Antony Loewenstein is an Australian independent investigative journalist, author, and documentary filmmaker. Born in Melbourne, he is the descendant of German-Jewish refugees who fled Nazi persecution in the late 1930s. Between 2016 and 2020, he was based in East Jerusalem as a foreign correspondent, reporting on Middle Eastern geopolitics, military technology, and digital surveillance for outlets including The Guardian, The New York Times, and Al Jazeera.
Loewenstein is the author of several investigative books on state power, war privatization, and foreign policy. His 2006 book, “My Israel Question,” examined political Zionism and media discourse within Diaspora communities, sparking extensive debate in Australian public life and leading him to co-found Independent Australian Jewish Voices (IAJV) in 2007. He subsequently published “Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe” (2015), which analyzed the commercialization of warfare, detention centers, and military aid, and was later adapted into a feature documentary film.
In 2023, Loewenstein published “The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World,” which won the 2024 Walkley Book Award for Journalism. The book documents how military equipment, border control systems, autonomous targeting tools, and surveillance software—such as the NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware—are tested in the Occupied Palestinian Territories before being marketed globally to autocratic and democratic governments under the label of field-tested security solutions.
Citing his family background during the Holocaust, Loewenstein advocates for global arms embargoes, foreign policy accountability, and the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. Through his writing and international lectures, he argues against conflating criticism of Israeli state policies with antisemitism, calling for an end to the occupation and the establishment of equal democratic rights for Palestinians and Israelis.