Mike Phipps reviews The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation around the World, by Antony Loewenstein, published by Verso

Huge recent protests in Israel against government proposals to subvert the independence of the judiciary have challenged the degree to which Israel – now labelled an “apartheid state” not just by respectable human rights organisations but by a quarter of all US Jews – can be called a democracy.

Antony Loewenstein, who lived in East Jerusalem between 2016 and 2020, raises other concerns about the country’s democratic failings: “All media outlets in Israel, along with publishers and authors, must submit stories related to foreign affairs and security to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) chief military censor before publication. No other Western country has such a system.”

But it is Israel as “a world-class weapons industry with equipment conveniently tested on occupied Palestinians” that is the focus of this book. Israeli arms sales in 2021 were the highest on record, at  US$11.3 billion. Europe was the biggest recipient of these weapons, even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Israel is now one of the top ten weapons dealers in the world.

As elsewhere, the danger is that commercial arms policy shapes government priorities more broadly. Israel rarely calls out atrocities worldwide. It armed the murderous Hutu regime in Rwanda before the genocide and was one of the main weapons suppliers to the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. It armed apartheid South Africa, the Shah of Iran, the Somoza regime in Nicaragua and provided arms, surveillance equipment and military advisors to the genocidal regime in Guatemala in the early 1980s.

In the 21^st century, Israel trained the Special Task Force, a brutal unit of the Sri Lankan police and sold the regime Kfir fighter jets, used in the war against the Tamils. Myanmar too benefited from Israeli arms sales and Modi’s India has become Israel’s leading weapons export market.

Israel has been cautious about condemning the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine by Russia, to which it has sold surveillance equipment used against dissidents. “Israel was thus complicit in Russia’s descent into autocracy,” observes the author.

Loewenstein is also concerned about the “Israelification of US security services” and the training US police departments get from the Israeli military. “The US–Mexico border has become a major site of Israeli security and surveillance companies, and their work in Palestine is used as a recruitment tool,” he argues.

The Pegasus spyware developed by Israeli cyber-intelligence company NSO is another concern. Although NSO bosses claim the company sells its technology only to democracies, the spyware has been used against anti-government activists and journalists in several countries. In November 2021 the Biden administration surprisingly placed NSO on a federal blacklist that prohibits an American company from selling it US technologies. The US Commerce Department accused NSO of arming foreign governments to “maliciously target” critics and officials. However, arguably,  the ban was motivated more by the fact that the company was encroaching on American technological .supremacy.

As with all states, Israel’s sophisticated weaponry inevitably ends up being used against its own citizens. During the Covid pandemic, “the poor ultra-Orthodox community of Bnei Brek, six kilometers from Tel Aviv with a population of 210,000 people, were guinea pigs in an operation that was usually directed only against Palestinians in the West Bank… In April 2020, Bnei Brek was sealed off… The Israeli tech company Octopus Services was contracted to provide command-and control systems, drones, five hundred cameras, and observation balloons to assist in the mission.” Lockdown had become militarised, thanks to Israel’s hardware – ‘battle-tested’ on Palestinians.

Elbit is the biggest private arms manufacturer in Israel today. The UK government signed a deal with Elbit in January 2021 and protesters have targeted the company since then, shutting down a facility in Oldham. More recently, Palestine Action activists attacked the offices of an accountants linked to the firm, arguing that, “Companies working with Elbit are automatically complicit in the crimes of Israel.”

There’s some impressive research here about the global reach of Israeli arms companies. But there is less evidence presented of how their technologies were first tested on Palestinians, which the title of the book implies.

Although I found The Palestine Laboratory informative, nothing here really surprised me. Perhaps that’s the result of living in the UK, which is now the second biggest arms dealer in the world, with a 16% share of the global arms trade. Since 2010, 60% of armaments contracts have been with the Middle East, pouring weapons into an already unstable region and fuelling the Saudi-led bombardment of Yemen.

Or perhaps I was unsurprised because arms manufacturers behave the same everywhere, making money out of war, oppression and insecurity and skewing government policy towards their own amoral behaviour. Loewenstein wants to say something more: namely, that it’s not just a hard-nosed emphasis on profits that makes Israel act in this way, but a close political affinity with the barbarous regimes it arms. He makes a strong case: readers can decide for themselves.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.