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Investigative journalist Antony Loewenstein questions the narratives he was taught growing up in the Jewish Diaspora as he traces the origins of Israel’s military-industrial complex, examining how Israel became one of the world’s leading arms and tech exporters. When a military force essentially creates a nation, can they ever be truly separated?
Guests: Mariam Dawwas, Haim Brasheeth-Zabner and Ghada Karmi
Content warning: This episode contains references to violence, including weapons of warfare, which may distress some listeners.
The Palestine Laboratory Podcast is Drop Site’s first investigative series, looking into how Israel is using Palestinian territories as a testing ground to develop its occupation-enforcing tech industry. Hosted by investigative journalist Antony Loewenstein and based on his recent book, this podcast series examines how Israel is reshaping conflict and population control globally. What happens in Palestine never stays there.
Credits
Host: Antony Loewenstein
Series Producer: Elle Marsh
Producer: Bethany Atkinson-Quinton
Production & Sound Engineering: Tim Jenkins
Field Recording: Cinnamon Nippard
Studio Recordings at 2SER: Michael Jones and Jonathan Chang
Original Music: Ara Koufax
Music Direction: Sunless Studio
Podcast Artwork: Debashish Chakrabarty
Special Thanks: Anu Hasbold
Additional music in the series is from: Use Knife, Muqata'a & The Album Leaf
[THEME MUSIC PLAYS]
There’s a story Israel tells about itself, one that celebrates innovation and tech.
[Archive Recording] God brought us into a neighborhood that was surrounded by enemies, and because of that Israel has to be creative.
Of how Israel became a world leader in developing surveillance and military hardware.
[Archive Recording] In Tel Aviv, you can’t walk two blocks without coming across the offices of a high tech company, from start ups, to major international corporations, to accelerators, and everything in between.
I’m Antony Loewenstein, an investigative journalist, and I’ve been uncovering Israel’s military and surveillance tech industry for more than a decade. And what’s missing from the story is that it's all built in the Palestine Laboratory.
[Archive Recording] Because as Loewenstein writes, Israel has developed a world-class weapons industry with equipment conveniently tested on occupied Palestinians, then marketed as battle tested, the Palestine Laboratory is a signature Israeli selling point.
This story is as old as the state of Israel itself. But since October 7, the Palestine Laboratory is accelerating. And they’re testing new weapons in Gaza as we speak.
[Archive Recording] They are very, very near to our hospital. This is happening right now as you see.
In this four-part series, I’ll speak to people who have never spoken out before and investigate how Israel exports the technology of occupation around the world.
[Archive Recording] Three Israeli companies are profiting from the war in Gaza. These companies have experienced a significant surge in profits … Israel Aerospace Industries, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, and Elbit Systems.
How did the small state of Israel become one of the world’s leading arms and tech exporters? How did it get here and what does this mean for warfare and the future of Palestine?
[Sound of a bomb going off in Gaza]
To begin to look at these questions, we need to go back in time.
[Archive Recording] And I therefore formally declare Israel admitted to membership in the United Nations.
Even before the state of Israel was established in 1948, when Palestine was under British colonial rule, where a small group of underground Jewish militias and influential British officers set off a chain of events that’s still in motion today.
[Archive Recording] An Arab Palestine is a threat to Great Britain and a menace to the world. A Jewish Palestine is an asset to Great Britain and a blessing for the world.
This is The Palestine Laboratory. Episode 1: The Start Up Nation.
[DRIVING SOUNDS]
GPS: Your destination is on the left.
Antony: It’s March 2024, in the middle of Ramadan.
Antony: Let's park here for now.
Antony: I’ve just arrived in a small town about an hour and a half’s drive north of Sydney to visit an old friend.
Antony: Hi. Is everyone sleeping? Hello. So good to see you.
Mariam: Good to see you.
Antony: I’m here to see my friend Mariam Dawwas, she has just escaped from Gaza with her five-year-old daughter and family.
Antony: Let me show you this stuff first, and then we'll...
Mariam: We can sit here,
Antony: Let's sit here. Yeah. How are you?
Antony: Mariam is a 32-year-old journalist, fixer, and translator. We first met in 2017 in Gaza when I was covering the strangulation of the territory by both Israel and Egypt and its awful impact on Palestinians.
