Antony Loewenstein

Gideon Levy is one of Israel’s most outspoken journalists. He’s been writing for decades in Israeli newspaper Haaretz about the devastating effects of the never-ending Israeli occupation of Palestine.

I first met Gideon in Tel Aviv in 2005 when I was researching my first book, My Israel Question.

Since then, he’s become an inspiration for daring to reveal the dark side of Israeli society and what it’s supporting in the West Bank and Gaza.

He recently toured Australia, and received extensive media coverage (on the public broadcaster ABC), and I was privileged to speak alongside him at Sydney University. It was one of the biggest Sydney Ideas events of the year, with nearly 500 people present.

My comments begin at 50:07 and then a Q&A with Gideon.

Here’s the audio:

And the video:

US President Donald Trump’s decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem is unsurprising and clarifying. It proves, once and for all, that Washington will only do the bidding of the Jewish state.

I was interviewed on Australian news program The Wire about the move:

Access and ownership of Jerusalem have been a hot issue for decades after its occupation by Israel. Peace talks have stalled multiple times and Donald Trump has thrown a spanner in the works once more.

The US President recently announced his intentions to move the US Embassy into Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. Which has caused condemnation from other political leaders and protests in the streets.  The consequences of his actions could be felt for years.

In the last months, I’ve been a judge on a great literary prize, Fair Australia, organised by Overland magazine:

What does a fairer world look like, and how do we get there? The Fair Australia Prize asks writers and artists to engage with these questions and imagine a new political agenda for Australia through fiction, essays, poetry, cartoons and art.

Many thanks to the 2017 judges – Michalia Arathimos, Jennifer Down, Emma Kerin, Antony Loewenstein, Godfrey Moase, Jacinda Woodhead, Ellen van Neerven, Toby Fitch, Carina Garland, Sam Wallman, Cathy Wilcox and Sam Davis – and to all the writers and artists who submitted entries this year. Note: the competition will reopen in 2018.

Overland, the National Union of Workers, the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance, and the National Tertiary Education Union (VIC) are very pleased to announce the winning entries of this year’s prize, which will be published in Overland’s final edition of the year, to be launched Monday 11 December in Melbourne.

The fine winner of the essay section that I co-judged:

‘Aussie Albert’

A snapshot of Albert Namatjira is a window into the injustices befalling Indigenous Australians, who are still denied a voice in determining their destiny in contemporary Australia.

Julian Bull studied natural resources management and landscape architecture at the Universities of Adelaide and Melbourne. His numerous articles on landscape architecture, urban design and art have been published in Australia and overseas.

After 6+ years in the making, my film, Disaster Capitalism, is finished. Working with director Thor Neureiter, co-producers Media Stockade and co-editor Leah Donovan, it’s been the most challenging creative project of my life. But here we are with a fine film.

Disaster Capitalism is a compelling documentary that goes inside Afghanistan, Haiti and Papua New Guinea to reveal the dark side of moneymakers and aid exploiters unafraid to make a killing from the misfortune of others.

We’ve just released the trailer on YouTube and Vimeo. Enjoy and please share on social media around your networks. Independent film-making requires your support.

In 2018, the film will be screened around the world, at film festivals, public screenings and TV broadcast (our French/US distributor has already secured a sale with a European TV broadcaster).

Thanks to the countless people in multiple nations for giving us so much encouragement and support over the last years.

We look forward to showing you this timely film next year.

Here’s the trailer:

I’m currently working on a new, investigative book on the global “war on drugs” covering vast parts of the world consumed by the drug war (from Honduras to West Africa). It’ll be published by Scribe in Australia, the UK and beyond in 2019.

This week I was interviewed by the US podcast, Bitcoin Uncensored, on this book, what my research has taught me so far, what legalisation/decriminalisation looks like etc. And yes, the words are out of sync (technical issues):

The Melbourne Press Club periodically inducts journalists into its Hall of Fame.

I was asked to write the profile and be interviewed about John Pilger, one of Australia’s most famous journalistic exports:

During his acceptance speech for the Sydney Peace Prize in 2009, Australian journalist, author and film-maker John Pilger articulated a worldview that he has vociferously opposed during a career spanning more than 50 years. “Democracy has become a business plan,” he said, “with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies – socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor – and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war.”

Pilger’s decades-long work in print and television has transformed him into one of the most successful and awarded Australian journalists in the modern era, yet this has not brought him universal praise from his media colleagues or a profession that often prefers safe insiders and embedded “realities”. Pilger is too confrontational towards state power and his industry to be widely adored and he embraces being the eternal dissident.

