 I'm Peter Chrono and I've known Anthony for a while and I understand that he's written a book. It relates to the nature of surveillance in our society and because he has a speciality with Israel, he has done an incredible book which I've just finished reading which I would commend to everybody here. It's not only on surveillance, it's on war and weaponry and also surveillance particularly. The first thing I'd like to do is to point out that there is an empty chair here on the stage. That empty chair is meant to represent someone who's missing today, that's Julie Nassange, who is in the clink in London as we all know, detained on the whim of the British government and the Americans with not enough pressure from Australia. Our hopes keep getting raised that he's about to be released but now we just don't know. So that's what that chair represents in case anyone's wondering why we've left it there. Now Sydney Penn, the Penn Group, which is a literary freedom of expression group, wants to make a statement and I'd like to invite Claudia up onto the stage and I'll give you this mic. Thanks Peter. I mean you've sort of said it all really just that it's a Penn tradition to have an empty chair at events like this and the person in the empty chair is an imprisoned writer or publisher or poet and this time round it's of course Julie Nassange and in the words of his father, John Shipton, he is really just a slow motion murder happening before our eyes. So we just like to call on the US government to drop the charges against Julian and for the Australian government to bring him home. In the words of our own PM, this whole thing needs to be brought to a conclusion. Anthony Lowenstein is a many skilled person. He's a writer, he's a journalist and he's a filmmaker. He's written, he tells me nine books, which I've got to say I haven't read them all. So, you know, bad cross on my score. But he's written on a broad group of issues, Drug Wars, which was a terrific book. The War Against Drugs, Disaster Capitalism, which was a terrific book. I'd commend you to have a look at some of his books. They are a genre, a book in Australia that is all too rare. And I think that they're the sort of books that we presume are written in New York and Washington and London, but boy there's an Australian who's doing those sort of tropics here and I really commend you to them. He's also written a lot about his own impersonal experience with Israel. I don't know, people may have seen the Good Weekend Magazine article on The Shwells last week. You know, a very heartfelt, very terrific story to know about Anthony and his connections to Israel. So, I'd commend you to pursue that as well. It's online. Now, Anthony's current book about to be released this month is the Palestine Laboratory. And it's a deep dive into the technologies of weapons and surveillance that Israel has become a master at. So, I guess the first question for Anthony today is to ask, what's this book all about and why have you written it now? Let me first start off by thanking everyone for being here today. It's cold, but it's going to be an amazing day. And I'm really wrapped that so many people have come. And I also wanted to start off by acknowledging traditional learners of the land on which we are here today and paying my respects to their elders past, present and emerging. And to thank Peter for doing it as well. So, thank you. No worries, Peter. Why this book? Well, I've been writing about Israel and Palestine for close to 20 years. And I've been visiting there since 2005. Every three or four years, I've been going there reporting from Israel, from Palestine, from the West Bank, from Gaza. From 2016 to 2020, I was living there with my partner and our young child in East Jerusalem. And I think one of the things that struck me, although I'd thought about this before, living there, was looking for a way to explain what was happening in Palestine that wasn't just happening on the ground. In other words, so many conflicts around the world are geographically based in that space. So, for example, I was living in 2015 with my partner Ali in South Sudan. What's happening in South Sudan is horrific, but it's centered in that country. What's happening in Palestine doesn't stay there. Essentially, it's an exportable conflict and exportable technology, which is used by obviously, Israelis and Palestinians, but also countless other nations around the world. So, the idea behind the book was to try to find, not just a narrative, but an explanatory way of saying to a reader, what's happening in Palestine is going global. And what I mean by that is the use of incredible spyware, drones, facial recognition technologies. And what Israel is doing, obviously, it has a ready-made population under occupation that Palestinians have been occupied for, it's the longest occupation in modern times. And essentially, they're guinea pigs. And there are countless examples, and the book goes into that, about what those tools and technologies are, which have been used by Israel so successfully from their perspective, and why so many other nations want those tools and technology. So, in brief, it's about that. But also, it's also briefly about the concept of ethno-nationalism, that Israel is undeniably the most successful, I use that term loosely, ethno-nationalist state in the world. It is a proudly Jewish majority stage. It discriminates against non-Jews. And the law that that is from many other nations is increasingly clear. It's clear that nations like India and Hungary and others are close to Israel, not just because they're getting weapons. There's an ideological affinity between Israel and other ethno-nationalist states. And there's a reason why much of the global far-right, who traditionally, of course, hate Jews, neo-Nazis and others, you regularly find at those protests the Israeli flag. Which at first might seem crazy, like why would the far-right who don't like Jews like Israel, they don't like Jews. What they like is the concept of what Israel is doing. They like the idea of a proudly unapologetic, far-right government that says Jews are the best and everybody else will be a second class citizen. They want to create in their own territory a Christian ethno-nationalist state. So therefore, I have a quote in there from Richard Spencer, who was a so-called alt-right leader a few years ago, who said, I'm a white Zionist. And that term, I think, really goes to the heart of it here, that there is a sense that he doesn't like Jews at all, but he does like what Israel's doing to Muslims and Palestinians and he wants to create that as well in his deluded worldview in the