Antony: Let me first off by asking the obvious. Can you introduce yourself and how you'd like to be described?
Mariam: Hi, Antony. I'm really happy to be with you. It’s my pleasure to speak about myself. I am Mariam Dawwas. The first thing that I want to identify myself with is that I am a mom of a very beautiful young child, five years old, Sophie. I lived in Gaza for almost all of my life.
Antony: Gaza is a 25-mile-long strip of land on the Mediterranean Sea, with a population of roughly 2.3-million people. The last time I saw Mariam was in Gaza and she had me over for dinner and I remember it really well. Her family made me maqluba which is this beautiful traditional Palestinian dish. But we had to eat over candlelight because there was a typical electrical blackout. So we all ate under those lights in almost complete darkness talking about life, the world, religion.
Mariam: Gaza has a very beautiful, warm, place with all its vibes. And we have friends everywhere in Gaza. You have relatives everywhere in Gaza. So you feel that every home in Gaza City or the Gaza Strip is your home.
Antony: But it's a home that many Gazans can’t leave due to the blockade on the strip imposed by Israel and Egypt since 2007.
Mariam: You know living in Gaza is unique, because Gaza has its own abnormal circumstances which we make some effort to adapt to. You feel that it's your home. But our problem with Gaza is that to feel home and safe, it is like a luxury that Gazans don't have. It's either you feel home or safe.
Antony: Mariam survived months of bombardment in Gaza after October 7 before escaping and coming to Australia. It's the fourth time she’s ever left Gaza. There's a lot to talk about. But there is one thing that sticks with me.
Mariam: The population in the Gaza Strip, I'm sad to say, but they became experts in the types of weapons used. I mean, even children.
Antony: She tells me about how children in Gaza can sometimes work out what weapons are being used in the Palestinian territory by the sound that they make.
Mariam: People in Gaza know when it's Apache. They know when it's F-16. They know when it's, you know that, a drone.
[DRONE SOUND]
Mariam: The drone it was becoming over the years, like a very normal thing of our daily lives. And we are okay with it to the extent that we thank God if it's only a drone.
Antony: In her lifetime, Mariam has lived through six major Israeli offensives on Gaza. She believes the IDF -- Israel Defence Forces -- are testing completely new weapons on the people there.
Mariam: The sound of bombing. It was incredible. I cannot describe it. I can’t find words to describe that sound. We've never experienced something like this before. I told my brother that they are using a new thing, and I was right. We knew that they have used a new kind of weapon: F-35.
Antony: These are the most advanced fighter jets ever made and it has been confirmed that Israel has been using them in Gaza since the beginning of the war, including their use to deliver 2000- pound bombs.
I’ve been hearing countless reports like Mariam’s, of everyday Palestinians witnessing & documenting the IDF testing new technology and tools of repression on the civilian population there and finding more and more ways to not just target Palestinians but use it as a model for other nations to follow. I’ve spent years investigating Israel's massive military-industrial complex, and just in case you are wondering, maybe I should explain a little bit about how I got here.
My story is not uncommon in the Jewish diaspora. Like many other Jews, I lost huge numbers of family members during the Holocaust. My grandparents fled Nazi Germany and Austria in 1939 just before the war began and came to Australia as refugees. My father, Jeffrey Loewenstein, was born in Melbourne on the 3rd of March, 1943, which was exactly the same day as his maternal grandparents -- my great grandparents -- were being murdered in Auschwitz, the Nazi regime’s most notorious death camp.
From a young age, at my family synagogue in Melbourne Australia, I was taught that Israel was the necessary answer to Jewish insecurity. I distinctly recall attending, after my bar-mitzvah at age 13, a regular Jewish youth group, D&M -- Deep and Meaningful -- where Israel was praised, admired and honored. It sounded like a pretty special place. I never learned what the establishment of Israel in 1948 meant for the estimated 750,000 Palestinians expelled or forced to flee, never allowed to return. This history was never talked about.
Twenty years ago as a young journalist, I visited Israel and Palestine for the first time. And this is where I began to unpack the cognitive dissonance I saw in Israeli society.
[Antony Home Video 1] Antony: The American school here in Gaza, bombed during the war.
