Neither oranges nor StartUp Nation: everyone wants Israeli weapons

Once upon a time there was a country known as the Land of Milk and Honey. A biblical image that in the mythical times of the creation of the State of Israel became a folk song (Eretz Zavat Halav U’dvash, which was even recorded by Nina Simone for her album Nina at the Village Gate, from 1962). Years of famous wars with impossible victories, such as the Six Days and Yom Kippur, where bearded and long-haired soldiers fresh out of the kibbutz or the university went out to fight so as not to lose because in that they literally lost their own lives and the of the young nation. With no less mythical leaders such as Golda Meir, Itzjak Rabin or Moshe Dayan. A socialist economy, an austere society that prides itself on exporting oranges.

But in the last decades of the last century all that was changing. Came the first right-wing government led by Menahem Begin, ending the era of social benefits and controlled poor capitalism, the disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the departure of Yasser Arafat and his brand of spectacular terrorism and international, the intifadas and the opening up of the occupation and the sour relationship with the Palestinians, the cold peace with Egypt and Jordan, the end of the Cold War and the consolidation of the alliance with the United States and the task of patrolling the Middle East.

Now, conflicts like the Six Day War are the stuff of the history books, the Yom Kippur War is remembered only when declassified documents are exhumed. A military conflict with Egypt or Jordan is unimaginable, not even with Syria. If before Israel feared Nasser’s armed forces or old Assad’s tanks, now the main concern of its military chiefs are the almost handmade rockets that Hamas and the Palestinian Jihad fire from time to time from the Gaza Strip and the more sophisticated ones from Hezbollah. in Lebanon, all with the seal of approval and momentum stamped from Tehran.

No more fighting soldier against soldier, tank against tank, fighter plane against fighter plane, the fight is against fanatical militants with much less fanatical leaders and projectiles that can reach Jerusalem, Tel Aviv or Beer Sheva in less than ten minutes. This is why the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) now looks less like a traditional army than a police force of the future. It targets Iran with its state-of-the-art F-35 planes and spy satellites, on the one hand, and watches over the Palestinians with drones, the most sophisticated missiles that can be made today, and an ultimate array of spy and control devices, for the other. That is, the arsenal of the new century. And many of those systems are developed and produced in the country. And they are exported.

A few decades ago, governments in Jerusalem printed posters of young men picking fruit in fields that had once been deserted and put out press releases announcing new destinations for their sales of oranges and other citrus fruits abroad. Now, as happened in mid-June last, the big news is a new record, but for arms exports: more than 12.5 billion dollars in weapons manufactured in Israel placed in 2022.

As highlighted at that time by Sibat, the Ministry of Defense board in charge of supervising exports and international cooperation in this field, sales jumped to 12,500 million last year from 11,400 million of the previous record set in 2021. In the 2011 period -2016, the number of arms sales abroad only oscillated between 5,600 and 7,500 million dollars.

“Demand for Israeli defense solutions has grown in the past year, which is manifested in the sharp increase in agreements” with the defense ministries of other nations, said reserve Brigadier General Yair Kulas, head of the Sibat.

A piece of information in the report that would have been impossible to imagine until a few decades ago said that close to a quarter of exports went to Arab countries that are part of the peace process known as the Abraham Accords. Always according to the numbers of the Ministry of Defense, countries such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Morocco acquired in 2022 some 2,960 million dollars in weapons made in Israel (24 percent), against 853 million in 2021 (just nine percent).

The most popular products designed and manufactured by Israeli companies last year were drones, which accounted for about a quarter of all business, followed by missiles and air defense and interception systems, which accounted for another 19 percent of the total.

Drones and other unmanned aerial devices have been the object of desire of many foreign governments for a long time. They are ideal elements for control and surveillance and can be lethal when loaded with explosives. It is not hard to imagine the French authorities wanting to deploy drones (surveillance only, at least for now) over the banlieues where the riots of a few weeks ago originated. And all those gadgets that can be seen in the fictional operations of the Fauda series in the West Bank and other hostile settings.

Also the interception teams, such as the Iron Dome, are a product of the conflict with the Palestinians, in this case with an emphasis on the projectiles that are periodically fired from Gaza. In fact, it is very common to read on pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli websites that the territories of Judea and Samaria and the strip over the Mediterranean controlled by Hamas are the “testing ground” for the new weapons of the IDF. “Israel’s leaders often hide the goals of their violent wars under various pretexts such as preemptive actions and other justifications they try to promote to the world,” noted, for example, an inflamed article on one such site, the Middle East Monitor. “Israeli weapons tests in the territories add a new and shameful dimension to the ongoing Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people,” the author of the note added angrily.

