Tilde Lowengrimm reviewed Palestine Laboratory by Antony Loewenstein
The Ethnostate Industrial Complex
3 stars
If you know about Israel's fascist occupation of Palestine and the IDF's ongoing attempt to perpetrate genocide against the Palestinian people, this book is the "But wait, there's more!" of this shitty infomercial playing out in front of us.
Israel's economy is, in large part, based on exporting tools of violence and human control. Weapons, surveillance, assassination, espionage: Israel sells the tools of fascism to its perpetrators, a little ethnostate-with-concentration-camps starter kit for China's oppression of Uhigurs, or Narendra Modi's BJP crackdown on Muslim people. Beyond just "The cruelty is the point.", the cruelty is extremely valuable market research & product development for a state which sells a fascism starter kit for anyone who can pay, no questions asked.
Forget IBM's complicity in the Nazi genocides, and cast your eyes instead to the number one purveyor of genocide technology worldwide. These tools are not general-purpose technologies which are sometimes used …
If you know about Israel's fascist occupation of Palestine and the IDF's ongoing attempt to perpetrate genocide against the Palestinian people, this book is the "But wait, there's more!" of this shitty infomercial playing out in front of us.
Israel's economy is, in large part, based on exporting tools of violence and human control. Weapons, surveillance, assassination, espionage: Israel sells the tools of fascism to its perpetrators, a little ethnostate-with-concentration-camps starter kit for China's oppression of Uhigurs, or Narendra Modi's BJP crackdown on Muslim people. Beyond just "The cruelty is the point.", the cruelty is extremely valuable market research & product development for a state which sells a fascism starter kit for anyone who can pay, no questions asked.
Forget IBM's complicity in the Nazi genocides, and cast your eyes instead to the number one purveyor of genocide technology worldwide. These tools are not general-purpose technologies which are sometimes used by bad people. They are tailor made to enact total dictatorial control and pursue crimes against humanity. Sure, they can be used for more benign purposes like hunting down journalists to dismember, monitoring the Mediterranean for migrants without any ability and therefore obligation to rescue them from drowning, or blackmailing people into become spies against their communities.
This book makes me so angry. How did a people whose most important identity is that of the outsider and the oppressed emerge from an attempted genocide to construct a state which stands for the opposite of those values in every way?
