The genocide in the Gaza Strip may cause outrage among millions of people worldwide, but it is also admired by governments interested in the control and oppression techniques applied against the Palestinian territory daily. The statement was made by Jewish journalist Antony Loewenstein, who was interviewed by BdF Entrevista.
“What we see in Gaza is almost a model of how many other nations want to run their societies and control unwanted populations,” said the journalist to Brasil de Fato.
“[That’s] A model for organizing conflict. You destroy an area, you isolate them, and you target people, this could be Palestinians. Israel has given a model that many other countries want to follow, despite what they might say publicly.”
Loewenstein is the author of the book The Palestine Laboratory, which investigates how the ongoing massacre of the subjugated population may not bring peace and security to Israelis but a lot of money from the sales of technologies to dictatorships all around the world, including openly antisemitic countries. It has happened since the creation of Israel in 1948.
“In 1967, when Israel took control of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, Israel realized that many countries did not approve of what they were doing. They opposed it and said: ‘Give the land back to the Arabs'."
“Israel, of course, refused to give the land back. The way it tried to protect itself was by contacting many countries to say ‘We can help you solve your problems. If you want to ‘manage’ minority groups in your territories, be it an Indigenous community, Muslims, or whoever, we'll sell you the technology, weapons and teach you how to use them."
“To this day, Israel uses this way of trading arms and I would add, this way of political coercion to protect itself. We don’t know to how many countries Israel has sold its weapons in the last 50 years, probably to 125 or 150 countries. That is, [Israel sold weapons] to most countries of the world.”
Read below excerpts from the interview
Brasil de Fato: Recently, I received your newsletter with the title "Israel's plans for Gaza are even worse than you imagine”. Could you explain a little bit more?
Antony Loewenstein: After October 7, in 2023, the narrative that we’ve often been told in much of the Western press – and I’m guessing maybe also in Brazil – is that Israel was going into Gaza to fight Hamas, to destroy Hamas, to maybe kill the Hamas leader, which they did recently. And that was pretty much the main goal. The reality, though, has been quite different. What I was talking about there [in the newsletter] and not everyone was saying this, was more and more evidence that the Netanyahu government is aiming to build settlements, at least in the northern part of Gaza. For now, there are no settlements yet, there are no outposts yet. But Israel is building the infrastructure – the roads and many other elements – to potentially bring back settlements.
Now, you are going to have 50,0000 Israelis suddenly moving to Gaza in the next week. But it will have, potentially, in the next 6 or 12 months, small outposts with radical Jewish Israeli settlers living in Gaza. So, when I was talking about there was partly that. The other thing briefly was that Israel has essentially destroyed Gaza. Gaza no longer exists, that is, life is not possible there. It doesn’t mean that Gazans did not live in Gaza – they do. But no one is going to seriously rebuild Gaza. It’s over.
The fear that I have and many other people who write about this, including, obviously, Palestinians, is that the long-term future for Gaza, for Palestinians there, is indefinite “tent cities”. Yes, maybe some buildings at some point will be rebuild. Let’s hope that they are. But the long-term future there is incredibly dark. There are many areas walled off almost in the form of a concentration camp.
How do you see the future of the rest of the population under Israeli domination in the West Bank and East Jerusalem?
I feel very pessimistic. I was just there recently, in fact, for work. I’ve not been there for a few years. The reality is that there are roughly 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank. Since October 7 – this was happening before, but has accelerated since – there is a growing push to physically remove Palestinians from their villages.
So, there are dozens of relatively small but significant Bedouin villages and others there are being ethnically cleansed. That's been happening since October 7, in the last 13 months. People leave, and that’s not by choice. They have no choice, then they become refugees in their own country. There’s nowhere else to go.
The long-term plan of Israel in the West Bank is to have 1 to 2 million settlers, if not more. The plan is to have as few Palestinians as possible.
What to do with them?
So, what do you do with them? Well, you potentially make their lives so unbearable that they want to live, they try to go to Egypt or Jordan or somewhere else.
This, of course, is the plan that has been expressed by senior Israeli government ministers, that Palestinians will be given a choice. “You can stay here and live under Israeli rule forever or if you choose to resist or fight, we will kill you or deport you.” This is the future.
The future is not written, but what people I spoke to in the West Bank fear is that what happens to Gaza now is going to happen to the West Bank. In my book “The Palestine Laboratory”, I didn’t predict October 7, I’m not saying I did. But in the end of that book, I talk about the fear that I had that there would be some major event – a war, an attack, which ended up being October 7 – that would give a “justification” for Israel to commit another mass ethnic cleansing.
That’s exactly what happened in Gaza, and that’s increasingly what’s happening in the West Bank: a massive increase in the killing of Palestinian civilians, including children in the last 13 months. The West Bank, I think, will be increasingly isolated.
I fear with the new US administration coming in January. For example, the new US ambassador for Israel, Mike Huckabee, said he thinks Palestinians aren’t even real people. I mean, this is the level of racism and dehumanization we are dealing with.
So, again, without outside pressure from other countries – not the US – I’m talking about the UE, nations in the Global South, putting pressure on Israel, sanctions, boycotts, the situation will not change. There needs to be some kind of action by other nations, including Brazil.
Does it bother the Israeli population that they are seen as pariahs?
I think it bothers them. But Israel has faced no consequences for its actions, for literally ever. So, yes, I don’t think Israeli Jews like the fact that many people in the world hate them and what they stand for, but it allows the majority of Israelis to see themselves as eternal victims.
“We are the eternal victims, regardless of what we are doing in Gaza. We are the victims, we are the biggest victims in history, and we're always going to be victims.”
So, it’s a weird contradiction. On the one hand, we are victims, so they say; on the other hand, we are the most powerful military in the Middle East and one of the most powerful countries in the world. We can’t be both.
Edited by: Nicolau Soares
