The Palestine Laboratory – EP 1

Al Jazeera (2025)

Film Review

This documentary is based on Antony Lowenstein’s book Palestinian Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World (2023). He narrates the film.

Israel is a world leader in the production of drones, missiles, tanks and surveillance technology. Despite their tiny population, they’re the world’s 9th largest weapon maker.

Every year they sell $13 billion worth of surveillance technology every year. They use extensive surveillance technology to monitor the movement of Palestinians, reducing the need for checkpoints and fractious interactions with the IDF.

Hebron in the West Bank is the main testing ground for so-called frictionless technology. There the IDF installs rooftop cameras (with iris scan capability) on nearly every building. All are linked to predictive policing AI to look for “threatening behavior,” ie participating in human right activities. Microsoft’s Wolfpack AI collects data, with Red Wolf AI linking the data to a central room database tracking all Palestinians and Blue Wolf transmits the data to IDF phones.

Israel has also installed remotely controlled AI enabled check points with the ability to fire bullets, tear gas and stun grenades.

A private company supported by the IDF markets this surveillance technology to prion and refugee camps around the world, in the hope of normalizing “predictive policing.”*

In addition to fixed surveillance cameras, Israel also uses surveillance drones and taps phones and social media accounts of all Palestinians, Israel provides all their phone an Internet services. The Israeli government also markets their surveillance and predator drones worldwide, as well as their AI drones capable of gunfire. Like Wolfpack AI, all were pretested in Gaza and/or Ukraine.

Israel also has the ability to infect phones remotely anywhere in the world with Pegasus spy software. Over fifty thousand phones worldwide have been infected with it.

Between 1965 and 2007, the IDF occupied Gaza as well as the Wet Bank. In 2007, the Israeli military officially withdrew from Gaza but retained control of Gazan Paletinians population by restricting food, water, energy and medical supplies allowed to enter the strip and introducing a comprehensive surveillance regime.

Like Lowenstein, commentators acquainted with Israel’s vast surveillance capability are baffled by the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack that obviously took years to plan.

Google and Amazon built the cloud services Israel employs to store data on the Palestinian population. When Lowenstein questioned Google about their participation in Israeli genocide, they bragged it would put them “first in line” for contracts with bigger countries.