US or somewhere else. One of the things I found in the book was that I didn't know about as much of the surveillance that you write about. I didn't know about the technologies, the companies, just the comprehensive nature of Israeli companies and what they're doing and the size of the companies. That's one of the largest exporters of this sort of technology in the world. Can you run through a couple of good solid meat and veg examples of the sorts of technology you were talking about? Look, on the one hand, it is strange, right, that a country which is tiny really on the global perspective is now the 10th biggest arms exporter in the world. In terms of spyware, spyware meaning hacking tools, people's ability to about listen to your everything in your phone, Israel has a top two or three companies. The most famous example which I go into detail in the book is NSO Group's Pegasus, which you may have heard of some of you here. Pegasus essentially is a tool where if your phone is hacked by this tool, everything on your phone is taken, literally everything. So photos, text, emails, nothing is secured, regardless of whether you think you might use signal and that keeps you secure as an app. Nothing is protected if your phone is compromised. And increasingly the technology is so sophisticated that it can take control of your phone, instead of your camera and your microphone and your phone. So essentially it becomes a recording device against yourself. Without you knowing, there's no way to actually know unless there's a forensics done on your phone which most people of course can't afford. So NSO Group is one of the more infamous examples, but there are many, many others. It's worth saying here that so many of these companies, the people who are running them and developing them have come from the Israeli military because they've spent years in the so-called intelligence units of the IDF surveilling Palestinians. That's their day job. So every aspect of Palestinian life, where they go, who they're speaking to, who they're having sex with, all that is monitored by Israel. And there's lots and lots of examples, and I put some of those in the book, of Palestinians who have, for example, been cheating on their wife or maybe having a gay affair, whatever it may be. Israel discovers that through surveillance technology and therefore blackmails that person to say, unless you work for us, we're going to tell your wife or tell your father or whatever it may be. So those companies are part of that. Elbus is the most well-known Israeli defense company. It's the biggest in the country. And its work is everything from drones, which operate both in over Gaza, which operate by the EU across the Mediterranean. Elbert also has a lot of amazing surveillance towers across the U.S.-Mexico border. And that's in some ways, I think, one of the better examples of what the Palestine laboratory is, that the reason the U.S. wanted to have Israeli surveillance tech is because they saw how inverted commas as effective it was in Palestine. So yeah, there's some of the examples. There are many more. I discovered, to my amazement, that Israel exports drones to Russia and sells rifles to China. I mean, there's basically... As far as we're aware, there's literally, you can count on one hand, nations that Israel won't sell to or hasn't sold to now. As far as I'm aware, they've never sold to St. North Korea. As far as we know. Interestingly enough, they also sell to Australia. So I got going. I picked one of the technologies in your book and decided to do a bit of googly. And I popped Celebrite. And you can talk about Celebrite in a minute. But what I found is this company allows your phone to be opened up and downloaded the entire data, red. So that'll be all your geolocations for the last time until you erase them. Without you knowing it. Absolutely. If you hand over your phone at the airport, they can plug it in and download the contents if they use Celebrite. So I just thought, I wonder who uses Celebrite in Australia? Popped it into Google. Found Oldtender, the Australian contracts... We've got them in the contracts page. 120 contracts to Celebrite over the past 10 years. Most of them are the Defence Department. The Defence Department, downloading mobile phones. The AFP. Home Affairs, obviously. That's ASIO. And Services Australia. Services Australia. It helps them track down sole parents who are having their partner live in their place. And I actually found a case where it was used for that. They're using Celebrite. The Brittany Higgins case in Canary. Celebrite. It's drag and sell right. There's another case up in Toowoomba at the moment. People may have seen a rape case, a alleged rape case. The alleged victim handed over her phone to a police who downloaded the entire contents of the victim's phone. This is not the alleged rapist of the alleged victim's phone. The alleged rapist then sought access to it and got access to it. And on that phone was a copy of the forensic report done after her alleged rape. So we've got a company that has fine tuned its abilities in the Gaza Strip. Being used to the detriment of rape victims in Australia. So Celebrite, are they a moral company? Very moral. The most moral. But what's so interesting about those examples and there are literally millions of others is that it's almost like these companies are politicised. Because most people would have no idea the Australian government would know of course but most people had no idea that Company X from Israel how did they get that experience? It wasn't just done in a lab. In an actual scientific lab it was done literally in Palestine. This is how it works. So the deep politicised nature of how so many countries, I mean what I say in the book is over 130 countries in the world would be used a form of Israeli defence equipment surveillance tech or repressive tech. Now that's the majority of countries in the world by far. Democracies and dictatorships. There's very few countries that haven't. Some people would have everything from more so called benign weapons like guns, not that guns can't do damage but guns, other countries have got drones spyware. There's a range of technologies but this gives Israel an insurance policy in a way, politically because there are so called smarter people in Israel realise that a lot of people in the world don't like the occupation. No kidding. However, if you're selling huge amounts of surveillance tech to nations that are desperate for it the thinking within Israel in these defence circles are well they're less likely to want to criticise us when it really matters. And although yes, if you see the UN