Antony Loewenstein

I was interviewed this week in Jerusalem by the US-based, The Real News Network about my book, Disaster Capitalism:

In late 2015, I was interviewed on TRT World’s The Newsmakers program from London about Israel/Palestine and the one-state solution. My interview begins at 3:37:

I lived in Juba, South Sudan during 2015 and witnessed the world’s newest nation descend into chaos. Near the beginning of the year, I accompanied the then top UN humanitarian official Valerie Amos with Hollywood actor and activist Forest Whitaker to the remote town of Wai in Jonglei state (here’s my Guardian report about it). I shot this short film to show how the local community welcomed us.

During my recent trip to Gaza, I shot this short film on daily life. It was published alongside a feature story in the Sydney Morning Herald/Melbourne Age:

My feature story in the Sydney Morning Herald/Melbourne Age (alongside my short film and photographs):

Umm al-Nasr, Gaza Strip: Everybody in Gaza fears another war. After the 2014 conflict, which killed 2250 Palestinians and 70 Israelis, little has changed on the ground for the territory’s 2 million residents.

A local psychiatrist, Khaled Dahlan, recently told me in Gaza that Palestinians had multi-generational trauma, having been dispossessed and attacked for decades. “We have had so many conflicts” in the last 70 years, he said.

The World Health Organisation estimates that at least 20 per cent of the population has severe mental illness.

Daniel Shapiro, the US ambassador to Israel under former US president Barack Obama, recently warned that “the next war in Gaza is coming”.

Israel’s military Chief of Staff, Lieutenant-General Gadi Eisenkot, explained in late March that his country reacts “disproportionately” to rocket fire from the strip. “The reality in Gaza is volatile,” he said.

Eisenkot warned that the Hamas authority in Gaza was “continuing to dig [tunnels] underground and to build their abilities and defensive capabilities”. Israel claims Hamas has new heavy rockets with which to attack Israeli border towns.

Israel’s State Comptroller released a report on the 2014 war that found the Israeli government was uninterested in avoiding a military conflict. “There was no realistic diplomatic alternative concerning the Gaza Strip,” it stated.

Hamas recently elected a new leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, who reportedly opposes reconciliation with Israel. He served 22 years in an Israeli jail before being released in a prisoner swap in 2011. Tensions rose again after the alleged Israeli assassination in late March of a senior Hamas militant in Gaza.

Yet Israeli Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman said in late 2016 that his country would help rebuild Gaza – if Hamas disarmed.

“We will be the first to invest in a port, an airport and industrial areas”, he told a Palestinian newspaper in October. Israel’s Transport Minister Israel Katz proposes building an island near Gaza to service its people – but Israel would control its air, sea and land borders.

Hani Muqbel, head of the Hamas Youth Department, told me in Gaza that his group’s philosophy was different to Islamic State’s or al-Qaeda’s. “They’re destroying the image of Islam,” he said. In contrast, Hamas had built a “national liberation movement”.

He acknowledged the current difficulties in Gaza but blamed the “Israeli occupation, siege and the [rival Fatah-run] Palestinian Authority [in the West Bank]”.

Muqbel said that Hamas did not want another war but that its issue with Israel “wasn’t between Jews and Muslims. It’s not a religious war, it’s about land.”

He demanded that Western powers stop claiming Hamas “wanted to kill Jews because they’re Jews. We do not.”

The Israeli media largely ignores Gaza and Israelis are not legally allowed to visit. Yet former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo recently said that the occupation was the country’s only “existential threat“.

An editorial in the liberal newspaper Haaretz urged the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “immediately consider other ways of halting the deterioration in Gaza – first and foremost by alleviating the wretchedness of life there”.

The Israeli human rights group Gisha recently found that Israel had massively reduced the ability of Gazans to leave in the last months, dropping 40 per cent compared to last year’s average. In February, only 7301 people went through the Erez checkpoint, which connects Gaza to Israel and the occupied West Bank. It was the lowest number since the end of the 2014 war.

Countless Gazans haven’t left for years. Many told me that it was impossible to plan anything major in life, such as marriage or travel, with certainty because applications to leave Gaza were routinely rejected by Israel with no reason given. Often they were ignored entirely.