Antony: I began to see and report on what the occupation of a subjugated people looked like.
[Antony Home Video 2] So if the settlers move in, the state will generally allow that to happen or ignore it?
Protestor: Well it’s not supposed to, but that’s what actually happens.
Antony: I remember going around the West Bank with Israeli peace activists who were trying to help Palestinians farm their land. And we saw Israeli soldiers and settlers working together to physically assault Palestinians. They tried to assault us. Israeli soldiers and settlers are one and the same thing. for Palestinians, no one protects them.
[Antony Home Video 3] Protester: They are not allowed to come here but at the same the settlers have the right to come here and build houses and the army is protecting them. They are illegal people. These people are breaking the law.
Antony: This kind of grim reality that I saw and was reporting was so at odds with the fairytale version of Israel I had been sold when I was growing up. And with the image that Israel tries to portray to the world still today.
[Archive Recording] This unique start-up nation ecosystem is something that governments, universities, and corporations around the world have tried to mimic.
Antony: Proponents say Israel is known as the world's "start-up nation," due to the country’s massive tech and industrial sector. A nation that is progressive and innovative, leading the rest of the world into a bright green future.
[Archive Recording] Israel's 6,000 startups are central to the country's high-tech sector, a sector that represents 10 percent of the country's GDP and nearly half of its exports.
Antony: Tel Aviv and the surrounding regions have been dubbed Silicon Wadi, which means Silicon Valley in Hebrew. There are over 300 multinational companies and 6,000 start-ups that employ hundreds of thousands of people. But what’s important to note here is that Israel has one of the most highly militarized cultures in the Western world. Military conscription for most young Israelis is mandatory from the age 18. And what a soldier learns in Israel’s Defense Forces, the IDF, is then put to use when they receive a job after military service in Israel’s massive military-industrial sector.
[Archive Recording] High-tech companies are looking for real talent. They might be looking at MIT, Harvard, and Stanford. But now there's a new word: 8200.
Antony: Israel's Unit 8200 is the country's elite intelligence branch. Its main role is to monitor and track Palestinians, and it's the equivalent of America's NSA. Many members of this unit have gone on to develop leading surveillance and military-tech startups in the private sector.
[Archive Recording] This specific unit actually already is having a high impact on Innovation worldwide. Smart international companies are trying to learn from what's going on there, to learn how to improve innovation.
Antony: One of Unit 8200’s main goals is the mass monitoring of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, collecting as much of their personal and political data as possible. But media coverage of the unit is largely glowing. A Forbes story in 2016 celebrated the over-1,000 Unit 8200 alumni who had gone on to found their own start-ups.
And then there’s the arms-manufacturing industry. Israel is now in the top ten weapons dealers of the world, having sold a range of surveillance equipment and arms to at least 140 countries. According to details uncovered by Israeli human rights lawyer Eitay Mack, the Israeli government has approved every defense deal brought to it since 2007. In 2022, which are the latest publicly available figures, Israeli arms sales were the highest on record, surging to over $12 billion US dollars.
[Archive Recording] And according to new defense-ministry figures, the surge in demand for Israeli-made weapons is due in part to Russia’s war on Ukraine. Arms sales have now doubled in the past decade.
Antony: Israel’s defense industry is only growing. In September last year, Israel signed an arms deal with Germany, worth about $3.5-billion US. The sale is the biggest-ever deal for Israel’s military industry. In 2023, exports reached a record-breaking $13.1 billion US dollars, marking the third-consecutive year that sales have broken records. And sales for 2024 are likely to increase even more.
Israel's dependency on the arms trade has been a fixture of the state's economy for a long time. But so much of this history is either underreported, obscured, or marked as classified by the state. There's this one story that was published in The New York Times in 1986 by the paper's then-bureau chief in Jerusalem, Tom Friedman, titled “How Israel’s Economy Got Hooked on Selling Arms Abroad.”
Now at the time, about 40 years ago now, Friedman reported that 10 percent of the workforce back then were involved in manufacturing or selling military hardware. He interviewed one of Israel's leading experts on arms sales, Aaron Kleiman, who said, quote: ''Israeli arms-manufacturers have reached such a level of production and importance within the Israeli economy that exporting weapons has become an economic imperative." End quote.