Outrage aside, the reporter has a point. For example, a report by the Israeli website Ynet revealed that the IDF used for the first time in the recent operation in Jenin at least six of the drones known as “loitering munitions”, disturbing devices loaded with explosives that can fly over enemy territory until finally They find their target, hit it, and pounce to blow it up with high precision and low collateral damage.

In July 2021, the Israeli press claimed that the IDF used drone “swarms” for the first time to collect combat intelligence in Gaza during the operation, carried out in May of that year against Hamas and Palestinian Jihad forces. “We carried out more than thirty missions with the ‘swarms’ of drones, which collected precise intelligence and helped other drones carry out attacks against the selected targets,” a military source quoted anonymously by the Israeli portal had explained at that time. Walla.

In addition to drones and the Iron Dome short-range interception system (which Ukraine has been asking for without luck since the start of the Russian invasion in February last year, and which Jerusalem avoids due to its ambiguous relationship with Russia, the country it in practice controls the airspace in Syria and allows for raids by Israeli planes against pro-Iranian forces from time to time), another new star is David’s Honda anti-aircraft equipment.

Facing threats from the neighboring Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon, to those a little further afield in Iran, the Israelis developed a multi-layered protective umbrella starting with Iron Dome, which can shoot down projectiles fired from close range. in a few seconds, it goes through David’s Honda, to intercept medium-range rockets, and is completed with the sophisticated Arrow system, designed to destroy ballistic missiles in the air.

All these devices are being manufactured by one of the three main national arms and aviation companies: Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), Elbit Systems and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. Considering that this industry always works supervised or in conjunction with the government and the IDF, it is common for the main devices to carry the signature of more than one company. The Iron Dome, for example, has Rafael as its main producer, but with the participation of IAI, controlled by the State and which also manufactures the Barak anti-aircraft missiles. Elbit is a great specialist in drones (like those of the Hermes family), the Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 come out of the IAI plant and David’s Honda project involves the three companies.

With this catalog available, it came as no surprise that, when the 2022 record was announced, the Israeli military authorities pointed out that behind the huge jump in the turnover of the defense establishment was the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the fears they used in the rest of Europe.

Among the clearest signs of this sudden interest in rearmament, especially on the defensive front, in mid-June the German Parliament concluded an item of 560 million euros to advance the purchase of Arrow 3 missiles, in an operation whose full amount will reach around 4 billion euros. For its part, the Finnish government announced in April this year, at the same time it joined NATO, its interest in acquiring batteries from David’s Honda. And in May it was the turn of Estonia, which wants to buy loitering ammunition.

“Israel manufactures almost everything that enters a battlefield,” pointed out an article in the Jerusalem Post, commenting on the export record and pointing out some cutting-edge products such as Saar corvettes (which are assembled in German shipyards), air interceptors ( projects in which US companies such as Boeing or Raytheon also participate by law) and Merkava tanks (which, apparently, could be exported for the first time), and bestsellers such as cybernetic systems and drones.

The author of the note, Amotz Asa-El, recalled an anecdote from the father of the Israeli state, David Ben-Gurion, who, the story goes, shared in 1936 with his advisers his main fear, an all-out war with Arab neighbors, a a situation that was not going to resemble the pogroms faced by the Jews in Europe but a total “annihilation”. The attackers, Ben-Gurion told his advisers, “will not only be the Arabs of the Land of Israel, but also the people of Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and they have planes and cannons.” Quoting historian Michael Bar-Zhoar, the article completed the story by putting this prescient phrase in the mouth of the Zionist leader: “Israel has to do two things: create an army capable of withstanding a major attack and establish a proper industry” of weapons.

“Back in 1936, that ‘proper industry’ meant making bullets and grenades, a minimal menu that in 1948 was expanded to mortars and a version of the British Sten submachine gun,” Asa-El wrote. That was then. Now, Israel’s defense industry is among the ten largest in the world.”

Many things have happened since the days of oranges and folk songs about the land from which milk and honey flow.

*Former correspondent in Washington and Israel. He writes about US and Middle Eastern issues and trends / @mraimon.