vote every six months the vast bulk of the world supports Palestine. There's six countries on one side Australia, Palau, Micronesia the US and Israel and then the rest of the world. So yes, that is certainly on the face of it seems like Israel is so isolated but actually they're not. Not isolated at all. There is no accountability in the US, I don't know if I use the word in the book, I think I do. It's impunity. Impunity is the issue here that you can as a state commit gross human rights abuses against your own population Palestinians and also sell that technology and one of the things that is so gross about this is that often the marketing is done to show how effective it's been in say Gaza or in say the West Bank or battle tested. And that's often said that way, I haven't got photos in the book sadly, but people can find this stuff online, there are lots and lots of examples of Israeli companies that have operated either surveillance technology or deadly weapons in Palestine saying how effective it was and therefore country acts or country wise should buy it. That's happening at arms fairs in the capital in a lot of Israeli surveillance firms are selling their stuff here amongst elsewhere, yeah. Try to explain why Israel is able to get free pass. I mean is it that there's a self-supporting outpost of the US in the Middle East? Is it a geopolitical thing that's going on that gives them that free pass? What is it? Look that is one of them and therefore many Western states that are US allies content to be very good friends with Israel, Australia much of Europe and elsewhere so that's part of it. I think it's more than that, I think there are for example nations that are colonial states themselves have an affinity I do like to be like, Australia wouldn't say that obviously but I think that definitely is part of it so Canada, New Zealand Australia and others I think have a US have an affinity and I think that's part of it I think there's also to me no doubt that the Holocaust does play a part here Holocaust was decades ago it's history but I think for a lot of states there is still this almost I think underlying belief that it's inappropriate to be too critical of Israel as a Jewish majority state because of what happened to the Jews in World War II that's also a factor I think and I think a lot of it has been worse than since 9-11 9-11, I mean this was happening for decades but 9-11 has really accelerated these trends as they say in the book the so-called US lead war on terror after 9-11, the playbook was written by Israel decades before America didn't make this up after 9-11, this came so much of it, not just the behavior of the US after 9-11 but the rhetoric, the rhetoric against Muslims and terrorists all that language Israel had been using that for decades so the US didn't wholly copy it but it was deeply inspired by it to the point where in the last 20 years you have all these American military officers and police forces going to Israel for training Do you think that the degree of secrecy that exists around the weapons surveillance industry allows for the preservation of the type of government that exists in Israel Do you think that that national security state, deep state that exists in Israel intentionally must keep that type of government in power to keep doing service to the rest of the world's repressive regimes? Yes, is the short answer but the slightly longer answer is that to me one of the key ways that Israel has maintained its dominance both within its own borders and beyond for so long is because there's actually remarkably little dissent within Israel itself, it's actually quite interesting, obviously there are people who are critical not saying there are not, there are but in general, this is one small example, in the last few months many people here will have seen these mass protests across Israel against the Netanyahu's government attempt to reform, so to speak the Supreme Court and what that might mean for democracy, okay, but firstly, democracy for whom? There are virtually no Palestinians protesting there are a handful of very small percentage of Israeli Jewish leftists who protest and I salute them for doing so who are critical, who talk about while the occupation continues there can never be true democracy but the vast vast majority of Israeli Jewish people don't see it that way, for them it's maintaining that dominance of a Jewish majority democracy, so-called democracy and they've able to sustain that for so long because AU had Jewish diaspora support almost uncritically for decades, yes the US is a key ally, but also the US and Israel have a, which I know we might talk about, have a curious relationship they're friends, but they also don't trust each other, weirdly so yeah, I mean what they mean by that is that, yes they're both selling each other huge amounts of technology and weapons and America provides shelter to Israel and many international forums including the UN, but America and Israel are both massively spying on each other, hugely spying on each other, so for example the latest figures that I had seen in the writing of this book was that every day in the NSA there are at least 400 Americans their job is to spy on Israel at least, and if we rest assured in the, it's happening the other way around as well, so they're good friends, they're good friends who don't really entirely trust each other 100% so they, you know, you watch your enemy but you watch your friends closely? Absolutely so with the United States critical of Israel and many forums often makes some words about settlements, doesn't do a lot, but makes words about settlements, makes press conferences statements obviously for the United States Israel is an essential part of the United States presence as an imperial power in the world, now given that that imperial power is being challenged by Russia and China Israel remains a firm part of supporting America's effort, so what are the prospects for democracy and openness in Israel as a result of its position with the US? In the short to medium term, close to zero and I say that because although of course history's, you know, the future's not written and that's always the caveat but Israel has generally been on a certain trajectory for quite a while governments come and go prime ministers change, all that's true but I think a lot of people in the west who talk about this issue think Netanyahu is this crazy extremist he's got a government full of extremists all that's true but it's kind of not really the problem in other words Netanyahu here is not the problem, he's terrible he's racist, he's an enabler of occupation all that's undeniably