In the introduction to a 2004 collection of fine investigative journalism from around the world, Tell Me No Lies, edited by Pilger, he warned that the proliferation of public relations forced reporters to take an even more adversarial position towards governments and corporate power. Political and historical context is everything and Pilger rightly demanded more discussion about the “hundreds of illegal [American] ‘covert operations’, many of them bloody” that have denied political and economic self-determination to much of the world.

Pilger has spent years visiting the sites of these often silent wars, genocides and occupations from East Timor to Palestine and Australia to Vietnam. He has never been a cheerleader for “our” side and his journalism is stronger because of it.

In his classic 1986 book, Heroes, Pilger wrote that he had “grown up in one of the most fortunate cities on earth”. Born in Sydney in 1939 to socialist parents Elsie and Claude, he was brought up in Bondi and developed a love of swimming that continued his entire life. With a working class background, his journalism career began as a copy boy on the now defunct Sydney Sun newspaper.

As a cadet on Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, Pilger soon discovered what he viewed as the dark heart of modern journalism. Writing in Heroes, he explained that “writing one thing and believing another was the way the system worked and to do otherwise was to risk not working at all.” He lamented many young journalists expressing “fake cynicism towards their craft, their readers and themselves.” It wasn’t surprising that he soon left the parochial shores of Sydney and followed the exodus of Australians to London.

Working as a journalist on the Daily Mirror, Pilger often found himself on the frontline of history. He witnessed the 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles. His critical reporting during the Vietnam War, including his first TV documentary in 1970, The Quiet Mutiny, documented declining morale within the US military for the bloody conflict.

His 1979 film, Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia, exclusively revealed the devastation of that nation’s people after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. Massive public reaction to the documentary led to millions of aid dollars being raised for the growing famine. Pilger didn’t just blame the genocidal Khmer Rouge for the catastrophe but also Washington for illegally bombing the state and creating the environment for the mass murderers to take power.

In his book, Distant Voices in 1992, Pilger recounted arriving in Phnom Penh in 1979 and “taking no photographs; incredulity saw to that. I had no sense of people, of even the remnants of a population; the first human shapes I glimpsed seemed incoherent shapes, detached from the city itself.” Pilger’s work on Cambodia was inarguably some of his most successful and he made five films about the country.

Pilger has long shone a harsh light on his birth country’s indigenous population. In his 1998 book, Hidden Agendas, he explained that “until we white Australians give back to the first Australians their nationhood, we can never claim our own.” Pilger has made many documentaries about Australia including Utopia, released in 2013. It was a scathing examination of the black population that remains invisible to the vast majority of Australians and the world. He showed desolate living conditions and apartheid-South African level incarceration rates for the nation’s first peoples.

Pilger has been routinely criticised for lacking objectivity, a concept he has dismissed for decades as the position of corporate journalists who routinely forget that they should be reporting on and defending the most marginalised citizens in society rather than siding or socialising with prime ministers, presidents and officials. He has been unapologetic about his defence of Wikileaks’ Julian Assange along with his criticism of liberal heroes such as Barack Obama. Noam Chomsky has called Pilger’s journalism “a beacon of light in often dark times.”

Upon winning the Order of Timor-Leste in 2017, in recognition of his work advocating for the East Timorese people during the Indonesian military occupation backed by Washington, London and Canberra, Pilger showed why he’s one of the best advocates for the forgotten. “Australia owes Timor Leste a huge debt, some would say, billions of dollars in reparations”, he said. “Australia should hand over, unconditionally, all royalties collected since [former Australian Foreign Minister] Gareth Evans toasted Suharto’s dictatorship while flying over the graves of its victims.”

Still engaged and angry in his seventh decade, Pilger is a rare journalist who has never sold out and never curbed his views to accommodate corporate donors. It’s no wonder officialdom has loathed him for decades yet readers and viewers across the world have often embraced his message.

Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist who has written for the Guardian, New York Times and many other publications. He is author of My Israel Question and Disaster Capitalism: Making A Killing Out Of Catastrophe and writer and co-producer of the documentary, Disaster Capitalism.

After 25 years of increasingly extreme Australian policies against asylum seekers both onshore and offshore, perhaps it’s time to think about more active measures to change course.

I was interviewed by the Guardian about my suggestions:

The author and journalist Antony Loewenstein is attempting to open up another front in the campaign against offshore detention. He has argued for some time that an international boycott of Australia over Manus is a key way to pressure the government. He wants to see a sporting and tourism boycott, and a boycott of companies “profiting from onshore and offshore detention”.

“Protest is vital but the old methods have failed to change decades of bipartisan support for mandatory detention of asylum seekers and other human rights violations,” Loewenstein told the Guardian.

