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AnyVision is an Israeli start-up that secretly monitors Palestinians across the West Bank with a range of cameras, the locations of which are not acknowledged by the company or Israel. Artificial intelligence thus merges with biometrics and facial recognition at dozens of Israel checkpoints throughout the West Bank. AnyVision claims that its technology does not discriminate on the basis or race or gender and that it creates only "ethical" products. When asked by NBC News in 2019 about its work in the West Bank, AnyVision CEO Eylon Etshtein initially threatened to sue them, denied there was an occupation, and accused the NBC reporter of being paid by Palestinian activists. He later apologized for the outburst.

— Palestine Laboratory by Antony Loewenstein (24% - 25%)

It was inevitable that the Israeli occupation would become increasingly privatized. With so many Israeli companies involved in maintaining the infrastructure around the occupation, these firms found innovative ways to sell their services to the state, test the latest technology on Palestinians, and then promote them around the world. Israel embraced neoliberalism from the mid-1980s and privatization of major state-owned enterprises accelerated in the 1990s. Nonetheless, while the defense industries are increasingly in private hands, they continue to act as an extension of Israel's foreign policy agenda, supporting its goals and pro-occupation ideology. The human cost of this neoliberal shift has been devastating: Israel has the highest income inequality of any nation in the OECD. The poverty rate in 2020 was 23 percent of the Israeli Jewish population and 36 percent of the Arab population. [...] Many Palestinians are unaware of how the occupation has been privatized because it makes no difference if a state officer or private individual harasses or humiliates them. Neither entity is accountable to those over whom they rule. I saw this constantly when working and traveling across the West Bank beginning in 2005. Many checkpoints through which Palestinians are forced to travel to access their schools, workplaces, or Israel if they are fortunate enough to get of the few work permits handed out by the state, use facial recognition technology and biometric details to document their every move.

— Palestine Laboratory by Antony Loewenstein (22% - 23%)

Israeli history can be split into two eras: before and after 1967. Before the Six-Day War, Israeli policy was not noble but at least gave the rhetorical impression of (sometimes) opposing repression. In 1963, Foreign Minister Golda Meir told the United Nations General Assembly that Israel “naturally opposes policies of apartheid, colonialism and racial or religious discrimination wherever they exist” because Jews understood what it meant to be victims. Israel bonded with newly independent African states, enjoying their postcolonial freedoms, and African nations backed Israel at the UN. Many Israelis then and now viewed their country as a liberation struggle akin to being freed from colonial bondage. They had no time for the view that Zionism was tinged with colonialism. (…) Journalist Sash Polakow-Suransky recounts in his book on Israel’s secret relationship with apartheid South Africa, The Unspoken Alliance, that 1967 saw a watershed in Israel’s defense posture. Assisted by Soviet and Arab propaganda, “Israel’s image as a state of Holocaust survivors in need of protection gradually deteriorat[ed] into that of an imperialist stooge of the West.” Thereafter, many Third World nations turned away from Israel and the “Israeli government abandoned the last vestiges of moral foreign policy in favour of hard-nosed realpolitik.” Partnering with the world’s most brutal tyrants followed. Israel’s relationship with Iran under the Shah was an early example.

— Palestine Laboratory by Antony Loewenstein (13%)

Both Israel and the US trained and armed death squads in Colombia well into the 2000s. The former drug trafficker Carlos Castaño, who ran a far-right paramilitary force, explains in his ghost-written autobiography, “I learned an infinite amount of things in Israel [in the 1980s], and to that country I owe part of my essence, my human and military achievements. I copied the concept of paramilitary forces from the Israelis.” He reportedly arrived in Israel in 2004 after fleeing his own country. Colombia has long been the most significant strategic US ally in the region. A Colombian government-appointed truth commission released its findings in 2022 about the grim realities during the country’s civil war between 1958 to 2016. The US was found to have known that its Colombian allies were running death squads and yet Washington’s backing increased. The Global South has been controlled and pacified with (primarily) Israeli and US weapons. Neither anti-Semitism nor extremism have been an impediment to collaboration with states that plunder assets or people.

— Palestine Laboratory by Antony Loewenstein (12%)

It is this extreme form of nationalism that’s been commercialized for more than fifty years. Shir Hever is one of the most insightful experts on the economic aspects of the Israeli occupation. Israeli arms manufacturers sell a particular message, he told me, that reflects the lived experience of brutalizing Palestinians. “If you listen to the [Israeli] arms companies themselves when they go to Europe to sell their products, they keep repeating the same mantra,” he said. “They say that these Europeans are so naive. They think that they can have human rights. They think that they can have privacy but that’s nonsense. We know that the only way to fight terrorism is to judge people by how they look and the color of their skin.” Israel’s status as an ethnonationalist state was there from its birth in 1948, but it’s been turbocharged in the twenty-first century. The Israeli leader who most successfully pursued this policy was Benyamin Netanyahu, a fervent believer in the endless occupation of Palestinian lands. He was the longest serving Prime Minister in the country’s history, though finally lost office in 2021 after more than twelve years leading the government. He won re-election in 2022 with the most right-wing coalition in the country’s history. His vision himself has won, since he convinced many other countries to use Israel as a model. Netanyahuism is an ideology that will outlive him.

— Palestine Laboratory by Antony Loewenstein (3% - 4%)

Israel’s claim to be a thriving democracy in the heart of the Middle East is challenged by the facts. All media outlets in Israel, along with publishers and authors, must submit stories related to foreign affairs and security to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) chief military censor before publication. No other Western country has such a system. It’s an archaic regulation that began soon after Israel was born. The censor has the power to block the story or partially redact it. What’s deemed valid is highly questionable, since the priorities of the national security establishment will be very different to what’s required for a healthy, democratic state. This contradiction is clear when Israel’s chief censor, Ariella Ben Avraham, left her position in 2020 and took a job with the country’s leading cyber-surveillance company, NSO Group.

— Palestine Laboratory by Antony Loewenstein (3%)

A quarter of US Jews in a 2021 survey agreed that Israel was an apartheid state. Even the publisher of Haaretz, Israel's most progressive, albeit Zionist, newspaper, admits it. "The product of Zionism, the State of Israel, is not a Jewish and democratic state but instead has become an apartheid state, plain and simple," Amos Shocken wrote in 2021. "One can say many things about this, but one cannot say Israel is fulfilling Zionism as a Jewish and democratic state."

— Palestine Laboratory by Antony Loewenstein (3%)