HOW ISRAEL COMMODIFIES MASS KILLING THROUGH ITS “PALESTINE LABORATORY”

Israel is “battle-testing” its military equipment on Palestinians — and selling it abroad.

FOR MORE THAN two months, the Israeli military has waged a scorched-earth campaign against Gaza, and the death toll has risen to over 18,000 Palestinians, including more than 7,000 children. Meanwhile, in the occupied West Bank, violent Israeli government-armed and funded settlers continue their violent campaign to purge Palestinians from their homes as the Israel Defense Forces lay siege to Jenin and other cities.

This week on Intercepted, Jeremy Scahill discusses the dystopian game show that Israel is subjecting Palestinians to in Gaza, kettling them into an ever-shrinking killing cage. While the scope of the war against Gaza is unprecedented, it has been preceded by a decadeslong cycle of regular Israeli ground and air attacks against the Palestinians of both Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Independent journalist Antony Loewenstein discusses his groundbreaking new bookOpens in a new tab, “The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World.” For two decades, Loewenstein, a co-founder of Declassified Australia, has reported on Gaza, the occupied West Bank, and Israel, having lived in East Jerusalem for several years. Loewenstein breaks down how Israel markets its defense and intelligence technology to nations across the world, boasting of how it has been “battle-tested” against the Palestinians. He also discusses the weaponization of accusations of antisemitism against critics of Israeli policies and wars and the formal efforts in the U.S., Germany, and elsewhere to categorize opposition to Zionism as antisemitism.

This is the last episode of 2023. Thank you for listening this year. We will be back with more episodes in 2024.

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted.

Welcome to Intercepted. I’m Jeremy Scahill.

The events of the past week or so should obliterate any doubt that the war against the Palestinians of Gaza is a joint U.S.-Israeli operation. Last Friday, as the Biden administration stood alone among all of the nations of the world in vetoing a U.N. Security Council resolution that called for an immediate ceasefire, Secretary of State Antony Blinken was busy circumventing U.S. Congressional review to ram through the approval of what he said was an emergency sale of more than 13,000 tank rounds to Israel.

Now, it’s not a shock that the United States is sending weapons to Israel, but remember that over the past month or more, Antony Blinken has been zipping across the Middle East, he’s been appearing on scores of television networks, in a sort of PR tour that is aimed at selling the world this notion that the Biden administration is deeply concerned about the fate of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents. And he said — just as the ceasefire was ending earlier this month and Israel resumed its scorched earth campaign — Blinken said that the U.S. had gotten assurances from Israel that they’re going to try a little bit harder not to kill so many civilians.

So, at the same time that you have Blinken saying these things, and you have the United States vetoing the call supported by a vast majority of nations in the world for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza… And, by the way, this was an extraordinary move on the part of the U.N. Secretary General, who invoked a seldom-used rule at the U.N. to try to demand that this ceasefire be imposed on Israel, and it was the United States standing alone that vetoes it. You have Blinken, though, at the same time saying, oh, but, actually, we’ve been telling Israel to tone it down a bit in the mass killing. And you have Blinken saying, oh, we care so much about Palestinian lives. And then they’re ramming through an emergency transfer of tank rounds to Israel.

So, these events, just of the past week or so alone, should decisively flush all of those platitudes that Blinken and other U.S. officials have been offering about concern for Palestinian lives, it should just flushed into a swirling pool of blood…

https://theintercept.com/2023/12/13/intercepted-podcast-israel-palestine-military-equipment/

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