Now I have not found many articles before or since in The New York Times that have come close to explaining the Israeli reliance on trading arms and its support of autocracies. But what’s really alarming about Friedman’s report and so much other work in mainstream western press prior to and since is that not once does Friedman mention the Israeli occupation of Palestine or even the word “Palestinian.”
[MUSIC PLAYS]
Antony: When I moved with my partner Ali to East Jerusalem in 2016, she got a job with an international human-rights organization. I began research for a new book, investigating the secrets of Israel's military and tech sectors while Israel continued to expand its brutal occupation of Palestine. There’s this clear gap in the way people understand Israel and its history. So in the middle of 2023, I finally released my book, “The Palestine Laboratory.” It was comprehensive and in-depth, but like a lot of reporting, the deeper you go, the more you begin to realize you’re only just scratching the surface. Then, October 7 happened.
When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, my first response was shock and awe, really, that such a sophisticated attack would happen, that Israeli defenses disappeared. And I knew literally from the first day when it became pretty clear that there was a huge Israeli death toll, that Israel would respond overwhelmingly and that this would be a moment akin to 9/11.
And although Israel itself called it a 9/11 moment, my reason was a bit different. What I meant when I thought that immediately on October 7, was that the U.S. response to 9/11 in 2001, in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and elsewhere, was so overwhelming, counterproductive, violent, and insane, that Israel would almost certainly unleash a similar slaughter in Gaza, which would change the map.
And in fact, since that day, huge numbers of people have come to me and asked: Where did we get to this moment? How are we in this horrendous situation? And the way to really answer that is to go back to history. And in fact, it's mostly a hidden history, which really begins in the early 1900s.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
[MIDROLL]
Antony: So to begin to unravel the deep militaristic roots of modern-day Israel there are a couple of key figures and turning points in the last century that are worth really going into.
Long before Israel was founded, for roughly 600 years the Ottoman Empire ruled over large parts of the Middle East. Throughout the centuries of Ottoman rule and then later when Palestine was under British colonial rule, Jewish people lived in communities alongside Christians and Muslims in what is now known as Palestine and Israel.
But with the advent of modern political Zionism in the late 1800s and the growing persecution of Jews in Europe, Zionists from Russia and Europe began to emigrate to Palestine to establish new settlements.
Many early Zionist thinkers believed that the Jewish population would not survive or know peace without a homeland of its own. And it's crazy to think of this now, but early Zionist thinkers started looking around the world for possible locations of that Jewish state: Australia, Argentina, other places, and in the end, of course, they decided that Palestine would make the most sense in their perspective. But the world could have been very different if there had been a Jewish state, for example, in the center of Australia or in South America. To establish a homeland of its own, though, some of these early Zionists believed a Jewish nation could be forged through military might alone.
Haim: This is a society that is built around the army, that thinks around the army, and itserves the army. You know, to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And this is exactly what happened in Palestine.
Antony: Filmmaker and historian Professor Haim Bresheeth-Zabner has extensively documented how early Zionists shaped the future of Israel’s military culture.
Haim: I'm an ex-Israeli living in Britain since 1972. I was born in a refugee camp in Italy, in 1946, because both my parents survived Auschwitz, the two people, alone of their families and came to Israel two weeks into the 1948 war. I was a baby and, basically, we lived in a place called Jabalia, which is to the south of Jaffa. And the only people living there were survivors of the Holocaust and survivors of the Nakba.
Antony: Haim himself was brought to Palestine as a baby, two weeks into the 1948 war. His work looks at how the state of Israel was essentially born out of the military.
Haim: So they knew from the beginning that they needed a military organization because they didn't mean to just have a dot here and a dot there on the map of Palestine. But they meant to take Palestine over, and they said so clearly from the beginning.
[MUSIC PLAYS]
Antony: Now in early 1909, one of the first Zionist armed militias set up a group called Hashomer, meaning Guardian. The group's goal was to defend new Zionist settlements, for Jewish communities in Palestine.
Haim: They needed it because you couldn't settle Palestine without dispossessing Palestinians. Most of the land was tilled in Palestine apart from in the Negev desert. So this was in a sense, the Hashomer and anything that followed, it were a settler-colonial organization to protect and to allow expansion of the projects.
