The recent announcement by US President Donald Trump that he wanted to take over the Gaza Strip, remove its Palestinian citizens and establish a “Riviera for the Middle East” has been rightly condemned as “ethnic cleansing” by sane voices around the world.
Standing alongside a smirking Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a man with a long history of crushing any hope of Palestinian self-determination, Trump expressed a long-held dream of the Israeli Right, emptying Palestinians from Palestine. It’s a position that’s supported today by a majority of Israel’s Jewish population.
The Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese appears unable or unwilling to condemn Trump’s proposal, left to mutter about a dead in the water two-state solution, while Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is far more enthusiastic, hoping to capitalise on Trump-like rhetoric to win the forthcoming federal election.
Beyond these shocking headlines, however, lies a far darker reality that’s been brewing in Palestine for decades. This is an occupied land and people used as a testing ground for the most sophisticated forms of Israeli weapons and surveillance tech. The mass slaughter in Gaza after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel is just the latest example of the Israeli state and defence companies profiting from disaster.
Israeli arms sales are booming. Defence exports topped US$13 billion in 2023 and figures for 2024 and 2025 are set to increase even more.
I’ve spent more than a decade investigating the ‘Palestine laboratory’, in a global best-selling book, podcast series and now film, recently released with Al Jazeera English and made with the UK production company Black Leaf Films and director Dan Davies.
The Palestine Laboratory part 1
In Episode 1 of the documentary, I travel to Israel and Palestine to reveal both the depths of the surveillance inflicted on Palestinians, including growing automation of the repression. The Israeli vision is a so-called “frictionless” occupation, where Israeli soldiers have less direct, one-on-one contact with Palestinians while maintaining complete control over every aspect of their lives.
In Gaza, AI-powered warfare fuelled Israel’s killing machine with Big Tech players, including Google, Amazon and Microsoft, directly complicit in the slaughter.
The level of Israeli dehumanisation now extends to the installation of an AI-controlled machine gun in occupied Hebron in the West Bank. The company behind it, Smart Shooter, is deeply involved in helping Israel’s war efforts in Gaza and has now established an Australian outpost called Smash Australia.
Israeli digital intelligence company, Cellebrite, is used (and abused) by countless police and intelligence services globally, giving them power to hack into people’s mobile phones.
In May 2023, I investigated for Declassified Australia how common Cellebrite was in Australia, contracted with virtually every major government department. I found that at least 128 contracts had been signed. Today, the number is 161.
This is how the Palestine laboratory works because what starts in Palestine never stays there.
The Palestine Laboratory Part 2
In Episode 2, I traverse the globe and detail how Israeli surveillance and border tech, along with arms, are proliferating.
On the US/Mexico border, Israeli’s biggest defence company, Elbit, has installed dozens of surveillance towers on the US side to monitor both refugees and migrants crossing from Mexico and Native Americans living on their own lands bordering Mexico.
This is spectacular landscape, a beautifully, green lush desert with millions of cacti. I hiked with one of the world’s experts on the border region, journalist Todd Miller, and we examined one of the Elbit towers up close. It contains a huge array of surveillance equipment and heat sensors.
The impact of this tech is bleak; migrants are desperate to avoid detection so travel to even more remote and dangerous parts of the desert. Thousands of people die in these harsh conditions, often from dehydration, all in the name of keeping the US safe from outsiders.
Successive US Presidents have increasingly relied on technology to manage an influx of migrants often coming from nations that have been destabilised or invaded by Washington. The border industrial complex, boosted by both Democratic and Republican administrations, is also imagining more “frictionless” interactions at crossing points between US border guards and migrants.
In Mexico, the country most obsessed with Israeli spyware in the world, I document how victims of the deadly drug war are targeted by Pegasus, the notorious tool used by democracies and dictatorships to monitor dissidents, journalists and human rights workers. Our investigation makes it clear that the Mexican army and political elites can’t shake their fascination with this cyber weapon.
One of the real concerns with the secret use of Pegasus is how little we know about what information the Israeli company behind it, NSO Group, stores on their own servers. For example, do they keep all the details of the individuals the Mexican state targets? I presume yes, though I can’t prove it, and this leaves any Mexican user of Pegasus or other spyware vulnerable to intrusive surveillance, threats or blackmail from the Israeli state who are looking for favours in international forums like the United Nations.
Pegasus remains the tip of the Israeli spyware industry. Italy is currently being convulsed by a scandal revolving around its use and abuse of a Pegasus rival, Paragon, co-founded by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and the Meloni government’s use of it to target critics. Without any regulation, the offensive cyber industry is booming.
It’s hard to find a corner of the globe where Israeli surveillance or border tech isn’t in use. On the Greek island of Samos, the European Union has built a hi-tech detention camp for refugees in its attempt to keep unwanted populations out of Europe. What this means in practice is black Africans, Arabs from the Middle East and anyone else who doesn’t fit the stereotypical white arrival will likely be turned away from European borders.
The EU has installed a suite of Israeli surveillance tools, including Viisights and Octopus. They’re used to both manage the dystopian system of control – I saw the Samos camp in the middle of a searing summer and it’s a concrete jungle with no shade or trees – and detect perceived threats from the migrants. Former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has an investment firm, AWZ Ventures, that’s behind these firms.
In India, an increasingly autocratic Hindu state that’s routinely praised by the Albanese government, as Declassified Australia has previously reported, the Modi administration is a vital ally of the Jewish state. It not only buys more weapons from Israel than any other country, and sends offensive weapons to Israel during its genocidal war in Gaza, but elites in both countries admire the other’s ethno-nationalism. There’s an ideological alignment that’s impossible to ignore.
Hindu nationalism and Zionist fanaticism have a long history of sharing a similar worldview against those who don’t fit their beliefs in racial supremacy.
I travelled to the Indian state of Punjab to report on Sikh farmers, protesting against high crop prices, who had been tear-gassed from drones in 2024 in a tactic copied from Israel who deployed the same moves against peacefully protesting Palestinians in Gaza in 2018.
It was a sobering experience to see huge numbers of Sikh protestors, blocking roads for months on end, for the right to make a better living. The people I met were generous and committed and shocked to discover that Indian forces were copying the ways in which occupied Palestinians are treated by Israel.
Perhaps the most confronting country to visit was South Africa. A nation that’s pursuing Israel at the International Court of Justice for committing genocide in Gaza, Israel and apartheid South Africa were close allies, inspiring each other in new ways to repress the black majority and Palestinian population. From weapons to crowd control tools, this was an ideological affinity born out of fear and racism.
It was shocking to visit the old black townships near Cape Town, set up to warehouse black South Africans decades ago, and seeing that life had barely changed for many people since the end of apartheid in 1994. The promise of a new country has been realised by some but many still live in economic apartheid.
The global response to The Palestine Laboratory film series has been overwhelming, reflecting a huge public appetite to both interrogate Israel’s military industrial complex and fight back against it.
In the Australian media, these issues barely register. Instead, we’re given endless numbers of articles talking about Israel’s right to bombard Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and beyond. Arabs are viewed as unpeople, not deserving of the same rights as Israeli Jews.
A serious media culture would investigate the deep ties between Israel and the Australian intelligence, military and political apparatus, as well as the litany of politicians and journalists routinely going on free pro-Israel lobby trips to the Jewish state.
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The Palestine Laboratory film series has been released in February 2025 and broadcast in two parts on Al Jazeera English. It is available online freely to Australian and international audiences.
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