The Palestine Laboratory

How Israel makes a killing from the Occupation.

WINNER OF THE 2023 WALKLEY NON-FICTION JOURNALISM PRIZE
Shortlisted for the 2023 Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing

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.

"This is a must read on a hidden and shocking aspect of the Israeli colonisation of the Palestinians. We have waited long for such a book that exposes the way Israel uses its oppression of the Palestine to enhance its military and security industries. This book shows clearly that this kind of export is now Israel's most significant contribution to the global violation of human rights..." - Ilan Pappe, author of Ten Myths About Israel

"A triumph of investigative journalism. It exposes the ruthlessness with which Israel exploits the experience gained from the illegal occupation to export all kinds of military hardware as well as the technology of surveillance, espionage, cyber warfare, phone-hacking, and house demolition. It also shines a torch on the dark side of Israel's support for despots around the world. Altogether, a profoundly depressing audit on a country that used to boast of being "a light unto the nations". - Avi Shlaim, Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford and author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

Loewenstein's account of how the myth of Israel's 'start-up nation' is born out of the state colonisation of Palestine is a riveting and essential read. From drones to Pegasus software, policing techniques to deadly ammunition this is a persuasive and timely intervention.' - Eyal Weizman, director of Forensic Architecture

Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist, best-selling author, filmmaker and co-founder of Declassified Australia. He's written for The Guardian, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books and many others. His 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. He was based in East Jerusalem 2016-2020.