Antony Loewenstein, “The Palestine Laboratory” – a review
JVL Introduction
We reviewed this book at the time of publication here.
Given the war on Gaza this new review by Conor Gallagher is timely, highlighting as it does the new model of authoritarian capitalism which the Israeli free-market, militarised and surveilled society is ushering in.
As he points out, while you might think the economic costs of the war on Gaza were extremely high, the Israeli calculus could be that genocide in Gaza will bring enough benefits in boosting Israel’s military-related sales of battle-tested materials and security systems to easily compensate for the current disruption it is causing.
RK
This article was originally published by Naked Capitalism on Wed 27 Dec 2023. Read the original here.
Book Review: Antony Loewenstein, “The Palestine Laboratory”
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This is a very useful book, bringing together many threads of the new cyber state Israel has become {which begs the question, never to be answered I suspect as to how 7/10 happened). I reviewed the book for Lobster and concluded that it defined Israel as a rogue state. This conclusion should inform all our discussions on its current behaviour.
Extremely interesting, alarming and important. Relatedly, here’s Moshé Machover’s review in Weekly Worker of Jeff Halper’s 2015 book, ‘War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification’ (Pluto Press) https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1077/the-dog-and-the-tail/ According to Moshé, Israel is ‘a great asset to US imperialism … [and plays a pivotal role] in conjunction with the US military-industrial complex …’
Moshé adds: ‘But what is unique about Zionist colonisation and the Israeli settler state is that it has worked out a novel mode of colonial economic exploitation. The occupied territories are a vast laboratory for testing Israeli military and security exports. Israel draws enormous economic benefit from exploiting not the labour-power of its colonial subjects but their collective body as laboratory human animals, on whom it tests its hardware, software and strategies of oppression and pacification. Thus Israel gains competitive advantage in the global marketplace from the fact that its military and security exports are tested in real action.’
Although useful information in itself, this book is “nothing more” but a follow-up / an update of the investigative work on the very same subject by the Dutch academic Jan Nederveen Pieterse. An update, because Pieterse did already publish his findings in 1984 in a booklet under the title : “Israel’s role in the Third World: exporting West Bank expertise”.
https://socialhistoryportal.org/sites/default/files/raf/0119840000_0.pdf
On the content of the work of the investigative journalist Lowenstein that JVL is refering to in this article, I recently already had observed an interesting / informative interview with Amy Goodman on the USA site of Democracy Now
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eYVjWwOVC4&ab_channel=DemocracyNow%21
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/14/israel_weapons
Domocracy Now (besides its daily interview shows) is a highly informative – on the subjects in the ME as well as elsewhere – website in its own right, so I will give you the link to its homesite as well.
https://www.democracynow.org/
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Since we are in the business of trying to predict the next steps of the consecutive participants in the Gazan massacre, it might be helpful, to once again watch back to an interview video from the very same Amy Goodman with then retired chief of staff of the USA army, four-star general Wesley Clark, that she produced in march 2007 (!). Some of the subjects that she discussed with Clark, were situated even earlier in that decade, namely he tells us about the plan of invasive military action, that the Pentagon had prepared just after the 9/11 attack : (one of his former subordinates in the Pentagon tells him) “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”
Here is the entire 2007 Democracy Now interview with Clark
https://www.democracynow.org/2007/3/2/gen_wesley_clark_weighs_presidential_bid