Best-selling journalist Antony Loewenstein trav­els across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, Papua New Guinea, the United States, Britain, Greece, and Australia to witness the reality of disaster capitalism. He discovers how companies such as G4S, Serco, and Halliburton cash in on or­ganized misery in a hidden world of privatized detention centers, militarized private security, aid profiteering, and destructive mining.

Disaster has become big business. Talking to immigrants stuck in limbo in Britain or visiting immigration centers in America, Loewenstein maps the secret networks formed to help cor­porations bleed what profits they can from economic crisis. He debates with Western contractors in Afghanistan, meets the locals in post-earthquake Haiti, and in Greece finds a country at the mercy of vulture profiteers. In Papua New Guinea, he sees a local commu­nity forced to rebel against predatory resource companies and NGOs.

What emerges through Loewenstein’s re­porting is a dark history of multinational corpo­rations that, with the aid of media and political elites, have grown more powerful than national governments. In the twenty-first century, the vulnerable have become the world’s most valu­able commodity. Disaster Capitalism is published by Verso in 2015 and in paperback in January 2017.

Profits_of_doom_cover_350Vulture capitalism has seen the corporation become more powerful than the state, and yet its work is often done by stealth, supported by political and media elites. The result is privatised wars and outsourced detention centres, mining companies pillaging precious land in developing countries and struggling nations invaded by NGOs and the corporate dollar. Best-selling journalist Antony Loewenstein travels to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, Papua New Guinea and across Australia to witness the reality of this largely hidden world of privatised detention centres, outsourced aid, destructive resource wars and militarized private security. Who is involved and why? Can it be stopped? What are the alternatives in a globalised world? Profits of Doom, published in 2013 and released in an updated edition in 2014, challenges the fundamentals of our unsustainable way of life and the money-making imperatives driving it. It is released in an updated edition in 2014.
forgodssakecover Four Australian thinkers come together to ask and answer the big questions, such as: What is the nature of the universe? Doesn't religion cause most of the conflict in the world? And Where do we find hope?   We are introduced to different belief systems – Judaism, Christianity, Islam – and to the argument that atheism, like organised religion, has its own compelling logic. And we gain insight into the life events that led each author to their current position.   Jane Caro flirted briefly with spiritual belief, inspired by 19th century literary heroines such as Elizabeth Gaskell and the Bronte sisters. Antony Loewenstein is proudly culturally, yet unconventionally, Jewish. Simon Smart is firmly and resolutely a Christian, but one who has had some of his most profound spiritual moments while surfing. Rachel Woodlock grew up in the alternative embrace of Baha'i belief but became entranced by its older parent religion, Islam.   Provocative, informative and passionately argued, For God's Sake, published in 2013, encourages us to accept religious differences, but to also challenge more vigorously the beliefs that create discord.  
After Zionism, published in 2012 and 2013 with co-editor Ahmed Moor, brings together some of the world s leading thinkers on the Middle East question to dissect the century-long conflict between Zionism and the Palestinians, and to explore possible forms of a one-state solution. Time has run out for the two-state solution because of the unending and permanent Jewish colonization of Palestinian land. Although deep mistrust exists on both sides of the conflict, growing numbers of Palestinians and Israelis, Jews and Arabs are working together to forge a different, unified future. Progressive and realist ideas are at last gaining a foothold in the discourse, while those influenced by the colonial era have been discredited or abandoned. Whatever the political solution may be, Palestinian and Israeli lives are intertwined, enmeshed, irrevocably. This daring and timely collection includes essays by Omar Barghouti, Jonathan Cook, Joseph Dana, Jeremiah Haber, Jeff Halper, Ghada Karmi, Antony Loewenstein, Saree Makdisi, John Mearsheimer, Ahmed Moor, Ilan Pappe, Sara Roy and Phil Weiss.
The 2008 financial crisis opened the door for a bold, progressive social movement. But despite widespread revulsion at economic inequity and political opportunism, after the crash very little has changed. Has the Left failed? What agenda should progressives pursue? And what alternatives do they dare to imagine? Left Turn, published by Melbourne University Press in 2012 and co-edited with Jeff Sparrow, is aimed at the many Australians disillusioned with the political process. It includes passionate and challenging contributions by a diverse range of writers, thinkers and politicians, from Larissa Berendht and Christos Tsiolkas to Guy Rundle and Lee Rhiannon. These essays offer perspectives largely excluded from the mainstream. They offer possibilities for resistance and for a renewed struggle for change.
The Blogging Revolution, released by Melbourne University Press in 2008, is a colourful and revelatory account of bloggers around the globe why live and write under repressive regimes - many of them risking their lives in doing so. Antony Loewenstein's travels take him to private parties in Iran and Egypt, internet cafes in Saudi Arabia and Damascus, to the homes of Cuban dissidents and into newspaper offices in Beijing, where he discovers the ways in which the internet is threatening the ruld of governments. Through first-hand investigations, he reveals the complicity of Western multinationals in assisting the restriction of information in these countries and how bloggers are leading the charge for change. The blogging revolution is a superb examination about the nature of repression in the twenty-first century and the power of brave individuals to overcome it. It was released in an updated edition in 2011, post the Arab revolutions, and an updated Indian print version in 2011.
The best-selling book on the Israel/Palestine conflict, My Israel Question - on Jewish identity, the Zionist lobby, reporting from Palestine and future Middle East directions - was released by Melbourne University Press in 2006. A new, updated edition was released in 2007 (and reprinted again in 2008). The book was short-listed for the 2007 NSW Premier's Literary Award. Another fully updated, third edition was published in 2009. It was released in all e-book formats in 2011. An updated and translated edition was published in Arabic in 2012.
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Who is trying to silence Israeli journalist David Sheen?