The effect of the wars and isolation has been dramatic on the domestic lives of men and women. The last years have seen an explosion of Western aid organisations in Gaza working with local NGOs on furthering women’s rights in a male-dominated society. Many women said that these courses gave them awareness of their legal and social rights along with the ability to resist and leave a violent marriage.

The United Nations Commission on the Status of Women recently released a draft resolution that highlighted the status of Palestinian women. It expressed “deep concern” about the “ongoing illegal Israeli occupation and all of its manifestations”, including “incidents of domestic violence and declining health, education and living standards, including the rising incidence of trauma and the decline in psychological well-being”, especially for girls and women in Gaza.

A lawyer with the Gaza-based NGO Aisha Association for Woman and Child Protection, Asma Abulehia, said that she met six to seven women every day who faced domestic abuse or economic uncertainty. However, many women couldn’t leave their houses to seek help, trapped by an abusive husband or family.

“The Israeli occupation is the main reason for these problems,” she told me. “The bad economic situation has worsened social problems, along with ignorance of Islam and unfair laws against women in Gaza.”

Due to the suffocating 10-year blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt, support for Hamas has decreased. Many people long for a return of the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority that governs Palestinians in the West Bank, though they aren’t convinced it would make much difference to their daily lives. Many said they wanted to leave and build a life elsewhere.

This month, Human Rights Watch released a new report, Unwilling or Unable, detailing Israeli restrictions on human rights workers entering Gaza to document breaches of human rights and international humanitarian law. It accused Israel of severely curtailing the ability of Israelis, Palestinians and internationals to enter or leave Gaza and dismissed its reasons for doing so.

Human Rights Watch asked the International Criminal Court, currently investigating possible war crimes committed in Palestine including Gaza, to determine the “credibility” of Israeli domestic investigations and its restrictions of human rights workers in and out of Gaza.

In a 2015 report the United Nations voiced fears that Gaza would be uninhabitable by 2020. It stated that the 2014 war had “effectively eliminated what was left of the middle class, sending almost all of the population into destitution and dependence on international humanitarian aid”.

“Hamas doesn’t care for the people,” Abulehia said. “They deny violence against women and drug abuse [of the opioid Tramadol] even exists.”

Abulehia said violence against women was worsening, though there were no reliable government figures. The Safe House, funded by the Hamas government and run by women in a secure location, is the Gaza Strip’s only women’s shelter, where up to 50 people can sleep overnight. The average stay is three months.

Many women I met at the Aisha office faced troubling options. Nineteen-year-old Noura al-Reefy married her husband three years ago and wanted a divorce. Her father-in-law sexually harassed her and her husband did nothing.

“He wanted to see my husband and me have sex in front of him and me naked without my hijab,” she told me. During multiple visits to Gaza, I’d never heard such graphic accounts of abuse from a woman.

Reefy had attempted suicide twice. She hadn’t finished high school but planned to complete her education after divorce. She was forced to marry her cousin “but it was a bad idea from the start. I wish it was easier for women to get divorced here..”

Buthaina Sobh, head of the Wefaq Society for Women and Child Care, told me in conservative Rafah, in the south of the territory, that sexual harassment at work, at home and on the streets was commonplace.

“In our society,” she said, “women can’t demand sexual pleasure, they’re considered a slut. Only men can. However, intellectual women now recognise that women have sexual desires and can ask for it privately.”

Sobh said the constant Israeli attacks made Palestinians “used to suffering”. She was pessimistic that women’s lives could change substantively until the siege was lifted.

Training facilities for women are still rare but slowly growing. In the conservative, Bedouin area of Umm al-Nasr in the strip’s north, I visited a multi-storey centre where women learnt tailoring and toymaking for local consumption. A showroom displayed the work for sale. Carpentry classes for women were initially resisted by traditionalist men in the village, but now the teaching of skills in a territory with one of the highest unemployment rates in the world – at least 43 per cent – is being welcomed. The Hamas authority backs the centre and wants similar facilities established throughout the strip.

The centre also runs English courses and exercise classes. Working for the Italian NGO Vento Di Terra, project manager Sara Alafifi said that before the 2014 war many people thought that exercise for women was a waste of time but now healthy bodies were seen as a sensible way to manage stress.

There are alternatives. A group of Israeli and Palestinian economists recently released two studies with the World Bank that outlined a blueprint for economic development in the West Bank, Jordan Valley and Gaza. At the launch in Jerusalem, former Israeli ambassador to South Africa Ilan Baruch was blunt.