correct but the last government when he was a prime minister in fact there was more violence against Palestinians in that year, my point being that there are trends here to massively continue to expand settlements, at the moment there are roughly 750,000 jury settlers in occupied territory so a so called two state solution is over, I mean you could argue it was never going to happen but now that window is very much closed it is currently a one state so called solution but it's an apartheid state and there are government ministers who openly talk about wanting one or two million settlers and I think it's very conceivable in years to come unless there is some kind of unpredictable war or something that happens at impossible to predict I would not be surprised if you start seeing because Israel is finding it harder and harder to get Jews to move to the West Bank, there's only so many people around the world who are willing to move to areas which are at times quite dangerous but I do think you will find evangelical Christians who are dying to go there and in fact a lot of Israelis are increasingly saying that ones who support the occupation in the status quo so liberal Jews in America are increasingly squeamish about what's happening, who cares in other words for decades they were the backbone of support in the US for Israel but if they melt away they're more critical now these young Jews which is increasingly true around designers to whatever it may be this will be replaced by evangelical support and that doesn't really make much of a difference frankly whether it's Joe Biden in the White House or Donald Trump, Trump accelerated what was already happening he was terrible to be sure but you think Biden's done anything differently I mean yes as you said they now and then put out a statement saying we very much urge all parties to come together and please don't build settlements and Israel says screw you we'll keep building them now and again what is just finally really concerning is that Palestinians have on one level fewer and fewer friends in civil society globally support for Palestine has never been high that is undeniably true you had a poll this year Gallup poll in the US which found for the first time ever that a majority of Democratic voters in America supported Palestinians more than Israelis that's significant now it's not reflected so far in Joe Biden's policies but there is a shift going on in the US there's no doubt about that including in the Jewish community but globally the US is mostly on Israel's side the EU puts out pressure releases and express deep concern about settlements and does nothing because the EU is Israel's biggest trading partner the Arab countries are increasingly in bed with Israel because they're desperate for Israeli surveillance technology so where is this at the moment at least international pressure coming from if it's not civil society I don't see it at the moment I'm not saying can that happen but at the moment it's not happening it's interesting that you say that civil society is coming around war to the Palestinian cause and if we had real democracy then perhaps we'd have policies that reflect that you've got the Israeli surveillance state and it's exported surveillance technology being used to keep that in place to keep democracy the functioning of democracy down I mean the low polls show us that most of the majority of Australians don't want to be in the US alliance don't want to go to war with China they want to be a allied armed neutral country I mean all of these things democracy if it worked would allow now the technology Israel's exporting obviously it's used in the West Bank and Palestine but clearly the attractions must be enormous to use that in Western democracies hugely and one of the things that I guess I wasn't easily shocked but I was a bit shocked in the writing and researching of this book was how ubiquitous Israeli surveillance tech and weapons are around the world I mean as I said there are so many examples and I won't bore you with all with them but literally if you think of the worst crimes and conflicts in the last 50 years pretty much every single one and again the US of course was there as well I'm not excusing them by the way the world's biggest arms deal about 40% of the world's weapons are exported from the US the US is still king let's be clear on that Israel's only 10th but America's a bit bigger and let's not forget as I say in the book that the US used Iraq and Afghanistan also as a testing ground for weapons and in fact the US and other nations are using the current war on Ukraine also as a testing ground for weapons that's been made very clear by a number of nations they're testing various, this is obviously mostly on the Ukrainian, the weapons are giving to Ukraine. So Israel's testing ground is different from all that war because it's more about repression and pressurizing and removing an unwanted population compared to America's experience which is as we know full on invasions and wars more often it is but that defence equipment and that surveillance tech always comes home and you see this in the US in the last two decades although it existed before 9-11 of US police forces buying huge amounts of military grade defence equipment spyware including from Israel now many American police forces probably didn't need necessarily that technology to be awful and racist and discriminatory of course they didn't need to go to Israel to get training to be racist there was racism obviously long before that but the ubiquitous nature of Israeli surveillance technology I mean they were selling weapons to Rwanda during the genocide they were selling weapons and spyware to the Myanmar regime when they were committing a genocide I mean the list goes on and on and on and again other countries have done that too it's not just Israeli US again being king it's pretty hard then to make an argument as Israel and its supporters do that we are this thriving democracy in the heart of the Middle East I mean they are exporting the worst forms of repression around the world but again with the allure that they have in Nevada commerce controlled Palestinian so successfully for so long that other countries are desperate for that technology to repress their own people so just briefly I mean Mexico for example this Mexico is the biggest user of Israeli spyware by far this is Mexico both in so called right wing governments and the current left wing government by far the current government denies it but it's bullshit they're using it and there's evidence for that is that cracking down on the drug wall well initially that exactly it was