The Palestine Laboratory by Antony Loewenstein

Winner of the Walkley Book Award for 2023 

Bestselling journalist Antony Loewenstein uncovers the widespread commercialisation 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 defence 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.

A sad and sordid record of how “the light unto the nations” became the purveyor of the means of violence and brutal repression from Guatemala to Myanmar and wherever else the opportunity arose.’
-Noam Chomsky

‘This is a must read on a hidden and shocking aspect of the Israeli colonisation of the Palestinians. 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 The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and 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