“There has been a deliberate Israeli policy to create deficiency,” he said. “The international community has to get involved – not as a donor, but to exert pressure.”

The constant threat of war against Gaza makes normality impossible. Hypertension, deep anxiety, increasing domestic violence and insomnia are ubiquitous amongst the population.

With hawkish Israeli commentators demanding another war with Hamas, and advocating the assassination of its leaders within days of any conflict commencing, prospects will only improve if the international community can put concerted effort into finding a new direction.

Antony Loewenstein is a Jerusalem-based independent journalist and author.

My article in US magazine Truthout:

President Barack Obama’s drug war legacy is paved with partially good intentions. It differed greatly between his domestic agenda and around the world. The former showed signs of bravery, challenging decades of draconian and counterproductive policy toward drug users and dealers, reducing the number of incarcerated men and women across the United States.

The latter, however, mostly continued failed ideas of the past and consisted of funding and arming some of the most repressive nations in the world, including Honduras and Mexico, worsening apocalyptic gang and drug violence. Many refugees fleeing to the US are a result of these White House directives.

These experiences could shape the Trump administration in its drug agenda, but it’s already clear that they prefer re-fighting the lost drug battles of the past, pledging a “law and order” agenda that guarantees rising prison numbers (and higher profits for private prison corporations). This will have zero effect on drug use or the social issues associated with it.

The drug war was never about ending drug abuse, but a battle against people of color. A former top advisor to President Richard Nixon admitted that it targeted antiwar protestors and “Black people.”

Today, drug reform is possible with even some of the most aggressive drug war backers of the past advocating the legalization and regulation of many, if not all, drugs. It remains a minority, if growing, view.

In the waning months of his presidency, Obama granted clemency and pardons to over 1,700 Americans in prison for nonviolent federal drug crimes. He used this extraordinary power more than any president since Harry Truman and 1,927 individuals are now free due to his decision.

I recently met one of these men in Washington, DC. Evans Ray was 12 years into a life sentence plus 10 years for distribution of crack cocaine and crack while possessing a firearm when he received Obama’s commutation in August 2016. He told me that he wanted to thank Obama for “allowing me a second chance in life, for allowing me the privilege of spending time with my mom and my kids and for giving me the opportunity to be a productive citizen.” Ray plans to establish an organization to help recently released prisoners readjust into society.

Despite Obama’s important record, tens of thousands of clemency applications were rejected including from prisoners such as Ferrell Scott, who is currently serving life imprisonment without parole for marijuana offenses.

As the Trump administration’s domestic drug war agenda becomes clear — Attorney General Jeff Sessions is threatening to overturn Obama’s Justice Department 2009 directive not to prosecute marijuana users and distributors who don’t break state laws — it’s now possible to view the Obama legacy in plain view. Obama’s domestic drug policies were a combination of sentencing logic, pushing back against harsh prison terms for nonviolent drug offenders, and gradual, sensible moves to transform the fight against drugs into a public health, rather than criminal justice, issue. People with opioid addictions were not acutely criminalized, though vastly more support is required. Many states legalized and regulated marijuana.

Globally, Obama was far more predictable in his drug war agenda. As one drug reform advocate told me recently in Washington, DC, there’s virtually no scrutiny in Congress (or the mainstream media) for US drug policy in remote corners of the globe.

Honduras is a notable exception. After the 2009 coup, backed by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, US military funding soared, along with catastrophic violence against civilians. The murder of famed environmental activist Berta Cáceres in 2016 ledDemocratic Congress member Hank Johnson of Georgia to introduce a bill in Congress calling on the US to halt all funds to Honduras for their military and police operations.

Honduras and Central America are still key transit areas for drugs entering the US. Washington’s support for neighboring countries such as Mexico, along with huge US domestic demand for drugs, has inarguably fueled the soaring death toll across the region.

When I visited Honduras in 2016, I spoke to Laura Zuñiga Cáceres, the daughter of Berta Cáceres, in her hometown ofLa Esperanza. She demanded that President Obama “cut all funding to Honduras, not just military but to private companies. Funding their projects creates a culture of dispossession [for locals].” This message is equally relevant to Trump.

President Trump is likely to continue — if not accelerate — Obama’s aggressive drug war policies. The Obama administration increased counter-narcotic activities across Africa and Afghanistan, supporting dictatorships in the process, and success rates against drugs were minimal. Afghanistan remains the world’s biggest supplier of opium.

