Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein has devoted his career to covering the genocide in Palestine. His book, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, argues that the occupied territories have become a global testing ground for advanced surveillance technologies, military repression, and media manipulation. He shows how the technologies and carceral strategies developed in apartheid Israel are tested in occupied Palestine, globally exported to other nations and police, and how they contain and surveil communities.
The Zionist occupation operates like any carceral apparatus or manufactured humanitarian crisis—it is a profitable capitalist industry entrenched in a transnational, repressive, and technological dialogue between the Zionist leadership and the heads of Western hegemonic states they secure.
These themes also surface in the work of anthropologist Shreya Subramani. Her dissertation, Carcerality in Transition: The Productive Relations of Reentry Governance in New Orleans, is a study that examines how racialized urban governance and neoliberal carceral reform impacted the political economy of reentry programs in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans.
While Loewenstein studies a military occupation in the Middle East and Subramani studies disaster capitalist redevelopment in a Southern U.S. city, both authors' projects are concerned with contested spaces where techniques of racial control are innovated, refined, and exported. Their studies depict how both New Orleans and Palestine can be understood as carceral laboratories, or spaces where the state experiments with new ways of controlling and superexploiting marginalized populations.
By combining Loewenstein's idea of the exportation of violence and Subramani's concept of "the terrain," we can better understand the shared logic that binds the settler colonial logics of Israeli occupation and New Orleans' disaster capitalist redevelopment.
The transnational analysis of both political contexts reveals the overlapping ways the violence of settler colonialism and racial capitalism maintains what Antonio Gramsci called "hegemony armored with coercion." Together, occupied Palestine and post-Katrina New Orleans clarify why settler violence is essential for colonial regimes to refute Palestinian and Native American sovereignties, in order to underdevelop, dispossess, and police the Black communities most heavily impacted by Katrina. From the South to Palestine, colonized people confront settler regimes and resettlement projects that dispossess native spaces and limit or eliminate their free movement.
State Surveillance
Loewenstein covers the ever-expanding relationship between American and Israeli security forces in the aftermath of 9/11. The War on Terror created new markets for their containment technologies, allowing the allied settler regime to "sell its acumen worldwide."
In a recent interview with Lowenstein for Scalawag, he explained, "There was a growing relationship between American police forces, military, and the Israeli army. A lot of visits back and forth, a lot of time in each other's countries, watching each other's repression." This mutual observation and training fosters, he emphasized, "the Israeli border-industrial complex," where techniques tested in Palestine migrate into U.S. policing and wider enforcement and vice-versa. Referring to his book, he noted that Israel enjoys an "unregulated surveillance." One of the most pointed observations Loewenstein made to me was that "Israel has sold a range of tools of occupation and repression that have initially been tested in Palestine on Palestinians." In his book he wrote about the NSO Group's Pegasus spyware, biometric facial recognition systems, "smart fences," and high-end drones, and how they all debuted in the occupied territories before being marketed abroad.
European Union agencies use Israeli drones to monitor the Mediterranean and to surveil rather than rescue migrants. In her investigation of the matter, international correspondent Sally Hayden found that the rise in anti-migrant sentiment in Europe has pushed EU legislators to implement policies that prevent migrants from reaching their borders, ending their efforts to save those who attempt the dangerous journeys across the Mediterranean and leaving the job of rescuing them to NGOs. This crackdown has created lucrative opportunities for transnational immigration detention, as Hayden reported that Libya and Tunisia have accepted EU funds to detain migrants, many of whom are African and Muslim, subjecting them to horrific conditions in Libyan detention centers.
The U.S.-Mexico border bristles with surveillance towers built by Israel's Elbit Systems, directly linking Gaza's militarized apartheid walls to U.S. immigration enforcement. In India, Pegasus spyware is deployed against dissidents to strengthen the Hindu ethnonationalist Prime Minister Modi's hold on power. As Loewenstein stressed, Pegasus is not a rogue operation but "an extension of Israeli foreign policy," used to cement ties with autocratic regimes.
