Writer’s ‘uncomfortable truth’ about Israel’s ‘battle-tested’ weapons tested on occupied Palestinians

It is an uncomfortable truth that Israel has built a high-tech export industry based on highly efficient methods of mass surveillance, communications interception and societal control. Autocracies and democracies alike buy those products knowing they are proven tools Israel uses to maintain the occupation, as well as its better-known defensive weapons.

For those brought up with the idea of “plucky” Israel as a beacon of democracy in a hostile region, Loewenstein’s assertion is confronting. For those hostile to Israel or just concerned at the plight of Palestinians, the book will validate their belief that Israel plays the “anti-Semitism” card to shield itself from criticism over the occupation.

Those who defend Israel come what may, or who see it as singled out by secret and not-so-secret anti-Semites will loathe the book as much as some loathe Loewenstein, who is visiting New Zealand this month. He is accused of being a “self-hating Jew” who betrays the memory of his family members obliterated in the Holocaust, that central pillar of the creation story of modern Israel.

All these facets are in the book and in Loewenstein’s evidently painful personal journey to question some of the founding shibboleths of Israel.

His grandparents fled Berlin for Australia in 1939; most of the family they left behind died at the hands of the Nazis. Melbourne-born Loewenstein’s first book exploring his identity, My Israel Question, came in 2006. In 2011, he surprised his family by becoming a German citizen (he retains dual citizenship). “My identity is a conflicted and messy mix that incorporates Judaism, atheism, anti-Zionism, Germanic traditions and Anglo-Saxon-Australian beliefs,” the filmmaker and freelance journalist wrote in the Guardian in 2013. “And yet I both routinely reject and embrace them all.”

Now based in Sydney, he tells the Listener: “Israel claims to speak in my name as a Jew. [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and various Israeli leaders and Jewish leaders routinely say that Judaism and Zionism are inseparable. My response to that has always been, and even more so now, based on the fact that they’re supporting and backing pogroms: ‘Not in my name’.”

His latest book tackles the dichotomy of a nation founded on ideas of freedom and self-determination presiding over the oppression, since the 1967 occupation of Palestinian territories, of another people to whom it is inextricably tied. In the occupation, Israel has developed highly scalable technologies that allow it to maintain control over five million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza – something it could never do with purely military or policing tactics. The technology makes it viable.

Loewenstein argues Israel befriends and supplies autocratic regimes with the technologies they need to oppress their people partly as insurance against future criticism of the occupation. Since its foundation, Israel has had uncomfortable bedfellows – relationships built on a mutual need to defy a hostile world: apartheid-era South Africa, Pinchot-era Chile, then-Burma, Sri Lanka, and the then-Rhodesia.

Today, that policy of realist, some would say cynical, alliances is a little more transparent. Supporters would say it’s built on the idea Israel faces uniquely existential threats and must do what it can to survive.