Israeli-Canadian journalist David Sheen is facing a major legal battle in Israel. 

I’ve investigated the story in British outlet The New Arab:

Israel promotes itself as the only democracy in the Middle East.

Former prime minister Ehud Barak once described his nation as a “villa in the jungle“. But recent years have seen a major erosion of press freedoms in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, and an Israeli Jewish public that wholeheartedly supports the suppression of independent media.

Palestinian journalists are routinely harassed and arrested. Palestinians are increasingly targeted on social media after Israel accuses them of incitement. Al Jazeera is now being threatened with closure. Israel’s communication minister Ayoub Kara claimed that Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Bahrain were his inspiration for trying to shut the Qatari news channel.

Israeli journalists aren’t immune. Being opposed to the decades-long occupation automatically makes you a target. Israel cannot maintain its control over millions of Palestinians without instituting a regime of control, intimidation, imprisonment and death. Occupation is brutal, unforgiving and now permanent.

Israeli-Canadian journalist David Sheen is the latest reporter to fall foul of Israel’s draconian political environment – and his case should be a wake-up call to a global community that still clings to the belief that Israel is a thriving democracy.

Sheen has contributed to The New Arab, Haaretz, Al Jazeera and others, and is one of Israel’s finest chroniclers of the state’s mistreatment of its Africans, and a consistent advocate of humanitarian principles.

He is being sued by an Israeli general, Israel Ziv, for writing about Ziv’s connections to the South Sudanese government led by President Salva Kiir.

Late last year, Israel’s Channel 2 discovered that Ziv’s company, Global CST, in addition to assisting and training security forces in South America, Eurasia and Africa, was advising Kiir to defend his beleaguered South Sudanese regime.

Kiir’s military stands accused of encouraging its soldiers to rape women during the ongoing civil war. Ziv and his colleagues allegedly suggested bringing a rape victim to the UN in New York, and giving Kiir the chance to blame these war crimes on traditional African culture. Ziv claims he was only working on agricultural projects in South Sudan.