Subramani's Carcerality in Transition showed that high-tech surveillance does not always appear in overtly militarized forms. She examined the technologies of reentry reform used in New Orleans' workforce development courts, case management software, and nonprofit-run tracking systems. Promoted as supportive measures to assist formerly incarcerated people's reentry, this technology operates as a tool of ongoing control essential to the post-Katrina "politics of movement and displacement." By measuring behavioral "success" through data-driven metrics, the state keeps formerly incarcerated individuals under perpetual observation, turning everyday life into a risk-assessment. She cited "biopolitical technologies of surveillance and bureaucratization" as key features of the prison-industrial complex.
Subramani cited the Louisiana Justice Reinvestment Initiative 2017 as an example of this paradox. Marketed as a progressive reform to lower incarceration rates by redirecting funds toward community programs, it often resulted in sticking participants in tightly monitored bureaucratic regimes. In New Orleans, this looked like mandatory program check-ins, location monitoring, and detailed personal data collection—a reverberation, albeit in civilian dress, of the biometric tracking used in occupied Palestine.
Here, Subramani elaborated the concept that a Gramscian bloc is not a space, but a terrain. In Palestine, the bloc is a militarized zone bounded by walls and checkpoints; in New Orleans, it is the neighborhood reorganized by "spot-zoning," police patrols, and a nonprofit service industry. In both, the "terrain" is politically contested and technologically re-managed, with surveillance used to secure control over populations rather than to ensure their safety. Both inevitably produce social movements and resistance.
Political Repression
Loewenstein described Israeli repression as both ideological inspiration and a practical resource for U.S. governance. He reiterated a point from his book that "the repression that Israel is utilizing against Palestinians ['provides inspiration to'] many American political and media officials." The United States' own long-standing systems of racial control, from Black Codes and Jim Crow laws to the war on drugs, map seamlessly onto occupation tactics. Loewenstein argued that the U.S. and Israel both construct racialized national security threats and challenges to justify extraordinary policing and military measures.
In a 2023 Democracy Now! interview, Loewenstein used Baruch Kimmerling's term "politicide" to describe Israel's aim of extinguishing Palestinian political existence. Following Kimmerling, he stated that there has been a sense that there's a way to crush Palestinian aspirations, their future, their horizon. This repression is globalized through Israeli military training and arms sales to regimes engaged in their own violent campaigns, such as the Guatemalan genocide of Indigenous peoples, Chile under Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship, and post-Abraham Accords autocracies, like Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.
At the same time, Subramani's work documented an albeit more insidious form of repression in New Orleans. The reentry programs in her study valorized entrepreneurialism and urged formerly incarcerated people to conform to neoliberal ideals of productivity and self-management. These programs obscure the historical roots of mass incarceration: slavery, racial capitalism, and urban dispossession—and redirect the rehabilitative focus on individual responsibility.
Together, occupied Palestine and post-Katrina New Orleans clarify why settler violence is essential for colonial regimes to refute Palestinian and Native American sovereignties, in order to underdevelop, dispossess, and police the Black communities most heavily impacted by Katrina.
Opportunities offered under the banner of carceral reform re-inscribe racial hierarchies, constraining the prospect of collective liberation. Further, Gramsci's phrase "hegemony armored with coercion" captures the common dynamic, which is governance by consent, sustained through ideological means, and backed by the latent or actual threat of force. In Palestine, this takes the form of heavily armed soldiers, quotidian settler violence, and the constant existential threats of "raids of homes and bedrooms." In New Orleans, it appears as reincarceration for program noncompliance, intensified policing in gentrifying areas, and punitive measures made against the unhoused.
The question of Indigenous self-sovereignty underlines a connection here between the scholars. (Loewenstein p. 140, Subramani p. 186). Palestinian claims to national sovereignty are systematically denied by the Israeli state, just as the plantation state denies the agency of the historically oppressed Black New Orleans natives. Indigenous communities in Louisiana, including the Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw are displaced by coastal erosion, fossil fuel extraction, and redevelopment projects. In both places, repression serves the settler colonial project of securing land and political space for one group by undermining the autonomy of another.
Media Manipulation
For Loewenstein, Western media bias toward Israel is both a structural fact and a product of organized influence. He remarked that, "for decades, many pro-Israel organizations [have influenced] American media outlets, and many journalists within American media [are] rather sympathetic to Israel." The New York Times, for example, is emblematic of this. He stated that "many New York Times correspondents have either served in the IDF or have family [who] served in the IDF, and it's inconceivable that you would have a Palestinian journalist with a family involved in Hamas or Hezbollah."
This asymmetry reflects not only individual bias but institutional gatekeeping over which affiliations are acceptable in journalism.
Loewenstein further noted both in his book, and to me, that "social media is challenging that, and public opinion polls have shown a fundamental shift." In other words, the younger and more diverse audiences, particularly in the U.S., aren't as inclined to accept pro-Israel accounts at face value. Digital platforms also provide alternative networks for Palestinian opinions. Nevertheless, Israel invests heavily in propaganda, with spending projected at $150 million in 2025, to maintain its narrative advantage. Loewenstein puts it simply, "social media [creates] a warzone." "Censorship and self-censorship," he wrote, "are also part of the media landscape." Loewenstein recalled the attempts by the Israel lobby in Australia to censor his book and condemn him in Parliament. Surveillance tools like Pegasus have been deployed against journalists in Morocco, India, and Mexico, curbing press freedom and deterring investigative reporting.
Subramani's analysis, at the same time, addressed media manipulation in a broader sense, through the performance of reform. She critiqued the "aspirational ethics" of progressive urbanism, arguing that reentry programs construct narratives of personal redemption that obscure structural violence. By framing success as a matter of personal responsibility, these narratives erase systemic critique and force individuals to internalize blame when they fail to meet often violent neoliberal standards, explained Subramani.
In short, in both Palestine and New Orleans, narrative control works in tandem with physical repression. In Palestine, the dominant story is one of counterterrorism and security; in New Orleans, it is one of disaster capitalism marketed as benevolent rehabilitation and opportunity. Both are examples of what Marco Nocente calls "carceral storytelling"—or the discursive practices that conceal ongoing violence while legitimizing the apparatus of control.
Epilogue and Further Reading
Loewenstein's The Palestine Laboratory and Subramani's Carcerality in Transition show how Palestine and New Orleans operate as interconnected carceral laboratories and serve as testing grounds for new technologies of surveillance, repression, and media control. These are not isolated phenomena, but products of what Cedric Robinson called racial capitalism. The carceral formations found in settler colonialism make for illiberal and immoral models of governance.
Johan Galtung's concept of structural violence and Gramsci's idea of hegemony, armored with coercion, explained how domination is both systemic and coercive. Michael T. Klare's Supplying Repression and Marco Nocente's Narratives on Prison Governmentality further illustrated how technological changes in punishment reinforce state power, even under the guise of reform.
Elizabeth Ellis's The Great Power of Small Nations highlighted unresolved carceral geographies and indigenous resistance to them. She reminded us that struggles for sovereignty have long contested state violence. Baruch Kimmerling's Politicide and Jake Johnston's Aid State discussed how colonial erasure, foreign intervention, and elite capture are yet more tools of carceral governance, stretching from Palestine and New Orleans to Haiti. Furthermore, class politics and class privilege resonate just as much as race politics in each respective case study, as they all contain aspects of capitalist modernity.
Together, all these works map a transnational system where control, profit, and repression circulate. Resisting it means forging solidarity across these terrains, not blocs, of struggle. The themes of surveillance, repression, and media manipulation are grounded in both troublesome histories and resistance aimed at collective liberation.