Antony: Many of the founders of Hashomer later became key figures in the Zionist movement, including Yitzhak Ben Zvi, Israel’s second president, his wife Rachel Yanait, and David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the state of Israel.
Haim: Ben-Gurion, who was, from very early, the most important person in the Zionist Federation, he immediately understood the importance of military institution.
Antony: David Ben-Gurion, a short balding figure just under five-feet tall, was originally from the Polish town of Plonsk. In 1906, when he was just 20 years old, Ben-Gurion moved to Palestine and worked as a farm laborer in the new Jewish settlements. He eventually discovered he was a much better political organizer and strategist.
Haim: Now, Ben-Gurion knew that without an army, he could not take over Palestine, a fully populated, densely populated, agrarian society of the 19th century, which was already modernizing, at quite a pace.
Antony: The founders of the state of Israel, in particular, David Ben-Gurion, believed that the building of a strong armed force was critical to establishing a state, and as a way to help form a new national identity among the diverse Jewish population who had recently immigrated to Palestine. Ben-Gurion believed that the nation was to be, quote “constructed through military experience,” and outlined his model of a, quote, “nation under arms.”
Haim: He was very influenced by the Prussian state. He wasn't alone in that, even the very left of the movement were influenced by Prussia. Many of them came from Germany. And Prussia was a model state of the 19th century, was the strongest state in continental Europe. It was militarized to the eyeballs and successfully became the kernel for the future German state. You know, the saying was, most states have an army, but Prussia is an army that has a state. So, basically this became the model.
The Army was there first. The state was its creation. And this is true to this very day. This is a society that the universities, like the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is an army camp with a campus around it. You know, I don't know about any British or American university that has an army camp.
So that's why his pioneering was not just in creating the army, but using the army as a social machinery and the political machinery to creating a state and a nation. So Ben-Gurion has laid the foundations for every aspect of Israeli life, and it hasn't changed in more than 75 years.
Antony: So how exactly did Ben-Gurion and others begin to create this “nation under arms”? One major factor was their early collaborations with British colonialists who took control over Palestine after the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. In 1917, the British government announced the Balfour Declaration, essentially giving support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. But what it didn't do was give equal support for Palestinians and Arabs living there in the same land. Hashomer was disbanded and absorbed into a new organization , Haganah. In the 1920s, Haganah and other Zionist paramilitary organizations were illegal under the British Mandate, but the British authorities began to turn a blind eye to their activities once they realized these underground groups might be of some use to them.
Haim: The Haganah was set up as an illegal operation, of course, but the British knew it. knew of it, had agents, in the Haganah, to keep things going, on their side of the fence, but never acted against it in the 20s and in most of the 30s. Until the 40s, there was no sanction against Haganah or the other organizations that later will be called terrorist organisations. They were, you know, the British closed their eyes to this and in many ways in the 30s trained Haganah and the others in fighting the Palestinians.
Antony: In the 1930s the local population began resisting the British Mandate. Palestinian groups called on the British Mandate to halt uncapped Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine, demanding the right to self-determination and representation.
[MUSIC PLAYS]
[Archive Recording, 1936 ] The main case of the Arabs is against the British government’s policy in Palestine, on favoring the establishment of a national home for Jews forgot to safeguard the civil rights of the non-Jewish population.
Haim: To begin with, they just went on strike. But the strike was so brutally broken by the British power in Palestine, in that mandate government, that gradually this has developed to an intifada. So this was what the British called the Arab revolt. And, it's actually, was total, you know, the whole of Palestine was on strike and striking against the British.
Antony: During the Arab Revolt in Palestine of 1936 to 1939, which was a popular uprising calling for Arab independence, the Haganah and other armed Zionists became useful collaborators for the British colonial forces, who fought to quell the revolt against the British.
[Archive Recording, 1936] The new Jerusalem built for peace today is the center of turmoil and riot. British patrols in the city adopt the sternest methods to keep order. Snipers have been responsible for many killed and injured. All visitors are searched for weapons. In the heart of the city is a blazing lumberyard, typical of the outrages that have occurred.
