#The Palestine Laboratory

[probablyasocialecologist]

The IDF uses extensive facial recognition with a growing network of cameras and mobile phones to document every Palestinian in the West Bank. Starting in 2019, Israeli soldiers used the Blue Wolf app to capture Palestinian faces, which were then compared to a massive database of images dubbed the “Facebook for Palestinians.” Soldiers were told to compete by taking the most photos of Palestinians and the most prolific would win prizes. The system is most extreme in the city of Hebron, where facial recognition and numerous cameras are used to monitor Palestinians, including at times in their homes, instead of the extreme Jewish settlers living there, who routinely express genocidal threats against the Palestinians. The IDF claimed that the program was designed to “improve the quality of life for the Palestinian population.”

Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

[akajustmerry]

The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World by Antony Loewenstein. Chapter 2: 'September 11 Was Good For Business'

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Surveillance exchange

[journeysendinlovers]

So I'm reading The Palestine Laboratory by Antony Loewenstein and I think it's difficult for the layperson--even ostensibly antizionists, passionate antizionists--to fully grasp the extent to which Israel is just a manufacturing plant that exports death and destruction. The extent to which Israel depends entirely on narrative to survive, especially as a nation whose closet of skeletons includes every single victim of genocide in the post WWII world that they could support the externination of. From Argentina to Uganda to Bosnia to Paraguay to Myanmar to Chile to Zimbabwe and Iraq and Lebanon and Brazil; Israel sides with whoever is paying for guns and "anti-terror" training which consists primarily of torture.

[wavecorewave]

From an Israeli perspective, the Palestine laboratory has had few downsides. Israel has worked closely with Washington for decades, often operating in places where the US preferred covert support rather than public backing. For example, Israel supported the police forces of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Costa Rica during the Cold War when the US Congress had blocked US agencies from officially doing so. Both Israel and the US trained and armed death squads in Colombia well into the 2000s. The former drug trafficker Carlos Castaño, who ran a far-right paramilitary force, explains in his ghost-written autobiography, “I learned an infinite amount of things in Israel [in the 1980s], and to that country I owe part of my essence, my human and military achievements. I copied the concept of paramilitary forces from the Israelis.” He reportedly arrived in Israel in 2004 after fleeing his own country. Colombia has long been the most significant strategic US ally in the region. A Colombian government-appointed truth commission released its findings in 2022 about the grim realities during the country’s civil war between 1958 to 2016. The US was found to have known that its Colombian allies were running death squads and yet Washington’s backing increased. The Global South has been controlled and pacified with (principally) Israeli and US weapons.

Antony Loewenstein The Palestine Laboratory - How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

[heavenlyyshecomes]

The IDF uses extensive facial recognition with a growing network of cameras and mobile phones to document every Palestinian in the West Bank. Starting in 2019, Israeli soldiers used the Blue Wolf app to capture Palestinian faces, which were then compared to a massive database of images dubbed the “Facebook for Palestinians.” Soldiers were told to compete by taking the most photos of Palestinians and the most prolific would win prizes. The system is most extreme in the city of Hebron, where facial recognition and numerous cameras are used to monitor Palestinians, including at times in their homes, instead of the extreme Jewish settlers living there, who routinely express genocidal threats against the Palestinians. The IDF claimed that the program was designed to “improve the quality of life for the Palestinian population.” […] Blue Wolf was a smaller version of the Wolf Pack database, which contained the personal details of virtually every Palestinian in the West Bank, including educational status, photos, security level, and family history. Soldiers in the West Bank were instructed in 2022 to enter the details and photos of at least fifty Palestinians into the Blue Wolf system every shift and were not allowed to end their shift until they did so. There was no security rationale for these actions. This is a similar set-up to what China does against the Uighurs in its Xinjiang province, using surveillance and technology to both track and intimidate the residents, though Beijing receives far more international condemnation than the Jewish state.

—Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

[selfdesructs]

The Palestine Laboratory, Antony Loewenstein

[friendlycursedspaceotter]

So, I don't have Disney+ out of being a broke artist with currently no paying jobs and also being a tiny bit underage. any reputable **insert sea shanties and that one theme from those movies with Johnny Depp, if you know, you know, here** sites that won't **insert bad guy from above movies here**?

Don't try and send me money. Don't try to get me on Reddit; Tumblr is already enough. I have a chance at getting a paying job at some point soon, but they're competitive and there is a very good chance I might not get it (speaking from experience of only having one currently unpaid-- Kai, you're amazing, and I know you're just a broke high schooler, so I hope this thing we're doing takes off-- job after almost 20 auditions, and I was probably one of the lucky ones). I'm about ready to maybe open up a Ko-Fi or something for my YouTube channel, but I still can't do that because Reasons, so in the meantime, I either need to find a way to get money or to get *insert things above here*. And I'm not paying for the stuff I want to watch on Prime Video.

tl;dr: broke girl woke up and chose to dismantle capitalism because she's tired of seeing spoilers on her dash

[probablyasocialecologist]

The father of Zionism, Theodore Herzl, wrote in his seminal 1896 pamphlet, The Jewish State, “There [in Palestine] we shall be a sector of the wall of Europe against Asia, we shall serve as the outpost of civilization against barbarism.” Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who led the country between 1999 and 2001, used a metaphor with a similar meaning: Israel is a “villa in the middle of a jungle,” arguing that Israel was a civilized nation among Muslim savages in the Middle East. This language matters because it displays a contempt for non-Jews that is carried into its relations with outsiders. It was common for Jews to be taught at school or in religious education, as I was told at home by my liberal Jewish parents, that Jews are the chosen people and have a unique relationship with God and society. We could and should help others (though there were set limits to this sympathy, namely excluding Palestinians). It is a belief system that allows racial supremacy against non-Jews to thrive and justifies disregard for their lives.

Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

[readingsquotes]

"Deadly robot dogs are in our future. Israel is using and testing them, both made in Israel and the US, in its destruction of Gaza.

It’s just one example, and there are so many more, of Israel not wanting to “waste” the opportunity in Gaza to show off its military hardware to an excited global market. My latest book, The Palestine Laboratory, examines this globally (pre 7 October 2023)."

[wavecorewave]

Incitement is so broadly defined by Israel that in many cases simply expressing support for Palestinian human rights, sharing a video online, or being opposed to Zionist colonization is deemed inappropriate. Social media posts are increasingly the sole reason a Palestinian will be detained for days, weeks, or months by the Israeli military. Israel’s interest in incitement is highly selective, with very few Israeli Jews detained for the same offenses. This is despite the fact that hate speech on Hebrew-language social media soared in 2020 and 2021, 9 percent higher than the year before, according to the Berl Katznelson Foundation and Vigo research institute. They found that 5.2 million comments either called for violence or were offensive, with Arabs being the main targets of abuse. Palestinian activist Dareen Tatour suffered years of house arrest and months in prison in 2018 for writing a poem that contained the words, “Resist, my people, resist them.” Israel accused her of “inciting terrorism.”

Antony Loewenstein The Palestine Laboratory - How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

[heavenlyyshecomes]

And if the fear of terrorism does not sell Israeli militarism, then sexual allure will. The Alpha Gun Girls (AGA) were founded in 2018 by former IDF veteran Orin Julie. A group of scantily-dressed women caressing Israeli military hardware and wearing camouflage, they mirrored a similar gun culture in the US but with a strongly Zionist agenda. Julie’s social media posts were peppered with pro-gun rhetoric and lines like this: “No matter how hard it’ll be WE WILL DEFEND OUR LAND!” At the 2019 Defense, Homeland Security and Cyber Exhibition (ISDEF) in Tel Aviv, the AGA fondled rifles, posed for photos with the adoring crowd, and passed out brochures with their Instagram handles listing bust measurements, shoe and clothing size, and number of followers. A long line of people waited to get autographs. The women are regularly seen posing in deserts, their clothes covered in fake blood. Female models promoting weapons on social media were a new phenomenon in Israel, and Orin Julie believed that she was the first, telling the Times of Israel in 2018 that she “really loved Israel” and formed the AGA to promote companies like Elbit and Israel Weapons Industries as an integral part of her Zionism. “Social media and a transnational private defense industry have democratized the lusty aesthetics of warfare,” wrote Sophia Goodfriend, a doctoral student in cultural anthropology at Duke University who researched the marketing and production of Israeli surveillance tools, in Jewish Currents magazine. “AGA exports Israel’s ability to deny violence and normalize occupation by aestheticizing warfare,” she continued. “Dressed up in high heels and detachable angel wings, the eroticism of Israeli obfuscation is now a transnational commodity.” Julie received a huge online response, some praising her looks and weapons skills, with others writing that she was a “baby killer,” but there is no doubt that sexualizing Israeli weaponry was a brazen way to counter growing online criticism of Israeli occupation policies and a tactic that connects the Jewish state with the huge number of mostly right-wing and pro-Israel American supporters of the National Rifle Association. This was Zionism as objectified sex object, not a huge stretch from Israel using female soldiers in propaganda in the years after its birth to promote a strong and determined female citizenry. The political agenda wasn’t hidden, nor was it always explicit, leaving viewers to believe that nationalism and big guns were essential to maintain the Jewish state. That’s undeniably true because without a highly militarized society it would be impossible to sustain more than fifty years of occupation. AGA were trying to depoliticize the occupation by completely ignoring those suffering because of it.

—Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

[selfdesructs]

Israel’s primary export is its occupation, and its “battle tested” treatment of Palestinians is exported and mirrored in the USA’s treatment of black Americans

The Palestine Laboratory, Anthony Loewenstein