Ending the failed drug war at home and abroad requires bravery and a decision to put ethical priorities above a desire to sign lucrative US defense contracts with repressive states across the world. Will President Trump build on the work begun by Obama in dismantling an architecture of domestic drug policy that leads to mass incarceration?

Internationally, Washington has yet to recognize, let alone apologize for, a “war on drugs” that benefits cartels, organized criminals and dictatorships.

Antony Loewenstein is a Jerusalem-based journalist, author of Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe and is researching the US-led “war on drugs.” Follow him on Twitter: @antloewenstein.

My article in The National newspaper in the UAE:

A group of old women sat outside in plastic chairs on a warm, Gaza day and sang traditional Palestinian songs. It was a happy mood at the Aged Care Foundation, the only community club for the elderly in the entire territory of two million people.

The head of the organisation, Nadia Alhashim, told me that there was a desperate need for her group because of social isolation in Gaza. “Old people are bored at home,” she said, “and we organise entertainment like dabke dancing, trips to the beach and exercise. It puts a smile on their faces.”

Men and women meet separately three times a week to share laughs and advice. Ms Alhashim said that the ­Israeli- and Egyptian-imposed siege on Gaza, now 10 years old, deprived many Gazans of essential medication and care including cancer treatment.

Om Ali Suhayla Abdu Al Qader Abulalreesh, 63, who lives with her mentally ill son in dire conditions, sang joyously to forget her problems and please her friends. It was a brief respite from the desperate, humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

The people of Palestine are often forgotten amid the calamities befalling the Middle East. Although the Israel/Palestine conflict was once a stated priority of successive American administrations, such attention only led to further misery and the entrenchment of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. Palestinian freedom would, probably, come sooner if Washington disengaged from the region entirely.

There are now at least 700,000 Israeli settlers living illegally in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Nobody seriously believes that these people will be forced to leave, so the situation is relatively permanent. What this means for the future of the Jewish state is grim with endless legislation aimed at delegitimising free speech and association. I’ve lost count of the number of leftist Israelis who’ve told me that they’re looking for ways to leave the country, because they are disillusioned with the nation’s direction and have no hope that it will improve.

The Palestinian people, bereft of capable leadership, are dealt an awful hand. Former president Barack Obama, while speaking critically about Israeli colonisation, did nothing concrete to stop it. He granted Israel its biggest aid package in history – $38 billion (Dh140bn) over 10 years. Mr Obama is rightly seen in Palestine as a key enabler of Israeli intransigence. The Trump administration is partly following the Obama playbook. Rhetorically, Washington is showing a more permissive attitude to continuing settlement expansion in the West Bank, which is funded by Jewish Americans and evangelical Christian groups whose contributions are tax deductible. Donald Trump also appointed a hard-line, settlement backer, David Friedman, as his ambassador to Israel. And yet Mr Trump’s team still talks about the dead-on-arrival, two-state solution and curbing settlement activity. It’s no wonder that settler groups are questioning their initial excitement over Mr Trump’s win.

It’s easy to believe that the Israeli-Washington relationship is in fine shape. During the recent conference of Israeli lobby group American-Israel Public Affairs Comittee (Aipac) in Washington, speaker after speaker praised Israel’s thriving democracy and America’s commitment to it. Palestinians were ignored.

Although large protests were held outside the Aipac event, organised by the young Jewish group IfNotNow, with the message, “Jews won’t be free until Palestinians are free”, both Democrats and Republicans are overwhelmingly supportive of Israel.

With the Israeli occupation of Palestine now lasting 50 years, this is forcing advocates to consider alternative tactics. A Lebanon-based United Nations agency that recently released a report claiming Israel was practising apartheid is formulating a document that will investigate “the cost of the Israeli occupation” of the Palestinian territories by using examples from apartheid South Africa and slavery in America.

It’s an interesting approach considering there is virtually no discussion in Palestine or Israel itself about how the conflict could be ended. Would there be a formal apology, financial compensation and then a South African-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission?

Back in Gaza, the mood is dark. Israel refuses to allow out many of the Palestinians who want to leave the besieged Strip, for no discernible reason other than spurious “security concerns”. The Rafah checkpoint, controlled by Egypt, is also largely sealed.

