The Palestine Laboratory
Featuring Antony Loewenstein
Al Jazeera, 2025
Well! What a sober, careful exploration of material that should go into the “you couldn’t make this shit up” category.
Jewish Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein’s two-part Al Jazeera video series, The Palestine Laboratory (40 minutes each, also available on YouTube), is a gift to anyone wanting to understand what lies beneath the façade of Zionism.
In the first episode, we see how Zionism is big business in every sense. At Britain’s Farnborough Air Show, Israeli weapons manufacturers IAI, Rafael and Elbit Systems boast major displays. Despite its size, Israel is the world’s ninth-largest arms exporter. How did it get there?
Loewenstein explores the staggering array of high-tech weaponry Israel creates — from phone-tapping and AI-enabled surveillance to autonomous drones. If you can imagine a fiendish device, Israel not only makes it, but tests it on a captive population with complete impunity.
The 40-minute format of each episode invites discussion to draw out the implications, which are frightening. Loewenstein explains how this technology enables a “frictionless” occupation, with the intention of controlling Palestinians with a minimum of soldiers, guards or settlers.
Ukraine has reportedly invited weapons makers to test their prototypes on its battlefields, but it still lags far behind Israel. Loewenstein describes how Israeli Defence Force Unit 8200 — a hybrid of army and private enterprise engaged in devising and testing novel weapons — is key to Israel’s dominance in hi-tech weaponry.
Palestinians tell Loewenstein that with AI-enabled surveillance, you never know when you might be deemed a threat, and therefore a target.
The second episode shows how this creation of existential unease is exported worldwide: to the United States, Mexico, Greece and India.
On the US–Mexico border, refugees take dangerous detours to avoid Israeli-designed surveillance towers, with their radar and listening sensors, making it the world’s deadliest land border crossing. In Mexico, the army — one of the biggest users of Pegasus spyware — spies on mobiles without authorisation. In the Mediterranean, drones patrol the sea and let refugees drown, unrescued, despite international maritime obligations to save lives at sea.
In India, the government uses drones to bomb its own farmers. Perhaps, here lies the deeper lesson. Israel is not just selling new weapons of mass control, Loewenstein argues, it is marketing the idea to powerful elites that they can do whatever they want — and get away with it.
When the International Criminal Court was established, it was hailed as the end of impunity. However, impunity has merely been reinvented, marketed and exported.
Guffaws may be the best antidote. Watch the 30:57 mark in the second episode: an Israeli groom serenades his Indian bride — “I promise to defend you, fulfil your expectations, shield you and support you” — as they dance around a Rafael rocket. She sings: “I believe in you”. The advertising slogan follows: “Rafael, your partner for indigenous air systems.” Truly, you couldn’t make that shit up.
But perhaps, the end of impunity beckons.
[Watch the first and second episode of The Palestine Laboratory on YouTube.]