My following article appears in Australian news outlet, Crikey:

Let’s talk about boycotting Australia.

Australia’s war on asylum seekers at Manus Island, Nauru and other privatised detention facilities on the Australian mainland is seemingly unstoppable by traditional means. While condemned by every human rights organisation in the world, Canberra is unmoved. The demonisation of (mostly) brown and Muslim individuals is an effective tool for politicians as well as many in the Murdoch and tabloid press to whip up fear and aggression against outsiders. And it’s been working for 25 years with Australia now inspiring hardline European policies.

When politics and international law fail to intervene if abuses occur, alternative tactics are required. Supporting a tourist and sporting boycott is one way to draw local and international attention to Australia’s mistreatment of refugees. It would inevitably lead to a hardening of views among some Australians, and vicious opposition by many in the media who would label it unrealistic or extreme — but that’s exactly the point. Business-as-usual ideas have failed for more than two decades. It’s time to try something new.

Back in 2014, I wrote in The Guardian that the United Nations should impose sanctions on Australia over its asylum seeker policies. Then and now it was a highly contentious view, and the UN is a deeply flawed and corrupt body itself, but my aim was to make Australians realise that turning a blind eye to what was happening on Manus Island and elsewhere should come with a tangible, economic price. In other words, let’s turn capitalism against a rich, capitalist country.

In 2015, I wrote in The Guardian again about boycotting companies, and divesting from them through shareholder activism, that financially benefited from Australia’s refugee policies. This included Serco, G4S and International Health and Medical Services. Earlier this year, when I raised the idea on ABC TV of a sports boycott against Australia, the online response was often vitriolic (though far from entirely).

“Sports and politics don’t mix” was the most tiresome response, as if people had conveniently forgotten the long and noble tradition of fighting oppression and racism during apartheid South Africa and in the US today with sports and its icons. There’s also a growing global divestment campaign against the coal industry.

The growing success of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, to pressure the Jewish state to abide by international law in its war against the Palestinians, is because it has massive Palestinian support within Palestine, granting the movement legitimacy in the eyes of global activists.

There are examples of Australians pushing for similar legitimacy here with current and former asylum seekers. The only Australian organisation that I know that’s pushing to sanction Australia is Rise: Refugees, Survivors and Ex-Detainees. They state: “Australia should be excluded from participation in all international humanitarian and human rights decision making processes until mandatory detention and refoulement of asylum seekers and refugees is abolished in Australia.”

What would a boycott against Australia look like? Because it’s unlikely that any countries would refuse to play Australia in cricket, football, hockey, netball or rugby (as these nations are themselves involved in abuses against minorities), it’s up to engaged citizens to put pressure on teams and their corporate sponsors to take a public stand against Australia’s refugee posture. Generate public protests in Australia and globally when Australia’s national team plays. Brief activists in foreign cities to write letters and op-eds whenever Australia appears. Australians crave global acceptance and will loathe being forced to consider why their teams are being shunned.

A tourist boycott is equally appealing (and a German journalist recently advocated for it). Tourism is a multibillion-dollar industry and many people would undoubtedly suffer if fewer foreigners visited. But there are ways to try and avoid this result. After the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka in 2009, some activists asked tourists not to come because the government was attempting to white-wash its crimes (or at least be careful not to stay at hotels or fly on airlines backed by the regime).

Australians could encourage potential tourists, with the aid of a helpful website, to back local communities and economies with no connection to corporations complicit in some way to Australia’s refugee policies. Activists could use culture jamming techniques to challenge Australian tourist ads running around the world, showing the reality away from the pretty beaches. Social media is an effective weapon here, producing alternative tourist messages with images from Manus Island and Nauru.

There’s no one way to end Australia’s cruelty towards asylum seekers but most of the current tactics have failed. If Australians start paying a real price for their acquiesce in punishing refugees, the politics may start to slowly change.

*Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist, film-maker, author of Disaster Capitalism: Making A Killing Out Of Catastrophe and is currently writing a book on the global “war on drugs”.

I signed the following public statement to support peaceful protest of the secretive US spy base at Pine Gap in Australia. It’s directed at Attorney General George Brandis:

My major investigation in the Melbourne Age/Sydney Morning Herald on Australia’s surging defence industry:

This year’s Avalon Air Show in Geelong was the first chance for the public to see the long-delayed Joint Strike Fighter in action. At a cost of at least $100 million per aircraft, Canberra is slated to spend $17 billion on 72 F-35s in the coming years.

