How Palestine Became the Testing Ground for Israeli Military Exports
The Israeli defense industry is making record profit by selling weapons it used on Palestinians.
The Sikh farmers had been protesting in the Indian state of Punjab for months.
Demanding a fair price for their crops, they had become a thorn in the side of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, blocking major highways and frequently clashing with police. One of these clashes led to the death of a 21-year-old man, Subhkaran Singh, last February.
When I went to Punjab in September 2024, I found thousands of farmers encamped on a major highway, listening to speeches by their leaders and refusing to budge.
The farmers told me about an incident when, at the time Singh was killed, they were attacked by police and paramilitary officers firing metal pellets. While the demonstrators looked for protection, tear gas was dropped from drones, suffocating many of them. Protest leaders showed me footage of the attacks and burned tear gas canisters.
What the farmers couldn’t have known back then was that the Indian government’s repressive response had a direct connection to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Indian officials had visited Israel in May 2018, near the start of the Great March of Return in Gaza, when, in over a year’s time, Israel killed or maimed thousands of Palestinians. The delegation learned from Israel as it pioneered the tactic of dropping tear gas from drones on protesters. As Palestinians peacefully opposed a suffocating siege on their territory, Israel took it as an opportunity to showcase its new weapons.
These revelations in India fit into a larger pattern of Israeli arms, strategies, surveillance, and border tech that is now spreading to every corner of the planet.
A Booming Industry
I’ve spent more than a decade investigating the Israeli weapons industry and its proliferation worldwide. This was the subject of my best-selling book, The Palestine Laboratory, podcast, and now film series with Al Jazeera English, made with the British director Dan Davies.
The aim of the two-part Al Jazeera series is to show how the Palestine lab, where Israel tests the forms of repression and surveillance on a captive Palestinian population and then sells it globally, works.
One of the most disturbing aspects of this panopticon-style surveillance is the extent to which it impacts daily life for Palestinians.