Palestine Laboratory
How Israel makes a killing from the occupation. Israel’s military industrial complex uses the occupied, Palestinian territories as a testing ground for weaponry and surveillance technology that they then export around the world to despots and democracies. For more than 50 years, occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has given the Israeli state invaluable experience in controlling an “enemy” population, the Palestinians. It’s here that they have perfected the architecture of control. Best-selling journalist Antony Loewenstein, author of Disaster Capitalism, uncovers this largely hidden world in a global investigation with secret documents, revealing interviews and on-the-ground reporting. This book shows in-depth, for the first time, how Palestine has become the perfect laboratory for the Israeli military-techno complex: surveillance, home demolitions, indefinite incarceration and brutality to the hi-tech tools that drive the ‘Start-up Nation’. From the Pegasus software that hacked Jeff Bezos’ and Jamal Khashoggi’s phones, the weapons sold to the Myanmar army that has murdered thousands of Rohingyas and drones used by the European Union to monitor refugees in the Mediterranean who are left to drown. Israel has become a global leader in spying technology and defence hardware that fuels the globe’s most brutal conflicts. As ethno-nationalism grows in the 21st century, Israel has built the ultimate model.
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What Hacker News says
- Excellent question. It seems likely because:
* The state of Israel does authorize spyware sales (eg NSO Group has to get a license from the Ministry of Defense, and Israel's Defense Export Control Agency states that its decisions take national security / foreign policy into account).
* In the case of Pegasus, NYT had reported that Netanyahu intervened to make an exception allowing sale of Pegasus to Saudi Arabia (as political leverage). NSO group execs used Israeli diplomatic passports when they traveled and stayed at the Israeli embassy.
* The government doesn't crack down on these industries, which it would do if it really considered them criminal.
* In this particular case, one of the main targets was Al Jazeera, which seems unlikely that a criminal company would want to target vs. a state actor.
So yea, the government seems to allow these companies to engage in what other countries would consider criminal activity. You can then kind of choose your spot on the spectrum of: "I think this is some broad conspiracy the government purposefully designed for large-scale espionage" or just "The Israeli government thinks it would be good to have great cybersecurity skills in the country so they bend the rules a little".
A good well-researched read is The Palestine Laboratory by Antony Loewenstein.
- Don't forget Israel gov 100% knew Hamas was going to attack on October 7th, and intentionally allowed it to happen because of the public outcry it would generate. The more hostages and the worse it was, the better the propoganda. They'll take the West Bank. They're taking Lebanese land too.
They knew the attack was going to happen and allowed the music festival to go on a day longer, one might guess they were frothing at the mouth at how good that propoganda was going to be.
Take a read of the book title The Palestine Laboratory - How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World - and you'll even learn that Israel has a long long history of murder around the world, aint none of this new.
One side won the propoganda war, and it wasn't the dirt poor Palestinains.
- apropos of nothing I highly recommend "The Palestine Laboratory" by Anthony Loewenstein
- I always thought this was a new thing until I read The Palestine Laboratory by Antony Loewenstein. Over more than 50 years Israel has developed a global export industry around military, surveillance, and security technologies that were developed and tested through its control of Palestinian territories, and that these technologies are then marketed and sold worldwide. Buyers are often bad actors that use it to kill and suppress other populations including in Armenia/Azerbaijan, Myanmar, Rwanda genocide, authoritarian governments and many other examples cited in the book.
- I would say that it's sad that LLMs are being used for mass surveillance, and such applications are things no government should be proud of deploying.
And it's things like this that are ripe to come to other countries. An interesting book that goes into this concept is "The Palestine Laboratory." Sad times indeed.
- See the book "The Palestine Laboratory" for more on this.
https://www.versobooks.com/en-ca/products/2684-the-palestine...
