The Palestine Laboratory is imminent
In a time of global crisis, it's possible to produce journalism that both challenges and educates
Dear friends,
It was recently the 20th anniversary of the 2003 US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. In the two decades since, Iraqi civilians have paid the highest price, with up to one million killed. Many Western Generals, media pundits and self-described journalists were disastrously wrong about the war and its aftermath and yet most have since failed up. Some reporters defied the prevailing mood and produced truthful work about the lack of Iraqi WMDs.
I started my journalism career in 2003 - here’s an early example of an interview with the late, great reporter Phillip Knightley - and it was a sobering experience. Being pro-war, then and now, was deemed the “serious” position. Being anti-war or skeptical of US claims about Iraq’s WMD was slammed as being pro-Saddam.
It was absurd, and history has proven the critics right. Not that this has helped the Iraqi people or many in the Middle East, living under (mostly) US-backed dictatorships.
My journalism career was shaped by those early years. From the beginning, I challenged the mainstream orthodoxy, from Iraq to Palestine and Afghanistan to the “war on terror”, and I quickly discovered that most reporters prefer to echo the claims of governments, big business and intelligence services.
Independent journalism has never been more important.
Welcome to a rebooted Antony Loewenstein website and newsletter (via the Substack platform). I highly recommend the web company Common behind the changes.
With the release of my new book, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports The Technology Of Occupation Around The World, in May, I thought it was time to introduce a new look, feel and archive of my work - more than 90% of my writings and audio + video interviews since 2003 appear on my website - including one of my most cherished interviews with the remarkable Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, conducted in 2006 just months before she was murdered in Moscow by Putin-backed thugs. She was the definition of bravery.
Here’s the headline and first paragraph from my first ever mainstream piece on Israel/Palestine, published by the Sydney Morning Herald in July 2003:
This newsletter will appear regularly in your in-box and it’ll be a selection of my recent work, news and reviews and links to other people’s interesting journalism (such as here, here and here).
The Palestine Laboratory is out this month; 23 May in the UK and US (with Verso) and 30 May in Australia and New Zealand (with Scribe). Please pre-order a copy because it helps show interest! Turkish and South Korean editions are coming and other translation deals will hopefully be struck soon.
My book has already attracted a number of strong, pre-release reviews including from US-based Kirkus Reviews, US-based Booklist and Al Jazeera English journalist Imran Khan. The acclaimed writer Malcolm Harris, author of Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism and the World, talked about the book on a recent Los Angeles Review of Books podcast and an academic from Edinburgh, Samer Abdelnour, has written a published report that references my book and the “globalisation of violence”.
In the coming months, I’ll be appearing at many public events, in Australia and overseas, and I’ll keep you posted of these dates. For now, I’ll be speaking at the Bendigo writer’s festival in Victoria on 6 May, Sydney’s Addi Road writer’s festival with journalist Peter Cronau on 20 May, 8 June for the official, Sydney launch at Gleebooks with Greens Deputy Leader Dr Mehreen Faruqi, 27 June at Melbourne’s Eltham Bookshop with Serpil Senelmis and 28 June at Readings in Melbourne with writer Jeff Sparrow. Here’s the full list of events so far publicly announced (with many more to come).
Other recent work:
My interview with ABC Australia’s Triple J Hack program on mass protests in Israel.
My book review in the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age on a new work about the Israeli spyware tool, Pegasus.
Declassified Australia, the investigative news website that I co-founded in 2021 with journalist Peter Cronau, continues to publish ground-breaking work (support us with $ here!) Here’s my long read on Australian mining billionaire Andrew Forrest and his forays in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a stunning series by our regular correspondent, Kellie Tranter, on the never-ending incarceration and torture of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange (including the most detailed look at her years-long work to uncover the truth about Western complicity in the Assange case), an accurate history by scholar Peter Job of the late Australian diplomat Richard Woolcott and his support for Indonesia’s invasion and occupation of East Timor, and new polling showing that Australians are opposed to a US-led war on China.
Declassified Australia was a co-sponsor at the recent Belmarsh Tribunal at Sydney University which featured some of the leading voices pushing for press freedom and Assange in Australia and globally including Stella Assange, David McBride, Kellie Tranter, Kerry O’Brien, Yanis Varoufakis and many others.
I’ve regularly appeared on global broadcaster TRT World talking about Israel/Palestine including on Netanyahu’s “judicial reforms” and Israeli attacks on Al-Aqsa Mosque. The interviews are here, here, here and here.
Thanks for reading and please tell other people about my work, sharing whatever you can across social media. Independent media will only survive and thrive with your support.
Until next time,
Antony
PS. I’ve been looking over my photo archive from my various journalistic trips since the 2000s and wanted to share one photo that sporadically goes viral. I took this in the occupied Jordan Valley in February 2019 where I accidentally ran into Israeli soldiers arresting Palestinians for no discernible reason. This kind of domination and callousness defines the Israeli occupation of Palestine.