The Israeli media is filled with ominous reports of another inevitable conflict between Israel and Hamas. Neither side would benefit from such a war. During my recent visits to Gaza, I saw the effects of the last battle, in 2014, and the many Palestinians who remain homeless or living in squalid conditions because Israel refused to allow in enough rebuilding materials.

I once thought that the status quo in Israel and Palestine wasn’t sustainable and that occupation couldn’t last for ever. I’ve changed my view. Today there is no international body willing to curtail Israeli behaviour, while Washington and the European Union largely support it. Without serious outside pressure, Palestinians will remain eternally under the Israeli boot.

Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist and author in Jerusalem

My investigation, for MidEastWire publication, researched over many months:

The global sound of fury and shock heralded by the win of Donald Trump as the new U.S. President wasn’t heard in Israel. A poll, released in early December by the firm Dialog, found that 83 percent of Israelis viewed Trump as “pro-Israel” and hoped he would support their government’s position on expanding settlements in the occupied West Bank.

In February 2016, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he was planning to “surround all of Israel with a fence” to keep out Palestinians and Arab states’ citizens. “In our neighborhood, we need to protect ourselves from wild beasts,” he said.

This discriminatory attitude is not just limited to politics but is both mainstream and widely accepted in Israel.  For example, members of the far-right extremist group Lehava are strictly against any interaction between Jews and Palestinians. They roam the streets of Israel assaulting Arabs, and Israel does little to stop it. The group’s Hebrew stickers on Jerusalem streets read: “Beware the goys [a derogatory term for non-Jews]: they will defile you.”

Israeli security firms are excited about Trump’s win. They see dollar signs in the U.S., Europe and beyond as Western nations struggle to manage a huge influx of refugees and Muslims from the Middle East, Africa and Western Asia. Israel is viewed as an expert in the fields of counter-terrorism, surveillance, fences, sensors and militarization of borders.

In 2015, Israel reported $5.7 billion of defense industry exports. Arms sales especially soared to Europe, growing from $724 million in 2014 to $1.63 billion in 2015, amid growing concerns over refugees and terrorism. Equipment included aerospace, radar, drones and intelligence systems. Israel and its defense firms hope that surging interest in their products will counteract any negative economic impact from the growing boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.

When contacted for a comment, the Israeli Ministry of Defense refused to talk about its collaboration over countering possible threats related to refugees and terrorism.

“Unfortunately, as a rule, the Ministry does not comment on defense relationships with other countries,” it said.

Israel-based Magal Security Systems, the world’s biggest provider of perimeter security technology has global experience in using technology to keep out the unwanted and saw its share price soar following Trump’s victory.

The company’s chief executive, Saar Koursh, was recently quoted by the Financial Times saying he wanted to work on Trump’s proposed border wall with Mexico.

“If Mr. Trump builds a fence or a wall, we believe our technology will definitely be a benefit,” he reportedly said.

Hagai Katz, Magal’s Vice President of Marketing and Business Development, explained that his firm is involved in securing all of Israel’s borders including those with Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza. The “smart fence” around Gaza, “battle-tested” is attractive to clients, works with Israeli video cameras, satellite monitoring, ground sensors and motion detectors.

The close-to two million citizens of the Gaza Strip live in a large, open-air Israeli-imposed prison, with the U.N. fearing the territory will be uninhabitable by 2020. A recent visit to Gaza showed a population with virtually no freedom of movement.

A Magal client list, confirmed by the corporation as up to date, shows hundreds of partners developed over its more than 43 years in the business. This includes security for civilian airports in China, Colombia, the U.S., U.K. and Mexico, seaports in Israel, Canada and Kenya, utilities in Australia, Chile and Morocco, oil and gas facilities in the Gulf, Italy and Nigeria and nuclear sites in the U.S. Furthermore, there are countless commercial projects across the world, prisons, militaries (including in Bahrain) and borders including India and Pakistan, Minnesota in the U.S., Bulgaria and Serbia, as well as Slovakia and Ukraine.

A new Magal promotional brochure explains to potential clients that the main challenge in stopping “infiltrators” in Europe is gathering intelligence and establishing early warning systems.

Katz said that Israel’s “smart fence” with Egypt, five metres high with barbed wire, military posts and a quick reaction force, is the “most relevant for Europe because it’s concerned with illegal immigration.” He explained that there were five “D’s” for an effective smart fence: demark the border, deterrence, detection, delay and defeat.