bought in the mid around 2011 2012 and the whole story I went boy with it now but if you guys remember when that crazy story remember Sean Penn ended up going to sort of have a meeting with El Chapo there was a key reason why El Chapo was captured because their phones had been hacked by Israeli spyware it's kind of a crazy story but Mexico is obsessed with this technology to go after dissidents, human rights workers all sorts of people so Mexico's appeal for Israel is not that it has to become an ethno-national state it just has lots of problems with drugs and repression for sure but there are other countries like India and I think it's important to mention that India is now the world's biggest country it's overtaking China it is a self-described democracy but frankly, arguably not it has a fundamentalist government that is increasingly keen to and there's key members of that government who are talking about genocide against Muslims it's a key ally of Australia the US and others because it's not China and yet Israel and India are incredibly close to each other at the moment when Modi and Netanyahu have there's a real bromance going on there's shots of them kind of waving their feet in the water on beaches it is crazy but not surprising in a way because there is an ideological affinity it's very much to me like I think the best comparison is Israel and apartheid South Africa who are very very close they're inspiring each other so India doesn't need Israel to be repressive but it's clear that Indian officials are openly saying we admire what you're doing in the West Bank we want to do something similar in Kashmir and in fact that's what India is increasingly doing they are bringing more and more Hindus to settle Muslim areas in Kashmir to dilute the Muslim majority populations now it's probably worse than for the Uighurs well I mean look there are so and I talk actually about China you don't have to get into it if you don't want but about the Chinese repression situation as well that there is I think in the West and only very recently this deep concern about Chinese repression internally and externally the argument that for all the reasons that people here will know go into it but what I say in the book is a few things briefly one until very very recently Western countries were going to Xinjiang to get advice from China how to fight a war on terror that only changed about four or five years ago A and B if we're worried if I say we if the West or certain people in the West are concerned about China exporting which they are sometimes doing now their own repressive surveillance technology Israel is exporting way way more of it not even a comparison and yet there's not much outrage unless I've missed it about Israeli repressive tech but there is a lot of I'd say faux fear about Chinese repression I'm not saying there's not repression in China there is but I'm saying that there's much more concern expressed about what they're doing globally than what Israel is the West certainly knows how to select its enemies with the media's role here in covering these sorts of technologies and industries that Israel promotes weapons and surveillance technology the media coverage doesn't really focus on that it focus on the brutalities and we can't deny we see a fair bit of bombings and repression in Palestine Gaza and West Bank is that a net positive or a net negative for Israel in that sort of coverage does it actually affect them negatively or is it a positive I have a chapter in the book all about social media because I think actually social media has fundamentally changed the game here and what I mean by that is that for decades and decades with some exceptions it was very rare to read a Palestinian voice in the media and I say the media Australia, US, UK of course they're exceptions obviously but in general and there was a reason why many of those states supported Israel what's happened in the last 15 years and this I think very much goes along the line of explaining why many western states public opinion wise has shifted it's much more difficult to censor or challenge a Palestinian in Palestine saying what's happening to them on Instagram, on Facebook, on Twitter it's there, you can deny the reality but it is happening and people are seeing that all over the world, Gaza's being bombed there are people literally live tweeting it, you know it's Palestinians I'm talking about and that's important because Israel increasingly cannot control that narrative and what they're doing to challenge that as I go in detail in the book is to put massive pressure on these social media companies, Palestinian accounts are regularly censored or removed their accounts are often shadow banned which means that often they're not you wouldn't see them on your feed if you use Facebook or Instagram or Twitter whatever your social media drug is of choice and the impact of that I think is almost I would say slightly desperate but it's not entirely I understand why Israel would be doing that because they're not controlling the narrative anymore as much as they did I'm not minimising the fact that in general I think much of our media is still not blindly pro-Israel but scared of being too critical and we haven't yet reached our South Africa moment what I mean by that is that I'm sure most people here will know but for decades and decades and decades this is mostly before my time but in general having wrote a lot about it in the book yes there was obviously anti-apartheid movement absolutely which was key in ending that regime but in terms of a leadership government level many many countries supported South Africa you know until quite late in the piece including of course Israel but at some point there was a it didn't happen one day but there was a point where there was a almost like a tipping point right where there was a sense that South Africa was almost given a choice of sorts and as I often say Israel won't wake up one day and say Jesus occupation is pretty terrible we better give it up it's not going to happen that way and only will happen with massive in my view economic pressure boycotts, sanctions, divestment it's the only way and that system is not perfect either and there is a BDS movement which is growing it's relatively small hasn't had massive practical impact on Israel but Israel's economy is doing relatively well but that could change and you have now I don't want to exaggerate the importance of this but there are now at least some people in the US Congress 10, 11 people who do talk about curtailing military aid to Israel and it's still pretty piss weak but it's something I mean having worked at the ABC I've