Manufacturer Lockheed Martin, the world’s biggest defence contractor, has faced countless problems with the plane including cost blowouts (spending more than $US1 trillion and counting), a Pentagon report in January finding 276 deficiencies (with 20 new issues discovered per month) and consistent troubles with overheating and cybersecurity. An Australian contractor on the aircraft was recently hacked, with sensitive material stolen.

None of this dampened the mood at Avalon. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, along with Defence Minister Marise Payne, Defence Industry Minister Christopher Pyne and Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson, praised the plane and Australia’s growing defence sector.

“It is an example of how our defence industry plan is not simply securing our Air Force and our Army and our Navy with the capabilities they need to keep us safe in the 21st century,” Turnbull said. “It is driving the advanced manufacturing, the jobs, the advanced technology that Australians need to make sure our children and grandchildren have the opportunities in the years ahead.”

Billed as Australia’s premiere showcase of defence, civilian and aerospace equipment, sponsored by the world’s major defence companies such as BAE Systems, Raytheon, Thales, L3, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, along with Australia’s Department of Defence and the Victorian Labor government, this year was the largest in Avalon’s history, with over 210,000 people in attendance.

But away from Avalon’s glitzy surface, and its promotion of a family-friendly event to watch the world’s most sophisticated aircraft, is a darker reality. Australia’s defence sector has hugely expanded in  recent years with barely any public discussion, let alone debate in federal parliament.

It’s a nearly impossible task to discover exactly what Australia is selling and to whom because the federal government refuses to say, but nuggets of information make it clear that Canberra is aggressively selling weapons and defence equipment to countries involved in conflicts where human rights abuses are being perpetrated.

Australian Defence Magazine released figures in December 2016 that revealed the scope of the industry. The top 40 defence contractors, including top players BAE Systems Australia and Raytheon Australia, had an annual turnover of $10.384 billion, 11 per cent higher than 2015 and the biggest in the magazine’s 21-year history.

According to Amnesty International, in 2016 the world spent $US1.69 trillion on the military, with the US Pentagon issuing  $US304 billion in contracts to corporations including Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

But how transparent is Australia’s defence spending internationally? In December 2016, Christopher Pyne visited Saudi Arabia and met with senior members of the regime, including the head of the National Guard. A Freedom of Information (FOI) request, filed in April by the Australian group, The Medical Association for Prevention of War, found that Canberra was looking to expand the reach of its domestic defence sector and had no issue selling equipment with dual use (for either military or civilian purposes). The government refused to give a full list of companies accompanying Pyne.

Saudi Arabia is already the world’s second biggest purchaser of weapons. The Trump administration recently signed a $US350 billion arms deal with Riyadh for the next 10 years.

Saudi Arabia launched military action against Yemen’s Houthi rebels in 2015 and the humanitarian situation in what was already the poorest country in the Middle East has rapidly deteriorated. At least 10,000 civilians have been killed, cholera ravages millions of citizens and Saudi Arabia has been accused of committing war crimes by human rights groups. In October the UN included the kingdom on a blacklist for killing and injuring children (though the UN has previously backed down on similar steps under Saudi pressure).

Britain has refused to support a United Nations investigation into atrocities because it could affect trade and weapons sales and in July Britain’s High Court backed London’s arms sales to Saudi Arabia as legal. Charity War Child UK has claimed that British arms companies have earned more than £6 billion ($10.3 billion) from trade with Saudi Arabia since the Yemen conflict began (Holland banned such sales in 2016).

Australia has refused to condemn Saudi actions in Yemen. The heavily redacted FOI revealed that there was discussion during Pyne’s December trip of the Royal Saudi Naval Force eastern fleet expansion with a budget of $26 billion (Australian shipbuilder Austal accompanied Pyne on his visit), talk of the Tasmanian, Incat-designed and built aluminium catamaran damaged by a Houthi attack off the coast of Yemen in October 2016 and consultation about a future submarine program (though whose was not clear).

I asked the Australian Department of Defence for further information on any dealings with Saudi Arabia and was told that “Defence does not release the details of export approvals due to commercial-in-confidence restrictions. Exports of military equipment and technology to Saudi Arabia were assessed in line with Australian export control provisions.”

Then Greens senator Scott Ludlam was one of the only parliamentarians who questioned Australia’s dealings with Saudi Arabia. He told Fairfax Media that he could find nobody in the Labor Party to support his enquiries into Pyne’s trip.

Greens leader Richard Di Natale told me that he condemned Australia’s “military-industrial complex”: “Why promote Australia as a global arms dealer when we could be revitalising our manufacturing industry around new energy technology?”

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) is one of the world’s leading researchers on conflict and armaments. Its latest figures, for the period 2010-2016, showed ships as the biggest Australian export, along with aircraft, missiles and armoured vehicles. The list of customers included Papua New Guinea, Oman, the Philippines, India, Indonesia, Singapore and the United States.

