Novara FM: Palestine as Showroom w/ Antony Loewenstein

Israel needs friends. And one of the main tools it has used to get them is its arms industry. The 10th biggest in the world, it increasingly specialises in the kind of digital surveillance technology European governments love to pretend they never use.

Such powerful technology has not only forced many of its former adversaries to the table but, paradoxically, has increased the mistrust between itself and its closest allies: the powerful Five Eyes group of anglophone intelligence agencies.

In The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, Antony Loewenstein reveals how this industry has made itself indispensable to the Israeli state.

He joins Rivkah Brown to talk about how Israel’s often spectacular occupation of the Palestinian territories has allowed it to export not just its sophisticated weaponry but also the very idea of ethnonationalism around the world.