Antony Loewenstein

Apartheid is just a speed bump on the way toward a higher share price.

. Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to US Secretary of State Colin Powell, declared in 2021 that Israel might not exist in twenty years’ time because it is a “strategic liability of the first order for the United States” and becoming an “apartheid state.”

Israel’s Palestine laboratory thrives on global disruption and violence.

Zionism was a hothouse flower grown from European nationalism, anti-Semitism and colonialism,” he wrote in 1984, “while Palestinian nationalism derived from the great wave of Arab and Islamic anti-colonial sentiment, has since 1967, though tinged with retrogressive religious sentiment, been located within the mainstream of secular post-imperialistthought.

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.”

Cashing in on the IDF brand has successfully led to Israeli security companies being some of the most successful in the world. The Palestine laboratory is a signature Israeli selling point.

The EU never stopped working with Israeli companies despite the country’s occupation, but his comments were instructive. “Europe must decide if it wants to live and prosper or wither and disappear,” he said. “I see you’re shocked because I’m not being politically correct … We’re part of the European culture. Europe ends in Israel. East of Israel, there’s no more Europe.”

Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Greg Grandin argues in his acclaimed 2006 book, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Making of an Imperial Republic, that Washington has traditionally viewed Latin America as a “workshop or a training ground, where the United States could regroup during periods of retrenchment” and test new ways of controlling its neighbors.12 Palestine is Israel’s workshop, where an occupied nation on its doorstep provides millions of subju-gated people as a laboratory for the most precise and successful methods of domination.

Israel’s defense industry is amoral because that’s how it grows. It will sell to anyone except for official enemies like North Korea, Iran, or Syria.

Israeli military establishment doesn’t care that its tools of surveillance and death are ubiquitous across the globe, even though they “knew very well the risks of selling such intrusive equipment to dubious regimes.” Israel “incubates arms dealers, security contractors and technological wizards, worships them and turns them into untouchable heroes for the homeland.”