seen the reluctance to cover all sorts of issues to do with Israel the fear of the Jewish lobby is palpable in the corridors of the ABC and I know that the bar to get stories on that done is much, much higher than it is to do a negative story about China so is the used term earlier, ethno-nationalism and I'm not quite sure I fully understand it is that just fascist? Well yes that's certainly fascist I wouldn't want to live under it fascist or ethno-nationalist regime What's the difference for you because you were saying that Israel is changing and a lot of right wing Christians may be moving in so that's kind of changing that mix a bit isn't it? It's changing the mix but a lot of powerful evangelicals have no issue at least until the second coming of Christ with a Jewish majority state when you have now and have for a number of years often evangelicals going to the West Bank and helping settlers in their wineries I mean you can book those trips now if you're so designed to want to do so What I guess I mean by ethno-nationalism I also didn't come up with that term but ethno-nationalism essentially would mean and Israel as that is the premier global example of this is a regime or ideology which preferences one people over another which is fascist I could use fascist but I prefer ethno-nationalism because And the nationalism part refers to what the militaristic lack of the crushing of opposition Yes well I mean Israel is very proudly in their perspective nationalistic state not unique to Israel it's always part of the US but there's not many other countries on the planet at the moment that are proudly discriminated against other people based on what I would call just a race I'm not saying it's not massive discrimination unless the country is around the world of course there are but what you see Israel doing and wanting to export as I said when Israel is exporting technology and surveillance that's obviously a financial aspect and also try that as I said before an insurance policy but when you're exporting the idea of ethno-nationalism to others you're saying to some extent what is possible what you can get away with because no one's stopping Israel and India for example under Modi is to me the most concerning example at the moment in the world of another country which is trying to go down a very similar path a country which by the way used to be much more pro-Palestinian and has become now very very pro-Israel if you can call it that and also the allure of some people to ethno-nationalism my fear is going to be one of the challenges of this century in many nations how ironic the descendants of the Warsaw ghetto and elsewhere are now the proud occupants waving the banner for ethno-nationalism selling repressive technologies around the world to 130 odd countries and have built themselves basically they've walled themselves into a ghetto I mean they don't obviously call it that but I mean that's essentially what it is there is a pretty much various walls literal walls around most of the Israel's border which of course Israel's never accepted those borders but nonetheless the borders that most of us would see on a map with your Jewish heritage though is this an issue that gets debated within the community this idea that the descendants of the ghettos are now creating their own Gaza Strip as a ghetto like how does this get worked out at the breakfast table it's normally we wait till dinner to have those conversations but look this is something obviously my good weekend piece last weekend and I've written about this a lot over the years this is to me one of the profound moral failings of my people so to speak the Jewish people over the last 100 years it is a complete moral collapse that you have far far too many Jews still I would say probably the majority of Jews around 14 million Jews in the world now give or take half roughly in Israel, half roughly in the US and obviously in various other parts but it's mostly mostly divided between two nations in the world Israel and the US that yes there's a growing Jewish descent all that's true mostly outside of Israel in fact Israeli Jewish populations becoming much more right wing sadly but I have obviously spent 20 years obviously not all my work has been about this issue but amongst others and I'm not the only Jewish person by any means saying this and writing about it there are many others of basically trying to shame the Jewish establishment critique them embarrass them outrage them piss them off to say to the wider community we in the community are complicit we are complicit with what's going on when I say we the Jewish community establishment leadership is complicit in what is going on over there it's not solely happening because a Jewish leader lives and breathes in Sydney obviously but they are central to that support and they're central to putting endless amounts of pressure on politicians and journalists I mean as some people he may know and those who don't this may open your eyes that Israel lobby groups are some of the biggest spenders on free trips to Israel for journalists and politicians happens all the time there was a short break during COVID it's been going on for decades and decades and that is not the only way but a key way that so-called Israel support this is Labour and Liberal this is journalists across the political board from what we call Naena the Herald the Age the Murdoch Press this is how this is how I guess I would say how you manufacture consent because most of those journalists and politicians who are going there they come back like weird robots it's like embedding journalists in the military they cannot help but start to feel empathy for the people who are being hospitable however and I agree with that and I think there is a journalist who only goes to a war zone and only embeds in say Afghanistan or Iraq and doesn't by the way haven't to speak to many Iraqis or Afghans is not a journalist is a politician or a journalist and you spend literally five minutes in Palestine and a lot more in Israel itself you ain't a journalist go back to the hotel and have dinner with your hosts Fisk used to call this hotel journalism that's kind of what it is they have a great time in the hotels because they're being whined and dined they're being romanced incredible and as we know MPs are targeted I think it's a third of our current federal MPs have accepted free luxury trips overseas, one third and it's an interesting Peter and I for those who don't know are the co-founders of Declassified Australia a website you should all read and support and we've done a few stories about the issue of this particular one in the last years