I asked the Department of Defence to whom they were selling defence equipment. They said that no export licences were granted between January 2015 and the present day to Myanmar (currently engaged in ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya, according to the UN), but during the same period dual-use equipment and technology was sold to the United Arab Emirates and Israel.

The UAE stands accused of committing abuses in Libya and Yemen while Israel has been condemned by the UN and human rights groups for war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank. An Australian intelligence company, iOmniscient, is selling surveillance equipment to the brutal Bahrain dictatorship. Canberra is already one of the world’s biggestimporters and exporters of small arms.

The federal government’s 2016 Defence White Paper outlined a $200 billion investment over the next 10 years. Canberra promotes its wares at events such as this year’s Defence and Security Equipment International conference in London, though protesters greeted the tens of thousands of participants.

Pyne said in July that his ambition was for Australia to “enormously increase that capacity and send a lot more weapons overseas to appropriate countries and appropriate places of course. We simply wouldn’t do so willy-nilly. We have a particular process for that.”

He says that current contracts are worth $200 billion in the coming years. That’s a massive expansion of defence exports from 2003/2004, when they amounted to just under $600 million.

The move was slammed by World Vision Australia chief Tim Costello, who questioned whether Australia should be “exporting death and profiting from bloodshed … Do we really want that to be what people think of when they see the brand ‘made in Australia’?”

The federal government states that export applications are granted against the following criteria: international obligations, human rights, regional security, national security and foreign policy. The government’s Global Supply Chain program gives exclusive access to Australian companies to enter into close commercial relationships with, and provide vital parts to, Lockheed Martin, Rheinmetall, Northrop Grumman, Thales, Boeing, BAE and Raytheon.

Some of these corporations have unprecedented access to decision making in the Trump administration, with the US President filling key roles in Homeland Security and the Pentagon with defence contractors. However, Barack Obama sold more weapons globally than any US commander-in-chief before him.

Australia’s ambition to expand its defence sector is intimately tied to the growth of the world’s biggest weapons companies on Australian soil, despite them being connected to some of the world’s major conflicts and controversies.

Thales is one of the biggest beneficiaries  of the European Union’s increasingly militarised border policies and Lockheed Martin is supplying weapons to Saudi Arabia. Lockheed Martin refused to answer my questions about its role in Australia despite its presence growing by the year (including the establishment of a research facility at the University of Melbourne, praised by Pyne).

But Australia’s goal of becoming a global weapons dealer may be futile. SIPRI’s senior researcher Siemon Wezeman has closely studied Australia’s defence policies and questions their stated aims.

“To be honest, I don’t see Australia becoming a major arms exporter in any near future,” he told me. “The list of exports in the last decade gives not the greatest reasons to be optimistic about exports of major weapons from Australia, the more so since the new-produced weapons listed are not very advanced and are not niche weapons. Australia has no comparative advantage and many other countries produce or can produce them cheaper.”

Wezeman stresses that Australia has made decisions to largely “cater for its own needs, largely now as subsidiaries of foreign companies, which works nicely if the government wants to spend its money in Australia (even if that may be not 100 per cent cost-effective).” He sees China, South Korea, Turkey, Japan and Singapore elbowing out Australia on the world stage because of their industrial, political and military connections.

In his seminal 2011 book on the global arms trade The Shadow World, journalist Andrew Feinstein exposes the fallacies of a nation’s expanding defence sector. “The arms industry’s economic contribution is undermined by the frequency with which its main players around the world, Lockheed Martin, BAE, Boeing, Northrop Grumman … are implicated in grand corruption, inefficiency and wastage of public resources,” he wrote.

Feinstein concludes that the arms trade “often makes us poorer, not richer, less not more safe, and governed not in our own interests but for the benefit of a small, self-serving elite, seemingly above the law, protected by the secrecy of national security and accountable to no one”.

Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist, filmmaker, author of Disaster Capitalism: Making A Killing Out Of Catastropheand is currently working on a book about the global war on drugs.

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten travelled to Israel this week to “celebrate” the 100-year anniversary of Beersheba and the Balfour Declaration. Palestine was barely on the agenda. After living in East Jerusalem for the last 1.5 years, I was interviewed for Lateline by ABC TV reporter Michael Vincent on the grim reality in Palestine:

In September, I spoke at Sydney University alongside US academic Mark LeVine and Palestinian academic Lana Tatour on the realities in today’s Palestine/Israel. Many interesting comments and my thoughts (after living in East Jerusalem for the last 1.5 years) start at 1:00:26: