment, my reason was a bit different. What I meant when I thought that immediately on October 7, was that the U.S. response to 9/11 in 2001, in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and elsewhere, was so overwhelming, counterproductive, violent, and insane, that Israel would almost certainly unleash a similar slaughter in Gaza, which would change the map. 

And in fact, since that day, huge numbers of people have come to me and asked: Where did we get to this moment? How are we in this horrendous situation? And the way to really answer that is to go back to history. And in fact, it's mostly a hidden history, which really begins in the early 1900s.

[MUSIC FADES OUT]

[MIDROLL]

Antony: So to begin to unravel the deep militaristic roots of modern-day Israel there are a couple of key figures and turning points in the last century that are worth really going into. 

Long before Israel was founded, for roughly 600 years the Ottoman Empire ruled over large parts of the Middle East. Throughout the centuries of Ottoman rule and then later when Palestine was under British colonial rule, Jewish people lived in communities alongside Christians and Muslims in what is now known as Palestine and Israel. 

But with the advent of modern political Zionism in the late 1800s and the growing persecution of Jews in Europe, Zionists from Russia and Europe began to emigrate to Palestine to establish new settlements. 

Many early Zionist thinkers believed that the Jewish population would not survive or know peace without a homeland of its own. And it's crazy to think of this now, but early Zionist thinkers started looking around the world for possible locations of that Jewish state: Australia, Argentina, other places, and in the end, of course, they decided that Palestine would make the most sense in their perspective. But the world could have been very different if there had been a Jewish state, for example, in the center of Australia or in South America. To establish a homeland of its own, though, some of these early Zionists believed a Jewish nation could be forged through military might alone.

Haim: This is a society that is built around the army, that thinks around the army, and itserves the army. You know, to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And this is exactly what happened in Palestine.

Antony: Filmmaker and historian Professor Haim Bresheeth-Zabner has extensively documented how early Zionists shaped the future of Israel’s military culture.

Haim: I'm an ex-Israeli living in Britain since 1972. I was born in a refugee camp in Italy, in 1946, because both my parents survived Auschwitz, the two people, alone of their families and came to Israel two weeks into the 1948 war. I was a baby and, basically, we lived in a place called Jabalia, which is to the south of Jaffa. And the only people living there were survivors of the Holocaust and survivors of the Nakba. 

Antony: Haim himself was brought to Palestine as a baby, two weeks into the 1948 war. His work looks at how the state of Israel was essentially born out of the military. 

Haim: So they knew from the beginning that they needed a military organization because they didn't mean to just have a dot here and a dot there on the map of Palestine. But they meant to take Palestine over, and they said so clearly from the beginning.

[MUSIC PLAYS]

Antony: Now in early 1909, one of the first Zionist armed militias set up a group called Hashomer, meaning Guardian. The group's goal was to defend new Zionist settlements, for Jewish communities in Palestine. 

Haim: They needed it because you couldn't settle Palestine without dispossessing Palestinians. Most of the land was tilled in Palestine apart from in the Negev desert. So this was in a sense, the Hashomer and anything that followed, it were a settler-colonial organization to protect and to allow expansion of the projects.

Antony: Many of the founders of Hashomer later became key figures in the Zionist movement, including Yitzhak Ben Zvi, Israel’s second president, his wife Rachel Yanait, and David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the state of Israel. 

Haim: Ben-Gurion, who was, from very early, the most important person in the Zionist Federation, he immediately understood the importance of military institution. 

Antony: David Ben-Gurion, a short balding figure just under five-feet tall, was originally from the Polish town of Plonsk. In 1906, when he was just 20 years old, Ben-Gurion moved to Palestine and worked as a farm laborer in the new Jewish settlements. He eventually discovered he was a much better political organizer and strategist.

Haim: Now, Ben-Gurion knew that without an army, he could not take over Palestine, a fully populated, densely populated, agrarian society of the 19th century, which was already modernizing, at quite a pace. 

Antony: The founders of the state of Israel, in particular, David Ben-Gurion, believed that the building of a strong armed force was critical to establishing a state, and as a way to help form a new national identity among the diverse Jewish population who had recently immigrated to Palestine. Ben-Gurion believed that the nation was to be, quote “constructed through military experience,” and outlined his model of a, quote, “nation under arms.”

Haim: He was very influenced by the Prussian state. He wasn't alone in that, even the very left of the movement were influenced by Prussia. Many of them came from Germany. And Prussia was a model state of the 19th century, was the strongest state in continental Europe. It was militarized to the eyeballs and successfully became the kernel for the future German state. You know, the saying was, most states have an army, but Prussia is an army that has a state. So, basically this became the model. 

The Army was there first. The state was its creation. And this is true to this very day. This is a society that the universities, like the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is an army camp with a campus around it. You know, I don't know about any British or American university that has an army camp.

So that's why his pioneering was not just in creating the army, but using the army as a social machinery and the political machinery to creating a state and a nation. So Ben-Gurion has laid the foundations for every aspect of Israeli life, and it hasn't changed in more than 75 years. 

Antony: So how exactly did Ben-Gurion and others begin to create this “nation under arms”? One major factor was their early collaborations with British colonialists who took control over Palestine after the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. In 1917, the British government announced the Balfour Declaration, essentially giving support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. But what it didn't do was give equal support for Palestinians and Arabs living there in the same land. Hashomer was disbanded and absorbed into a new organization , Haganah. In the 1920s, Haganah and other Zionist paramilitary organizations were illegal under the British Mandate, but the British authorities began to turn a blind eye to their activities once they realized these underground groups might be of some use to them. 

Haim: The Haganah was set up as an illegal operation, of course, but the British knew it. knew of it, had agents, in the Haganah, to keep things going, on their side of the fence, but never acted against it in the 20s and in most of the 30s. Until the 40s, there was no sanction against Haganah or the other organizations that later will be called terrorist organisations. They were, you know, the British closed their eyes to this and in many ways in the 30s trained Haganah and the others in fighting the Palestinians. 

Antony: In the 1930s the local population began resisting the British Mandate. Palestinian groups called on the British Mandate to halt uncapped Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine, demanding the right to self-determination and representation. 

[MUSIC PLAYS]

[Archive Recording, 1936 ] The main case of the Arabs is against the British government’s policy in Palestine, on favoring the establishment of a national home for Jews forgot to safeguard the civil rights of the non-Jewish population.

Haim: To begin with, they just went on strike. But the strike was so brutally broken by the British power in Palestine, in that mandate government, that gradually this has developed to an intifada. So this was what the British called the Arab revolt. And, it's actually, was total, you know, the whole of Palestine was on strike and striking against the British. 

Antony: During the Arab Revolt in Palestine of 1936 to 1939, which was a popular uprising calling for Arab independence, the Haganah and other armed Zionists became useful collaborators for the British colonial forces, who fought to quell the revolt against the British.

[Archive Recording, 1936] The new Jerusalem built for peace today is the center of turmoil and riot. British patrols in the city adopt the sternest methods to keep order. Snipers have been responsible for many killed and injured. All visitors are searched for weapons. In the heart of the city is a blazing lumberyard, typical of the outrages that have occurred.

Haim: Now the British needed the Haganah and needed the other organizations. And they actually brought it into their military forces. It was famously done by Orde Wingate, that was a veteran of the British Army. And he started training the Haganah, before 1939, to assist the British later on. His methods were, a bit, unusual, for example, lining up a whole village, all the men in the square and then shooting every tenth man, you know, basically decimated the village. If they didn't give up the arms and told him who the people resisting are in that village, they would all die. So, these were the methods that Haganah commanders were trained in and were part of in the 30s already. 

Antony: Now during this uprising, British forces deployed brutal tactics which they had developed and tested during their fight against Irish resistance during that war of independence in 1919. One tactic the British pioneered during their fight against the Irishthen deployed in Palestine was tying Palestinian prisoners to the front of convoys to prevent rebels attacking. Which, interestingly enough, is exactly what the Israelis often do now in Palestine, particularly in the West Bank.

Haim: The police units called Black and Tan, which had a terrible reputation in Ireland because of their brutality, were brought lock, stock and barrel, to Palestine to a new colonial conflict. In other words, from Britain's earliest colony, Ireland, to Britain's newest colony, Palestine.

Antony: The strategies from the British playbook used against the Palestinian rebels during this time included executions, detention of thousands without trial, and exile of their leaders.

Haim: You know you have to think about Palestine, and before that, Ireland, as laboratories. Those were laboratories for methods of fighting, a population which is not really very armed, you know, they were fighting with shotguns and such light arms, but trying to defend their livelihood and their homes and the fields, against the colonial police and the colonial force. So, everything was tried out and the British already knew, and everyone else knew that world war is coming. And therefore this was a chance to try new weapons, to try new techniques. And what the Haganah was so good at learning from the British. 

Antony: This collaboration between Zionist groups and British forces deepened during World War II, where tens of thousands of Jews received military training by the British to combat the threat of Nazi allied forces. Now at the same time, new skilled arrivals who had fled from Germany and Austria were helping industrialize the cities in Palestine. And here, weapons, made by local plants, proved invaluable for when Jews wanted to establish their own nation after World War II in the ashes of the Holocaust. 

[MUSIC PLAYS]

[Archive Recording, 1937] From Palestine, first pictures of the latest bomb outrage. Jewish terrorists blow up the Goldsmith Officers Club in Jerusalem. 13 Britons were killed and 16 injured. Total casualties on this one day of violence was 18 dead and 25 injured.

Antony: Jewish militias began launching attacks against the British forces and against Palestinian villages, forcing thousands to flee.

[Archive Recording, 1937] Britain answered these attacks by putting whole cities under martial law.

Antony: The situation escalated into a full-scale war in 1948, resulting in the permanent displacement of more than half of the Palestinian population and between 15 to-20,000dead. 

[Archive Recording, 1948] Latest camera records from Palestine show heavy damage in and around the Arab city of Jaffa as Haganah troops move up to new positions along the war-scarred roads. Jaffa itself has become an almost deserted city.

Antony: The Palestinians refer to this as the Nakba, which means catastrophe in Arabic.

[Archive Recording, 1948] Victorious Haganah troops have driven the Arabs out of the beleaguered city, taking many prisoners. Few pitiful refugees rescue what few belongings they can.

Antony: With the end of the British Mandate and the British forces departing Palestine, on May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion stood up in Dizengoff House in today’s Tel Aviv and declared the independent state of Israel. 

[Archive Recording, 1948] David Ben-Gurion in Hebrew, By virtue of our historical and natural right. We declare the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel, the state of Israel. [Applause]

Antony: What I found living in Israel and Palestine, and, really, what I still see in much of the Jewish diaspora, is profound denial about 1948. You see villages which were ethnically cleansed in 1948. One that stands out particularly: My partner Ali and I went to Lifta which is on the outskirts of Jerusalem. And no one lives there anymore, and nature is taking over again the old homes. But you see this quite eerie old village. People’s homes and old shops which are falling apart. But this is one of the more visible signs of what 1948 meant. 

Ghada: The events of 1948, of leaving my home, my city, my country, and going into exile. I didn't understand it as exile. I just understood it as leaving, with nobody able to tell me when we were going home, when we were going to return, was terribly traumatic.

Antony: Palestinian historian and writer Ghada Karmi was a child living with her family in Jerusalem in 1948. After Zionist snipers set up posts in evacuated Palestinian houses near her home, her parents decided to leave until things died down.

Ghada: We had to leave rather hurriedly. We got a taxi with enormous difficulty because it was so dangerous. And my mother had packed one suitcase for all of us. My brother, my sister, and my parents, because she, you know, she believed that it wasn't for long. And shouldn’t we be back soon? And so we left on that morning in April. And little did I know that we would leave, never to return.

