Antony Loewenstein has brought a book to a gunfight, taking on Israel’s enormous and expanding military-industrial complex and invasive cyber spy operations with the low-tech tool of words on paper.
In the right hands, there’s nothing more powerful or incendiary than words and Loewenstein mounts a full-scale attack. He accuses Israel of not only running an apartheid state but profiting from the tools used to oppress millions, and selling them to some of the world’s more murderous despots and least scrupulous governments.
The scope of the argument is set out early: “Palestine is Israel’s workshop, where an occupied nation on its doorstep provides millions of subjugated people as a laboratory for the most precise and successful methods of domination.”
What follows is a polemic traversing Israel’s history from its establishment in 1948, expansion in the Six-Day War of 1967, the post-September 11, 2001 war on terror through to today’s cyber cold war. Along the way it explores the clandestine operations of Israeli intelligence’s Unit 8200 and opaque security companies such as NSO Group and Black Cube, and sales of hardware, surveillance technology and know-how from Saudi Arabia to Myanmar and beyond.
It synthesises Loewenstein’s own work and also takes advantage of once-secret documents, archives and growing media scrutiny both within Israel and from outside. Examining these issues for 20 years has earned him the trust of insiders and activists alike, but also no shortage of criticism and enemies in the form of Israel’s fiercest defenders. It’s not an entry-level book, as it assumes a level of knowledge of and interest in Israeli history and global affairs, but it does stand on its own as an eye-opening account of a shadowy world.
Read the review by Michael Ruffles in The Sydney Morning Herald.