Haim: Now the British needed the Haganah and needed the other organizations. And they actually brought it into their military forces. It was famously done by Orde Wingate, that was a veteran of the British Army. And he started training the Haganah, before 1939, to assist the British later on. His methods were, a bit, unusual, for example, lining up a whole village, all the men in the square and then shooting every tenth man, you know, basically decimated the village. If they didn't give up the arms and told him who the people resisting are in that village, they would all die. So, these were the methods that Haganah commanders were trained in and were part of in the 30s already.
Antony: Now during this uprising, British forces deployed brutal tactics which they had developed and tested during their fight against Irish resistance during that war of independence in 1919. One tactic the British pioneered during their fight against the Irishthen deployed in Palestine was tying Palestinian prisoners to the front of convoys to prevent rebels attacking. Which, interestingly enough, is exactly what the Israelis often do now in Palestine, particularly in the West Bank.
Haim: The police units called Black and Tan, which had a terrible reputation in Ireland because of their brutality, were brought lock, stock and barrel, to Palestine to a new colonial conflict. In other words, from Britain's earliest colony, Ireland, to Britain's newest colony, Palestine.
Antony: The strategies from the British playbook used against the Palestinian rebels during this time included executions, detention of thousands without trial, and exile of their leaders.
Haim: You know you have to think about Palestine, and before that, Ireland, as laboratories. Those were laboratories for methods of fighting, a population which is not really very armed, you know, they were fighting with shotguns and such light arms, but trying to defend their livelihood and their homes and the fields, against the colonial police and the colonial force. So, everything was tried out and the British already knew, and everyone else knew that world war is coming. And therefore this was a chance to try new weapons, to try new techniques. And what the Haganah was so good at learning from the British.
Antony: This collaboration between Zionist groups and British forces deepened during World War II, where tens of thousands of Jews received military training by the British to combat the threat of Nazi allied forces. Now at the same time, new skilled arrivals who had fled from Germany and Austria were helping industrialize the cities in Palestine. And here, weapons, made by local plants, proved invaluable for when Jews wanted to establish their own nation after World War II in the ashes of the Holocaust.
[MUSIC PLAYS]
[Archive Recording, 1937] From Palestine, first pictures of the latest bomb outrage. Jewish terrorists blow up the Goldsmith Officers Club in Jerusalem. 13 Britons were killed and 16 injured. Total casualties on this one day of violence was 18 dead and 25 injured.
Antony: Jewish militias began launching attacks against the British forces and against Palestinian villages, forcing thousands to flee.
[Archive Recording, 1937] Britain answered these attacks by putting whole cities under martial law.
Antony: The situation escalated into a full-scale war in 1948, resulting in the permanent displacement of more than half of the Palestinian population and between 15 to-20,000dead.
[Archive Recording, 1948] Latest camera records from Palestine show heavy damage in and around the Arab city of Jaffa as Haganah troops move up to new positions along the war-scarred roads. Jaffa itself has become an almost deserted city.
Antony: The Palestinians refer to this as the Nakba, which means catastrophe in Arabic.
[Archive Recording, 1948] Victorious Haganah troops have driven the Arabs out of the beleaguered city, taking many prisoners. Few pitiful refugees rescue what few belongings they can.
Antony: With the end of the British Mandate and the British forces departing Palestine, on May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion stood up in Dizengoff House in today’s Tel Aviv and declared the independent state of Israel.
[Archive Recording, 1948] David Ben-Gurion in Hebrew, By virtue of our historical and natural right. We declare the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel, the state of Israel. [Applause]
Antony: What I found living in Israel and Palestine, and, really, what I still see in much of the Jewish diaspora, is profound denial about 1948. You see villages which were ethnically cleansed in 1948. One that stands out particularly: My partner Ali and I went to Lifta which is on the outskirts of Jerusalem. And no one lives there anymore, and nature is taking over again the old homes. But you see this quite eerie old village. People’s homes and old shops which are falling apart. But this is one of the more visible signs of what 1948 meant.
Ghada: The events of 1948, of leaving my home, my city, my country, and going into exile. I didn't understand it as exile. I just understood it as leaving, with nobody able to tell me when we were going home, when we were going to return, was terribly traumatic.
Antony: Palestinian historian and writer Ghada Karmi was a child living with her family in Jerusalem in 1948. After Zionist snipers set up posts in evacuated Palestinian houses near her home, her parents decided to leave until things died down.