Antony: The Nakba really is ever-present in Israel and I would argue in fact it is ever-present in many settler-colonial states. The equivalent here in Australia, the genocide that people often don't want to talk about, or in the US with Native Americans or in Canada or in New Zealand, in every country that had outside colonial forces come in forcibly and try to destroy the indigenous population, that history remains still buried. But within Israel itself it happened really in a human’s lifetime ago. We are not talking that long ago. And I think the echoes of the Nakba still resonate today and they feel very alive for a lot of Palestinians.

Mariam: It's repeating. It's not the past. It's not the past, it didn't happen in 1948 and now it's different, it's the same. It's the same way. It is the same atrocities, it’s happening again. And in front of the world's eyes. And no one is doing anything.

Antony: Mariam’s own family, the Dawwas, were displaced from a town outside of Gaza in 1948.

Mariam: The Dawwas family comes originally from, we are refugees, we are not Gazans. So I come from a town called Hiribya. It is near the Gaza Strip, but it's now considered in Israel. It's called Yad Mordechai now. And I'm originally from there, so I was always educating myself about what happened in Nakba. How did it happen? And I always had a question when I see the massacres of Deir Yassin and the many other massacres, I've always asked myself a question: Where were the world?

Antony: Palestinians and the rest of the world are still dealing with the ramifications of 1948. But the death and mass displacement in Gaza alone since October 7 is actually worse than that of the 1948 Nakba. And that leaves him with the key question. What does that say to the long-term ramifications of this current moment? For Mariam and other families in Gaza, not only is history repeating itself, but the Palestine laboratory is accelerating. 

Mariam: It was planned. It was designed for Gaza to be used as a workshop. You know, there's a funny thing that I want to tell you about. You know, I get offended really, I get offended when I buy makeup and personal-hygiene products. It says it doesn't test on animals. So I feel that even we are not privileged like the animals. It's painful that I'm saying this. But, you know, the world is okay. It's okay with a state, an occupation that is testing, that is testing weapons and killing people with its arms and then markets that. They say that it's been already tested on Gaza.  

Antony: In the next episode of the series, we’ll deep dive into exactly how Israel’s military industry markets its hardware to governments across the globe. We’ll look at the secret deals that have been made with dictators abroad for decades, and meet the people fighting to uncover the truth about Israel's history as a major arms dealer to some of the world’s deadliest regimes. 

[Archive Recording] 

Reporter: General Pinochet, how would you evaluate the success of the junta to date?

Pinochet: It’s a complete success

Reporter: Can you predict when the power will be returned to the people of Chile?

Pinochet: That's a question that everybody asks.

[CREDIT MUSIC PLAYS]

The Palestine Laboratory Podcast is hosted by me, Antony Loewenstein.

Throughout the series we discuss and reference a number of different Israeli companies. We reached out to all of them for comment. One got back to us. The rest didn’t, and you can read more about this in the show notes. 

The series is produced by Elle Marsh and Bethany Atkinson-Quinton. Production and sound engineering by Tim Jenkins. 

Studio recordings at 2SER with Michael Jones and Jonathan Chang. Field production by Cinnamon Nippard. 

Original music in this series is by Ara Koufax and music direction by Sunless Studio.

This last track is Coupe d'état, by Use Knife, remixed by Muqata’a. 

A special thanks to Anu Hasbold and to my friend Mariam Dawwas for telling us her story, providing invaluable testimony and an eyewitness account of the reality on the ground in Gaza. You’ll be hearing more from Mariam in later episodes.

You can find full credits and links to relevant resources and further reading on the podcast’s website, including information about Haim Bresheeth-Zabner and Ghada Karmi’s work.

This is an independent podcast brought to you by Drop Site News. 

To support Drop Site's journalism and get 20 percent off a subscription, visit dropsitenews.com slash palestinelab.

Thanks for listening.

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*Disclaimer: We reached out for comment to Elbit Systems and received no response.