the countries that are getting the most trips from politicians and journalists US, Israel, Taiwan and I do think that explains a lot about a lot it explains a lot about how there has been this quite radical shift in the last years around obviously China Taiwan, the US alliance Israel and I think when you have all these people taking free trips who mostly by the way don't acknowledge it or talk about it in that way then it does clearly impact how are they doing politics or how they're writing about these issues and I think as a journalist myself I sort of think that I don't know as I said before I think anyone who takes a free trip there needs to be either a damn good reason to do it and if you don't spend more time in places that are not on the tour then you're not a journalist or a real politician and you should put it on your LinkedIn account as well because they don't tell many people I'll make this my last question to Anthony before we open up for a couple of questions I think we're about right on timing in terms of what non-Jews can do I think a lot of non-Jews are nervous about criticising Jews just as people you know at the moment very topically with the voice people are nervous about criticising Aboriginal people and that's quite a spectacular resignation from the ABC or stepping down from the ABC of an Aboriginal person at the moment now people don't feel that criticism can be made easily because they're continually being told they're anti-Semitic what's the answer there what is the answer to dealing with that the way I always answer this question because I get it quite a lot actually is that anti-Semitism obviously is real that might be an obvious thing to say but anti-Semitism does exist it is real actually it's getting worse real anti-Semitism, I'm not talking about a lot of pro-Israeli groups frame anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism which I don't think it is at all but I'm in actual Jew hatred it's actually getting worse in certain parts and that worries me as a Jewish person hasn't there been some effort to quantify a definition of anti-Semitism which would include being anti-Israeli foreign policy yeah well I mean this yeah there are attempts to try to put very clear boundaries about what is acceptable to discuss around Israel and Palestine it's called the AIHRA definition which many governments and universities and others are being encouraged or pressured to adopt so if you as a student or an individual are deemed to be too critical of Israel if you don't accept Israel's right to exist so to speak as a Jewish state then you're apparently beyond the pale and can be fine I mean I think it's crazy look I think what I often say to people around this issue is that expressing support for Palestinians or being critical of Israel doesn't make you anti-Semitic it's obvious to say that but it's important to be said there are lines that can be crossed as I said if one says all the Jews in the world are causing the problems or that Israel is the source of all the world's problems obviously that's bullshit and simply not true and that's probably anti-Semitic is anti-Semitic but one thing I found in my work over the years and this again even after my good weekend piece last weekend I've been literally overwhelmed with mostly positive there's been some charming nutters who have written to me mostly very Jews and non-Jews writing to me saying the non-Jews mostly saying we are often as you just said Peter wondering how do we talk about this issue we are pained about what's happening in Palestine we're not anti-Semitic I've got no indication of anyone who wrote to me as much as you can tell on an email was anti-Semitic at all and I said I said well raise your voice up there are lots of organisations you can be involved with you can go to rallies you can write letters you can speak about it you can encourage people to to vest boycott and sanction Israel there are ways to do things speak about it speak about it in your community your community meaning whoever you're with visit Palestine if you can afford that if you can travel there see what is happening with your own eyes there are ways to do things to I mean anti-Semitism has been weaponised and this to me is one of the most dangerous trends in the last few decades because if you weaponise anti-Semitism you diminish the real risk of actual anti-Semitism and one of the things I said in my Good Week End piece which very a number of people have written both to the paper and also to me being outraged and I said essentially that Israeli actions contribute to anti-Semitism it doesn't make it okay to be anti-Semitic obviously not but it's like saying after 9-11 and the US criminal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan there was a growth in anti-American sentiment no kidding doesn't even want to kill Americans everywhere but there was a sense that people were pissed off with what America was doing in those countries and elsewhere and there is undeniably a lot of people who feel incredibly angry with what Israel is doing and if Israel claims as it does to speak for all Jews in the world that's what Israel does we are the Jewish state for those who don't know I can go to Israel tomorrow if you let me in and within 2 or 3 months I would have a passport I could be a full citizen even if you were a black Jew from Africa well that could be trickier there has been a long history of a lot of racism about other Jews who are not white absolutely but in general if I go there tomorrow as a Jew my mother was Jewish I could be a citizen and a Palestinian who probably has far more connection to the land does not have that right at all so it's a kind of supremacy it's Jewish no it's proudly Jewish supremacy but supremacy based on skin tone so you kind of call it white supremacy well I mean and there is a reason why as I said before a lot of white supremacist groups love Israel there's a reason for that on the Facebook I know it sounds crazy but this is the love of ethno-nationalism wow so as I said it's not accidental that many of these far right rallies in the US in Australia, in Europe, in Germany Neo-Nazis are often waving the Israeli flag and that alliance has been far too little condemned by Israel which I think speaks volumes about the kind of friends that they want we'll see if the boys in their black shirts down in Melbourne start waving to the star of David that'll be interesting look we've come a bit of a journey here from your book and the sort of technology being made and it's been great talking I think we'll open it up to a few questions if that's okay, if you're happy to accept them we've got a