Palestine as a laboratory: Aerial technologies, colonial violence and an origin of information-weaponry systems

Abstract This article positions Palestine as a laboratory in the making of modern information-weaponry systems. During the 1936–1939 Palestinian Revolt, Britain tested and refined aerial technologies that fused media, surveillance, and militaria into a new regime of colonial control. The Royal Air Force transformed the sky into a vertical field of domination—at once a medium of transmission, a platform of surveillance, and a weapon of atmospheric discipline. By triangulating earth and air, the British aimed to pin and envelop a racialized population through airborne infrastructures, prefiguring later doctrines of information war and combined-arms. Drawing on primary sources from the Mandate-era, the article demonstrates how Palestine became an information-weaponry proving ground for techniques that reverberate in Israel’s present regime. Recasting Palestine as a site of an earlier colonial experimentation, the article foregrounds its centrality to media and communication studies, a field that has often evaded its own colonial entanglements.