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. Israel had been an arms exporter to apartheid South Africa until its collapse in 1994. ...
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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. Israel had been an arms exporter to apartheid South Africa until its collapse in 1994. Today, Israel exports surveillance equipment and armaments to a large range of countries, many with dodgy human rights records - Rwanda, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia. It supplied surveillance technology to India, self-described as the world's biggest democracy but in fact an increasingly ethnocentric dictatorship favouring the Hindu ascendancy that looks to Israel's role in Palestine as a model for India's role in Kashmir and elsewhere. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research (SIPRI), Israel has been among the world's ten main exporters of weapons since at least 2004, and in the 2016-2020 period, it was the eighth largest exporter. The official private status of Israeli weapons companies provides the Israeli government with the advantage of plausible deniability in case of scandal. 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 in-depth look shows, 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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