“In the case of illegal immigration,” Katz explained, “deterrence is the most important thing because you don’t want to cope with the problem when somebody crosses [a border].” When a Magal spokesman was asked if fences and monitoring borders were a solution to the refugee crisis or simply a profitable outcome, Katz said: “If you really want to solve it, you need to be aggressive and determined. Nobody likes to use fences. The landscape looks ugly. It’s against the idea of open borders.”

He added that Hungary, perhaps the most antagonistic nation towards refugees in Europe, had only constructed a “dumb fence,” without technology or sensors. This “doesn’t solve the problem but moves it from one country to another.”

Although Katz said that a number of European nations had contacted Magal to get quotes on border security – the cost is up to $5 million per kilometre of physical fence – “most of the European countries have not decided to do this. They believe they can cope with the problem without decisive actions.” Katz saw expansion opportunities in Africa (Magal is competing to build a wall between Kenya and Somalia, at a cost of over $15 billion), Eastern Europe and former Soviet states.

Other Israeli companies are also in the border monitoring business. Elbit Systems, one of Israel’s largest defence contractors and experts in drone manufacturing, are working on the U.S./Mexico border. The sandy terrain near Nogales, Arizona, the second-largest border-patrol station in the U.S., has an Elbit-built radar system. The company’s head, Bezhalel Machlis, told the Financial Times in July that he was excited about the worldwide trend towards increased military budgets.

The Israeli military tests Elbit equipment before they are sold to agencies worldwide, where Palestinians living under occupation are used as guinea pigs for Elbit’s technology.

It is worth noting that the global interest in Israeli strategies to control borders is more than just a desire for technological experience. Trump’s election and the growing support for far-right political parties and movements across Europe reveal an ideological alliance that connects Israel’s burgeoning militarized settler movement with the white nationalist agenda.

This was perfectly articulated in December at Texas A&M University when Richard Spencer, head of the white nationalist National Policy Institute, silenced Rabbi Matt Rosenberg by suggesting Zionism and Jewish continuity required discrimination and isolation to thrive.

“Do you really want radical inclusion into the State of Israel?” Spencer asked. “And by that I mean radical inclusion. Maybe all of the Middle East could go move in to Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Would you really want that? Jews exist precisely because you did not assimilate.”

A few weeks earlier, Spencer had praised Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman and questioned whether “Israeli nationalists might want to help finance the far right in Europe and North America.” In July, he told the U.S. website Mondoweiss that he admired Israel as “a homogenous ethno-state.” During the Trump inauguration in Washington DC, Spencer was punched in the head by an anti-fascist protestor. He remains a divisive figure, opposed by many Jews, who craves separation of the races.

However, Spencer perfectly understood why many white nationalists, in the U.S., Europe and globally, have become ardent Israel supporters. Demographically, maintaining a Jewish majority in Israel is only assured by treating its Arab population as second class citizens. This is what most white nationalists admire in Israel, a willingness to brutally suppress another people to keep the state racially pure. Nationalists want the U.S. and Europe to behave similarly towards Muslims and refugees, groups that, in their view, are diluting the purity of the world’s superior Christian population.

David Sheen, an Israeli-based, independent journalist focusing on racial and religious conflict in Israeli society, said that “Israel’s leaders make brazen statements about their intentions to rule all the land, from the river to the sea, and to make Jewish supremacy paramount, demoting democratic principles to secondary status. They have already forced out over a third of the country’s African refugee population, and are on track to complete the cleansing over the next decade, if not less than that…There is no serious force at present, either within Israeli society or outside of it, that is capable of halting, or even of slowing down, Israel’s descent from flawed ethnocracy into full-on folkism.”

This logic has seen neo-Nazis and far-right extremists from Europe and the U.S. welcomed to Israel with open arms. Austria’s far-right, Freedom Party leader, Heinz-Christian Strach, visited Israel’s Holocaust memorial in April and met with members of the governing Likud party. His motives, according to press reports, were to make him “kosher in Israel” and acceptable to world leaders. Strach spoke of the “the Judeo-Christian West”.

“If Israel fails, Europe fails. And if Europe fails, Israel fails,” he said. Israeli settler leaders happily overlooked his neo-Nazi past and praised his unwavering support for Israel.