Ghada: We had to leave rather hurriedly. We got a taxi with enormous difficulty because it was so dangerous. And my mother had packed one suitcase for all of us. My brother, my sister, and my parents, because she, you know, she believed that it wasn't for long. And shouldn’t we be back soon? And so we left on that morning in April. And little did I know that we would leave, never to return.
Antony: The Nakba really is ever-present in Israel and I would argue in fact it is ever-present in many settler-colonial states. The equivalent here in Australia, the genocide that people often don't want to talk about, or in the US with Native Americans or in Canada or in New Zealand, in every country that had outside colonial forces come in forcibly and try to destroy the indigenous population, that history remains still buried. But within Israel itself it happened really in a human’s lifetime ago. We are not talking that long ago. And I think the echoes of the Nakba still resonate today and they feel very alive for a lot of Palestinians.
Mariam: It's repeating. It's not the past. It's not the past, it didn't happen in 1948 and now it's different, it's the same. It's the same way. It is the same atrocities, it’s happening again. And in front of the world's eyes. And no one is doing anything.
Antony: Mariam’s own family, the Dawwas, were displaced from a town outside of Gaza in 1948.
Mariam: The Dawwas family comes originally from, we are refugees, we are not Gazans. So I come from a town called Hiribya. It is near the Gaza Strip, but it's now considered in Israel. It's called Yad Mordechai now. And I'm originally from there, so I was always educating myself about what happened in Nakba. How did it happen? And I always had a question when I see the massacres of Deir Yassin and the many other massacres, I've always asked myself a question: Where were the world?
Antony: Palestinians and the rest of the world are still dealing with the ramifications of 1948. But the death and mass displacement in Gaza alone since October 7 is actually worse than that of the 1948 Nakba. And that leaves him with the key question. What does that say to the long-term ramifications of this current moment? For Mariam and other families in Gaza, not only is history repeating itself, but the Palestine laboratory is accelerating.
Mariam: It was planned. It was designed for Gaza to be used as a workshop. You know, there's a funny thing that I want to tell you about. You know, I get offended really, I get offended when I buy makeup and personal-hygiene products. It says it doesn't test on animals. So I feel that even we are not privileged like the animals. It's painful that I'm saying this. But, you know, the world is okay. It's okay with a state, an occupation that is testing, that is testing weapons and killing people with its arms and then markets that. They say that it's been already tested on Gaza.
Antony: In the next episode of the series, we’ll deep dive into exactly how Israel’s military industry markets its hardware to governments across the globe. We’ll look at the secret deals that have been made with dictators abroad for decades, and meet the people fighting to uncover the truth about Israel's history as a major arms dealer to some of the world’s deadliest regimes.
[Archive Recording]
Reporter: General Pinochet, how would you evaluate the success of the junta to date?
Pinochet: It’s a complete success
Reporter: Can you predict when the power will be returned to the people of Chile?
Pinochet: That's a question that everybody asks.
[CREDIT MUSIC PLAYS]
The Palestine Laboratory Podcast is hosted by me, Antony Loewenstein.
Throughout the series we discuss and reference a number of different Israeli companies. We reached out to all of them for comment. One got back to us. The rest didn’t, and you can read more about this in the show notes.
The series is produced by Elle Marsh and Bethany Atkinson-Quinton. Production and sound engineering by Tim Jenkins.
Studio recordings at 2SER with Michael Jones and Jonathan Chang. Field production by Cinnamon Nippard.
Original music in this series is by Ara Koufax and music direction by Sunless Studio.
This last track is Coupe d'état, by Use Knife, remixed by Muqata’a.
A special thanks to Anu Hasbold and to my friend Mariam Dawwas for telling us her story, providing invaluable testimony and an eyewitness account of the reality on the ground in Gaza. You’ll be hearing more from Mariam in later episodes.
You can find full credits and links to relevant resources and further reading on the podcast’s website, including information about Haim Bresheeth-Zabner and Ghada Karmi’s work.
This is an independent podcast brought to you by Drop Site News.
To support Drop Site's journalism and get 20 percent off a subscription, visit dropsitenews.com slash palestinelab.
Thanks for listening.
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*Disclaimer: We reached out for comment to Elbit Systems and received no response.
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