Profiting Off War: A Look Into The World Of Israeli Arms Dealing

[Purveyor]

War in Israel has become a constant source of profit, with the West Bank and Gaza Strip used as experimental sites for arms dealers backed up by intellectuals. These are the protagonists of ‘The Lab,’ a new film by Yotam Feldman. In its exceptional interviews, the film reveals that the image of the arms dealer operating in the shadows is a thing of the past.

By Eilat Maoz (Translated from Hebrew by Guy Eliav, edited by Ami Asher)

A laboratory is a site where scientists conduct experiments under controlled conditions – a space where large-scale phenomena such as hurricanes are miniaturized and tiny objects such as microbes are magnified to observe complex processes and learn how to control them. A laboratory is where the world is divided into predictable phenomena and observable objects. Where knowledge is created and later disseminated, making the world better understandable and better organized, through the lens of the knowledge we have accumulated about it.

Yotam Feldman’s new film, “The Lab,” introduces us to the men who made the Occupied Palestinian Territories the largest and most advanced weapon-testing laboratory: arms dealers and developers, defense experts and industry leaders. Despite the urge to compare it to other Israeli documentaries which have recently exposed the secret lives of the people running the occupation (such as “The Law in These Parts” and “The Gatekeepers”), “The Lab” is above all a film about knowledge. Security knowledge created in the flexible zone between two dimensions separated by a very blurred line: the military and the market.

On the first plot level, “The Lab” follows Naomi Klein’s claim that the main reason for Israel’s economic prosperity at a time of political instability and global crisis lies not in its outstanding human capital that enables it to smoothly escape the negative economic repercussions, but rather the continuation of regional conflicts. In The Shock Doctrine, she shows that most of Israel’s economic growth can be attributed to the huge defense industry, which has become Israel’s main export industry, particularly following 9/11 (In 2012, Israel was ranked the world’s sixth largest arms exporter). She also claims that the West Bank and Gaza Strip are not only the world’s largest open-air prisons, but also the world’s largest test-labs, where “Palestinians are no longer just targets. They are guinea pigs.”

For Feldman, recent military campaigns, primarily Operation Cast Lead, illustrate the transformed nature of war: from a temporary disturbance involving damage to life and property, to a fixed, profitable state of affairs. Thus, the film joins other voices seeking to assess the profits derived from the occupation, and not its alleged costs to the Israeli society. The film’s true power is revealed, however, not when it shows up uninvited to closed events in order to confront the profiteers, but in the exceptional interviews held with them. These reveal that every arms dealer has a worldview that is quickly unfolded in front of the camera. Warmongers, it seems, no longer operate in the shadows. If arms are sold in the open market, they should be treated like any other commodity, and since what is hidden cannot be sold, the veil of secrecy must be quickly removed from the security market, turning the occupation from a disgraceful well-known secret into a selling point.

MORE...

http://972mag.com/economic-strength-is-more-than-a-rhetorical-pun-its-a-work-plan/76488/

[delrem]

1. There's a whole lot of deja-vu going on here.

I like your posts, Purveyor. Many of them, like this one, send me off on google hunts.

So there I found myself after following your link, googling Shimon Naveh and finding the interview:
http://972mag.com/wars-on-gaza-have-become-part-of-israels-system-of-governance-an-interview-with-filmmaker-yotam-feldman/
There, after *incredible* befuddlement I get to the line:
"One of the protagonists in the film is Shimon Naveh, who implemented critical theories by Deleuze and Guattari "

At this point I understand the source of my befuddlement. Deleuze.
What you've got here is sentences meaning gibberish, but containing techno-babble terms, surrounded by a marshmallow of "philosophy". This is pretty bad stuff.

Hopefully Feldman didn't get sucked into that mindfuck.

Back to earth:
Does it not seem that the US has the identical military/economic strategy, so it's impossible to say who is leading and who is following?