TEHRAN – The Persian translation of the book “The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World,” written by Antony Loewenstein, has been released in bookstores across the country.

Translated by Hesamoddin Shahrabi Farahani, the book has been brought out by Neshan Publishing House in 376 pages, Mehr reported.

Originally published in 2023, the book by the bestselling journalist Antony Loewenstein uncovers the widespread commercialization and brutal deployment globally of Israel’s occupation-enforcing technologies.

For more than 50 years, the 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, using the occupied Palestinian territories as a testing ground for weaponry and surveillance technology that they then export around the world.

“The Palestine Laboratory” shows in depth and for the first time how Israel has become a leader in developing spying technology and defense hardware that fuels some of the globe’s most brutal conflicts — from the Pegasus software that hacked Jeff Bezos’s and Jamal Khashoggi’s phones, and the weapons sold to the Myanmar army that has murdered thousands of Rohingyas, to the drones being used by the European Union to monitor refugees in the Mediterranean who are left to drown.

In a global investigation that uncovers secret documents, based on revealing interviews and on-the-ground reporting, Antony Loewenstein shows how, as ethno-nationalism grows in the 21st century, Israel has built the ultimate tools for despots and democracies.

In this book, Loewenstein shows how Israel uses its occupation of Palestine to test and develop military hardware for sale on the global market. In fact, this development is not even an open secret, but an active selling point of Israeli weapons manufacturers. Lowenstein recounts an occasion when the Israeli company ‘Elbit Systems’ advertised their new drone’s capability with footage of air strikes in Gaza and the West Bank. Upon further investigation, the drone strike shown by Elbit had killed innocent Palestinians, including children.

However, it is not only military hardware which Israel exports. There is also a large industry of surveillance and digital extraction software. Since at least 2005, Lowenstein has witnessed a massive uptick in the usage of facial recognition and biometric scans in Israeli-occupied Palestine. This software tracks every move of Palestinians. However, increasingly this software is not state-owned or made. Since the 1990s, much of Israel’s security apparatus has been privatized.

One private company highlighted by Lowenstein is Cellebrite. It advertises itself as an “industry-leading digital intelligence platform”. In reality, this means that Cellebrite sells software which can hack into and track smartphones. This software has been sold the world over to both Israel’s allies and enemies. Lowenstein reports over 140 countries have purchased Cellebrite products. This includes countries with official embargoes of Israeli products like Pakistan, which has used Cellebrite software since at least 2012. This also includes countries in SEA, including Singapore, which quietly signed a five-year 14-million-dollar contract with Cellebrite in early 2023.

The indiscriminate sale of surveillance software has meant that Israel not only upholds apartheid in occupied Palestine, but also diminishes democracy abroad. The Committee to Protect Journalists has stated that such software is an “existential threat to press freedom”. Lowenstein argues that this global destabilization is in fact good for business. He points to the boom in the Israeli surveillance software industry since 9/11. Israel had long positioned itself as both an expert in surveillance and an ideally situated ally in the war on terror. However, Lowenstein argues that since 2001 Israeli companies have been able to cash in on state paranoia worldwide.

Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist, best-selling author, filmmaker and co-founder of Declassified Australia. 

He has written for The Guardian, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books and many others. His other books include “Pills, Powder and Smoke,” “Disaster Capitalism,” and “My Israel Question”. His documentary films include “Disaster Capitalism” and the Al Jazeera English films “West Africa's Opioid Crisis” and “Under the Cover of Covid”.

SS/SAB