The South Sudanese regime is guilty of rampant human rights abuses – including murder, rape and ethnic cleansing. Israeli companies have a dark and largely hidden relationship with the African state, selling weapons and surveillance equipment since the country’s independence in 2011.

I was based in South Sudan in 2015 and routinely heard about Israelis visiting to assist the state’s repression.

This fits into Israel’s aggressive policy to befriend African states, selling them arms and defence equipment, in the hope of better diplomatic support at the UN. Israel has also been sending African refugees to Rwanda and Uganda in an opaque process that’s causing immense trauma for the people being sent back.

I interviewed Eritrean refugees in South Sudan in 2015 who had been kicked out of Israel and left to fend for themselves in one of Africa’s poorest nations.

Tellingly, Ziv is pursuing Sheen – but not Israel’s Channel 2 (its report on Ziv is damning). It’s the very definition of a SLAPP suit which is “intended to censor, intimidate and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defence until they abandon their criticism or opposition”.

After the Channel 2 investigation aired last December, Ziv appeared on Israel’s Army Radio. One of the hosts, Amit Segal, asked Ziv: “So how did you get into a situation where you are sitting in a café… and in something like a parody of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, you suggest how he [the president of South Sudan] can whitewash his crimes?”

Ziv chuckled. He was accused by a mainstream journalist of secretly plotting to manipulate world opinion, cover up crimes and was compared to the most anti-Semitic work in history, and yet Ziv did not sue Segal. Instead, he’s harassing Sheen.

Ziv has a history of disturbing behaviour and comments in both Palestine and the world’s trouble spots. As a former commander of Israeli forces in Gaza, he has smeared Palestinians as having a “society for whom lies are its truth”. He has blamed murdered peace activist Rachel Corrie for her own death at the hands of the Israeli army in 2003.

In 2002, Israeli media outlet Kol Ha’ir Weekly Magazine reported that Ziv pushed to close an inquiry into the killing of five Palestinian children in 2001, “an investigation that may question, among other things, Ziv’s own responsibility for the killing”.

Ziv is deeply connected with the Israeli political establishment – many former Israeli politicians have worked for his company, Global CST, and assisted in the repression of innocent civilians across Latin America.

According to Amnesty International, Ziv’s firm was witnessed training Guinean military forces in 2009. That same year, Guinean forces committed horrible human rights abuses. Israel has recently upgraded its relations with the African state.

Wikileaks’ State Department cables released in 2011 revealed that the US had major concerns with Global CST, claiming it “created problems” in Colombia and Peru. US ambassador to Bogota, William Brownfield, wrote that the company “had no Latin American experience and that its proposals seem designed more to support Israeli equipment and services sales than to meet in-country needs”.

Sheen, a friend and colleague, has spent his professional life highlighting the descent of Israeli society into state-sanctioned racism. His astute observations are increasingly rare in a country that celebrates the use of unaccountable violence against perceived enemies.

Most importantly, he has examined the growing tendency of Israeli military figures to profit from its brutal occupation of Palestinians. The Israeli state is now a global leader in providing military, strategic and political advice to nations determined to deter, stop, kill or imprison unwanted minorities.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has worked for years with his media allies trying to silence anti-occupation voices. Critical perspectives on the occupation, Palestinian self-determination, Zionism or Israel’s future are increasingly infused with indignant nationalism and rampant anti-Arab racism.

Sheen is a rare voice who should be celebrated, not silenced. The court case against him, beginning in September, should be carefully watched by global media watchdogs, fellow journalists and foreign governments as a test of the Israeli judicial system to fairly arbitrate between a powerful, former military man and an independent journalist.

It’s clear where justice lies.

Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist who has written for The New York Times, the Guardian and many others. He is the author of My Israel Question and Disaster Capitalism: Making A Killing Out Of Catastrophe and has been reporting on Israel/Palestine for fifteen years.

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August 10th, 2017 in Israel