Reseña de The Palestine Laboratory por Josh

I've generally avoided reading too much about Israel because I find it depressing.

Israel was founded in 1948, the same year the apartheid regime was established in South Africa. Both countries saw themselves as outposts of European civilization surrounded by barbaric non-Europeans who needed to be controlled and politically marginalized.

South African apartheid collapsed in 1994, largely due to international pressure, but Israel largely managed to avoid similar ostracism for two reasons: 1. Enormous and unconditional economic and political support from the U.S. and Germany 2. Global guilt about the holocaust and an aggressive global campaign to treat critics of state policy as anti-semites.

In the three decades since, Israel has not only maintained but strengthened its controls over Palestine. This is largely thanks to the development of world leading hacking and digital surveillance technology, which the country sells to "anyone who wants it."

Lowenstein quotes Edward Snowden, that Israel sells largely to "countries that occupy the red-hot intersection of a Venn Diagram between 'desperately craves the tools of oppression' and 'sorely lacks the sophistication to produce them domestically.'" Indeed, as Lowenstein documents at length, most of the technology the country exports is not designed for war between states, but for suppression of domestic dissent.

Historically maintaining a police state that aggressively crushed domestic dissent was expensive. East Germany apparently employed ~2% of the entire population in domestic spying, which required millions of hours of listening in on phone calls. Today technology makes it possible to maintain far more comprehensive surveillance with far fewer people. This means that autocratic and oppressive regimes have an ever smaller group of "essential backers" that they need to keep happy, making them ever less responsive to critics.

This book was exactly as depressing as I expected it to be. The one bright spot was that there does seem to be an emerging opposition movement within Israel itself. Lowenstein draws heavily on research from Eitay Mack, an Israeli human rights lawyer who has repeatedly challenged exports to regimes that violate human rights (albeit without much success). Israel maintains a functional legal system and continues to tolerate significant public dissent, and there seems to be an increasing awareness that its isolation and support of abusive regimes is making the country less not more secure. Time will tell if this awareness coallesses into an effective political movement, but the germ of such a movement does exist.