Among some French and German far-right movements online there is extensive support for Israel and its posture towards Muslims and Arabs. Largely written in the local language, and ignored by the Western media, far-right websites revel in Islamophobia as a perceived state policy in Israel and urge Europe to copy it.

One German website, PI News, claims to be “news against the mainstream” and backing “America, Israel, basic and human laws and the fight against the Islamization of Europe.” German Holocaust deniers visited Israel’s Holocaust museum and travelled around Israel in 2016 talking about blowing up mosques and embracing the settler movement. The group, from popular anti-immigrant parties, believed that radical Islam was the common dominator between themselves and Israel.

Such rhetoric is now politically popular across the West and it’s not hard to see why Israel, building fences and walls around itself, is the model. Companies such as Elbit and Magal are reaping the benefits.

Many Europeans now oppose Israel’s colonization policies and advocate boycotts against the Jewish state. However, Strach and his party, founded by former Nazis in the 1950s, are leading a wave of far-right solidarity with Israel across Europe and the world. From Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France to key players in the Trump administration, backing Israel and its draconian policies against Muslims, refugees, Palestinians, Arabs and black Africans is the new litmus test for the authoritarian right. Israel’s political and business elites, largely in sync with these views, have brilliantly exploited and monetized Western fears over minorities.

Trump’s chief strategist, of course, is Steve Bannon, former executive chair of the far-right Breitbart website that has published countless derogatory articles on Muslims, woman and Jews but earned praise (along with some opposition) for its Zionist stance from some of the leading U.S. – Zionist organizations. For them, anti-Semitism is irrelevant so long as Israel is given unconditional support.

It’s a dangerous and self-defeating stance that endangers Jews worldwide though there’s a long history of Zionist groups working with fascist groups in Israel and globally. Historically, neo-Nazis and white nationalists loathed Jews but today it’s not unusual to see the Israeli flag being waved at a far-right, Pegida rally in Germany or an event organized by Britain’s U.K. Independence Party (UKIP).

Former Israeli politician, Aryeh Eldad, from the far-right National Union Party, who once advocated the shooting of anybody who crossed Israel’s border with Egypt and is friends with far-right, Dutch politician Geert Wilders, says Israel has key lessons to teach the world.

Eldad believes that it was a mistake to see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as territorial with the refugee issues facing Europe since Islam is the problem.

He adds that refugee and Muslims’ high birth-rate would soon extinguish European Christians.

“If they [Europeans] want to keep their national and cultural identity…they will have to prevent further waves of immigrants because they will not be assimilated…We [Israelis] are idiots if we think it isn’t a religious war or clash of ideologies,” he said in a recent interview.

Eldad’s solution included expanding Israeli settlements, which he viewed as “legal” and “necessary,” as well as fortifying Israeli borders. Europe had to respond similarly, he argued, and repel the wave of migrants. Otherwise, it would continue being a “suicidal society,” determined to be overrun by Islam.

In the age of Donald Trump and rabid nationalism, I was recently asked to write a short essay by US-based publication World Policy Journal on the role of journalists and media in creating and fanning xenophobia: Big Question

During my recent visit to the US, I spoke in New York about my book, Disaster Capitalism. I was in conversation with journalist Ben Norton who has just written the following review of the book for US magazine Alternet:

“It is profitable to let the world go to hell,” wrote Jørgen Randers, professor of climate strategy at the BI Norwegian Business School, in 2015. “I believe that the tyranny of the short term will prevail over the decades to come. As a result, a number of long-term problems will not be solved, even if they could have been, and even as they cause gradually increasing difficulties.”

Journalist Antony Loewenstein opens his book Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing out of Catastrophe with these portentous words. Having crossed the globe, he has seen firsthand just how profitable disaster can be.

Loewenstein is a journalistic virtuoso, having traveled to dozens of countries on multiple continents in recent years for his multifaceted reporting. Like his accomplished compatriot John Pilger, Loewenstein has tackled a dizzying array of topics, with the expertise of a scholar and the vigor of an explorer.

Disaster Capitalism, a 300-page tome that is more like seven books in one, is based on a decade of research and reporting. Loewenstein traveled to wartorn Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan to study how the defense industry and for-profit private military companies are turning one of the longest wars in U.S. history into a lucrative business opportunity. He also visited crowded refugee camps in Greece and fully privatized detention centers at Christmas Island, off the coast of his native Australia, to meet asylum-seekers fleeing the wars multinational corporations are profiting from.