roving mic so one thing with questions is that they're questions not speeches thank you if you went back to Israel in your context we'd say Jewish people around the world how many books like that are you regarded as a traitor well I think a lot of, well some obviously hard to quantify exactly how many think that, but yes there are definitely I got that in the last week after my Good Week end piece and I've been having it for 20 years that there are a number of Jewish people I mean I can't say how many people, minority vocal minority I would say who regard my politics on this issue as traitorous I'm accused of being a Nazi I'm accused of being an Arab lover somehow I don't know how that's a bad thing but apparently it is in other words I'm basically being traitorous to my own people because apparently in that deluded world view unless you are uncritically supportive I would say well you can be critical but you're anti-Zionist and anti-Zionist meaning that I don't believe in the concept of a Jewish state I believe Jews have the right to live in safety of course they do but the idea of a Jewish state is by definition discriminatory and I say the same thing by the way about a Muslim majority state or any state that discriminates against the majority population I mean it's not just because it's Israel India is a Hindu fundamentalist state that discriminates against Muslims I'm equally opposed to that but the attempt to try to smear or silence or criticize or quash critical Jewish voices I don't think really works it definitely has an impact on some people and I know I get messages regularly from people who say to me I can't speak about these Jewish people I can't speak about this with my husband with my wife with my kids and my husband on this question is such a deep and personal issue for some not all and finally on that point for a lot of Jewish people who are essentially secular not talking about religious Jews, secular Israel is their religion it's become their religion and how a lot of people feel about religion is you really can't criticize your religion so therefore if your religion is Israel or Zionism if you criticize that you've gone beyond the power basically I remember years ago I was told I'm only Jewish born well yeah I am Jewish born but in other words I sort of gave up that right apparently after I was born in other words I'm not committed to the Jewish community because I'm not sufficiently pro-Israel or loving the Jewish state enough whatever the deluded logic is so yes I'm accused of that and traitor is a mild word I've been accused of course we'll take a couple of more questions but we are running out of time so maybe one there and can we get one over here because we're all running late it's just funny do you have any idea why there's been so reporting about well about spyware used against welfare recipients in Australia apart from the Guardian it's very little good question I mean the short answer is I don't I don't know why I guess that is yeah why aren't journalists doing a better job well I don't know I mean some are just I don't think it's any particular conspiracy or anything I haven't spoken to particular journalists about that I know I know what Guardian stuff but I don't know I think there's probably for some people as I said before there is sometimes a reluctance to talk too much about these issues but I think for some people there just hasn't been a priority for them I guess but I don't know I haven't really got a particular reason beyond that I'm not sure I would ask the journalists to write about those issues I guess okay well there is one more question over there sorry it's going to be the last one everybody I think it's not brushing off afterwards but the event is running with late last mission things right I just wanted to say thank you for doing it from many points but in particular the mention of vocop divestment sanctions and since you're focusing on technology I understand that the company HP which we're all able to vocop when we're looking at our computer technology and our printers and things like this is this a useful tactic and are there any other technology companies that we as individuals can target and secondly of course you mentioned Israel not being accountable our politicians are not accountable either and it's up to us to make them accountable how can we best do this here at Australia well the second question, big question Jennifer how do you make politicians accountable I guess elect good one to be a star but I mean look I mean I'm a question of Israel and Palestine yeah I think still for a lot of politicians I'm talking about Labor, Liberal less so the Greens but Labor and Liberal particularly and there are exceptions in the Labor Party now some not enough Liberal Party on this issue is frankly a lost cause there is I think still ties back to what Peter was saying before I think there is still a real reluctance to be too critical of Israel being accused of anti-Semitism many of them have gone to Israel on free trips the so-called pro-Palestine lobby does some important work but nothing like the pro-Israel lobby and there's not really seen as a political price to support Israel that this isn't are you likely to lose your seat for supporting Israel no you're not I guess I think though the issue of Palestine as I've said today and others have said it too the issue of Palestine isn't just about Palestine it's a far bigger question not just about the technology which I'm writing about but the general issues that are happening there are relevant to many other subjects and I think there's something to be said for making these kinds of questions something that our politicians should think about in other words when they may be trying to get pre-selection or even running in a seat these issues should be on the agenda why aren't they? The first brief is your first point HP for those who don't know are deeply complicit in the occupation they're involved in the infrastructure of some of the elements of the technology that Israel uses in the West Bank definitely boycott them definitely I mean there are a few other companies here that are operating I mean most of the boycott divestment sanctions like there's not for example huge amounts of Israeli settler lying here you might find it if you're really desperate in some Jewish wineries but in general there's not massive you don't go to your local bottle shop and have a whole area Israeli settler lying thankfully in other countries you do so don't drink Israeli settler wine I've tried it for work wasn't very good just for research purposes we might limit it that I'm sorry we have run out of time