Loewenstein continued his reporting in post-earthquake Haiti, where he got to witness disaster capitalism in real time. He also saw how international mining corporations are raking in cash on the extraction boom in Papua New Guinea. In addition to these expeditions, Loewenstein also recently spent time doing even more reporting in South Sudan, Kenya, and Israel.

At a recent public discussion of Disaster Capitalism with AlterNet’s Ben Norton at McNally Jackson Books in New York City, Loewenstein spoke of the increasing privatization of wars and detention facilities for refugees and migrants. He also examined the refugee crisis, and how Western wars and intervention have fueled this crisis, highlighting the links tying together war, detention, mass incarceration, the military-industrial complex, and the prison-industrial complex, and how private prison and security companies are profiting from it all.

The journalist also addressed the rise of far-right and neo-fascist movements around the world, from Donald Trump to France’s Marine Le Pen to Greece’s Golden Dawn, and how these forces will be incapable of solving the structural global problems exacerbated and reinforced by a profit-driven system.

“I believe that bearing witness to what I see, and giving unequal players the right of reply, gives balance to the privatization debate, rather than the false construct of ‘balance’ that permeates the corporate press, which merely pits one powerful interest against another,” Loewenstein explains in the book.

The concept behind Disaster Capitalism is loosely rooted in Naomi Klein’s 2007 opus The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Loewenstein picks up where Klein left off, analyzing not only how natural disasters and war can be vehicles for capitalist policies, but also how corporations push their neoliberal agenda, and make lots of money, on immigration, refugee detention, prisons, and the discovery of natural resource reserves.

“This book is a product of the post-9/11 environment,” he notes. The explosion of the so-called war on terror, the rapid expansion of the surveillance state, the slew of never-ending wars, the privation of public institutions and services, and the militarization of police, the border, and all of society — this is the brave new world Loewenstein devotes himself to dissecting.

And there is even a movie! A Disaster Capitalism documentary has been several years in the making. Loewenstein says they are wrapping up the production process, and are in discussions for distribution of the film.

Loewenstein’s previous book, Profits of Doom, explores similar subjects, while 2008’s The Blogging Revolution presages the 2011 protests that swept the globe. And his My Israel Question became a bestseller in 2007 and helped foment critical public debate about Israel-Palestine.

…

Loewenstein is the definition of a cosmopolitan. In a Guardian article  about his Australian-German-Jewish identity, he wrote, “My identity is a conflicted and messy mix that incorporates Judaism, atheism, anti-Zionism, Germanic traditions and Anglo-Saxon-Australian beliefs. And yet I both routinely reject and embrace them all.”

He’s also a darn good writer.

While he boasts an impressive collection of bylines in prestigious publications, nevertheless, Loewenstein has largely been relegated to the sidelines of mainstream corporate journalism, much like the muckrakers before him.

“Far too few reporters demand transparency or challenge capitalism, preferring instead to operate comfortably within it,” he observes in his book. “This work is an antidote to such thinking… This book considers the view from below, the experiences of people who are all too often invisible in the daily news cycle.”

Around the Empire podcast, based in the US, interviews me about my book, Disaster Capitalism, Israel/Palestine, the dangers and advantages of aid and the Trump administration:

On this episode of Around The Empire, Dan and Joanne interview journalist Antony Loewenstein about his new book and upcoming film Disaster Capitalism. Loewenstein has traveled to the United States, Britain, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, Papua New Guinea, and Australia to research how multinational corporations exploit disasters for profit.

The discussion starts with a focus on recent decisions by the Trump Administration to increase the use of private prisons and detention centers. Loewenstein details how companies profit from this approach both in the United States and around the world, and the role such companies play in expanding the surveillance and incarceration state.

Loewenstein also explains the complicated role of non-government organizations (NGOs) in international development and disaster capitalism. Using the failures of NGOs in Haiti as a starting point, he explains the conflicting incentives NGOs have that often lead to them failing to make a positive impact despite ample resources:

I was pleased to be asked to sign the following statement in support of free speech and against blacklisting for “unpopular” views on Syria (though it’s equally relevant for Palestine, the “war on terror” etc). I sign alongside Noam Chomsky, Glenn Greenwald, Reza Aslan and many others: