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Israeli Arms Exports

Israel's defense exports are coordinated and regulated through SIBAT - the Foreign Defense Assistance and Defense Export Organization - which is run by the Ministry of Defense. SIBAT's tasks include licensing all defense exports as well as marketing products developed for the IDF, from electronic components to missile boats and tanks. Each year, SIBAT publishes a defense sales directory, an authoritative guide to what the industry has to offer.

Israel exports a wide range of defense products including ammunition, defense electronics, small arms, artillery, armored vehicles, and sophisticated land and air defense systems. During 2007-2011, sensors, armored vehicles, and missiles were the three most exported defense goods, with market shares of 32%, 22.8%, and 22.8% respectively.

Owing to the high priority given the defense sector, Israel possesses the prerequisite of an advanced industrial base able to keep abreast of technological innovation. The military industries possess the skilled manpower necessary for undertaking major arms development projects. Israel is regarded as one of only six developing countries with across-the-board capabilities, meaning the ability to produce each of the four chief types of weapons systems: aircraft, small naval vessels, armored fighting vehicles and missiles.

Israel has the most sophisticated arms industry among the LDCs. Despite its highly sophisticated conflict environment, the Israel Military Industries (IMI) is able to meet nearly all its defense needs, by type if not by quantity, except in the area of tank engines and aircraft. Further, its extensive arms production industry was able to generate over a billion dollars annually in export sales in the 1980s, second only to Brazil in the Third World.

Israel designed and built an innovative tank, the Merkava (Chariot) Mk-1, which has a laser range finder and ballistic computer. Israel also makes its own armored wheeled vehicles, an array of howitzers, and missiles-includingair-to-air, surface-to-surface, and antiship missiles. It produces the Kfir jetfighter and developed a new generation of aircraft, the Lavi; it also made a STOL (short takeoff and landing) vehicle, and a utility helicopter. Israel's remotely piloted vehicle (the Scout) became an important part of its Lebanon Campaign.Israel also manufactures patrol boats and electronic and ECM (electroniccounter measure) equipment. Its Uzi submachine gun is world renowned, and its Galil assault rifle enjoys wide sales abroad.

Israel's deficiencies of size, industrial raw materials and economic trading power limit itsdevelopment into a major national defense manufacturer and exporter. Yet by the 1980s the Israelis had carved a modest niche for themselves in the international arms field by maximizing the few comparative advantages available to them, such as their cumulative battlefield experience with Western or indigenous defense systems against Soviet-supplied Arab armies. Israel ranks among the important second tier of arms producers and suppliers after the firsttier, which includes the United States, the Soviet Union and France. In the 1980s both the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) listed Israel as a top Third World defense exporter along with China and Brazil. Foreign security assistance by Israel during the 1980s was unofficially estimated at averaging close to $1 billion annually, roughly equivalent to one-quarter of total industrial export.

The country's status in the conventional arms trade is far from assured. The ambitious program of indigenous militarization centering on local research, design, production andexport of sophisticated weaponry threatened by two negative trends. At home, the price of this domestic arms-making process is becoming prohibitive. Arguably the overseas market could compensate by helping to recoup the initial startup costs of these defense projects. Except that Israel, like other aspiring Third Word arms merchants, is finding the conventional weapons trade increasingly competitive and challenging.

Israel's place in the global defense field is easily and often misrepresented. Contrary to the popular impression fostered by the media, Israel's role in the international weapons trade is at best marginal. However, the domestic implications are of an entirely different magnitude. Here the role of military manufacture and export is a major factor. Jerusalem views defense production as a pillar of national security. Armament made in Israel figures in maintaining a high state of military preparedness, providing for emergency stockpiles this arms capability helped preserve Israel's slim quantitative edge against the Arab threat, making the strategy of deterrence credible by projecting a clear image of military prowess and defensive strength.

Israeli arms sales have enhanced this small country's influence, prestige and contacts abroad. Defense support has gained diplomatic as well as commercial access to regions and countries outside the immediate Arab confrontation zone for a country like Israel whose foreign contacts were rather restricted, defense sales can provide an extra margin for independent diplomatic maneuver. It is impressive how much political mileage Israel has derived from the arms export drive, aside from other security and economic considerations.

Israeli defense industry exports amounted to $12.5 billion in 2022, and were expected to rise in 2023, just as they are expected to flourish globally due to the impact of the Gaza war. But investors are not only pumping money into multinational arms companies, but also into small up-and-coming companies, many of which are based in Israel, and which manufacture, among other things, automatic machine guns, electronic hacking programs, dive aircraft, and tanks enhanced with artificial intelligence, all of which are technologies that are being considered. It is profitable in Silicon Valley.

The 2023 Israeli war in Gaza was a display of Israeli expertise in the field of weapons, and the occupation army does not hide this, and therefore customers will not need to wait until the end of the war, because the new weapons are displayed on the army’s official website, with a brief technical explanation stating that the “users” are happy with their experiences in the field.

With this summary, the Media Part website opened - an analysis written by Gwennael Lenoir - in which he pointed out the use of new weapons and algorithms for the first time in the Gaza Strip , and reviewed some of the new military equipment that Israeli companies will present at arms exhibitions, such as the “Iron Sting” mortars with a new laser guidance system or GPS.

The writer pointed to the shoulder-fired Hewlett-Yatid missiles, for areas with high population density, which were tested for the first time in the Strip, such as the Negev 7 machine gun, the Ethan armored vehicle, the Smash telescope, and the Perry pocket, which bears the name of one of the “kibbutzim” (settlements) in which The attack on October 7, 2023 affected it, as well as other equipment.

The Israeli press reports on the army's website, and even the Jerusalem Post journalist who turned into a sales representative - according to the author - adds American weapons to the catalog of "innovations" such as unguided "dumb bombs" that were converted into "smart" bombs thanks to a guidance system based on Global Positioning System, invented by Boeing to be added to very powerful bombs of up to 900 kilograms.

Lowenstein: "For years, Israel has been testing and experimenting with a large number of repressive techniques on Palestinians in Palestine, to then be promoted on battlefields around the world, and Gaza is often seen as the ultimate testing ground for weapons of destruction and surveillance. Accordingly, the Gaza Strip has become a public display for the Israeli army, and a showroom for the military industry and its innovations, and the weapons that Israel purchases from its foreign suppliers, especially the United States.""

“This is not the first time that Gaza has become a selling point, but what is new is the timing during the war on Gaza,” he added. says Shir Hever, an Israeli economist and leader of the BDS campaign.

Anthony Lowenstein, author of the 2023 “Palestinian Laboratory” article, explains: “For years, Israel has been testing and experimenting with a large number of repressive techniques on Palestinians in Palestine, to then be promoted on battlefields around the world, and Gaza is often seen as a testing ground.” "The ultimate weapon of destruction and surveillance."

The Israeli army admitted - as the writer says - two days ago that it pumped “large quantities of water” into the tunnels used by the Islamic Resistance Movement ( Hamas ) in the Gaza Strip, in order to “neutralize” them and ensure that access to drinking water in the Strip is not affected. The occupation army said in a statement that “various tools have been developed to send large quantities of water into the tunnels (...) in a professional manner based on soil analysis,” indicating that the method is only used in places where it is “appropriate.”

The Israeli army presents its new weapons as aiming to achieve greater efficiency and “humanity,” and thus the army’s website praises the Iron Sting missile as allowing it to target and strike cells and vehicles with surgical precision, and it can enter through windows in a way that reduces collateral damage.

However, the author points out that the current war has led to a massacre and huge losses, with the death toll exceeding 26,000, most of them women and children. However, it is impossible to attribute the scale of human losses and destruction to specific munitions, because Israel used all of its air, land and sea weapons, and even because of military censorship. severe, in addition to the secrecy of major companies.

CNN revealed an assessment by the Office of the US Director of National Intelligence, in which it said that 40 to 45% of the 29,000 munitions dropped during the first two months of the war on the Gaza Strip were unguided, and perhaps the use of high-powered bombs would explain this. Partly due to the staggering number of civilian deaths and injuries, the IDF itself has at least once admitted to using “inappropriate” munitions.

The writer pointed out that a new system for determining targets using artificial intelligence may be another explanation for these huge losses. In something similar to science fiction movies, the system “grinds” astronomical amounts of information at lightning speed and presents “targets” in real time, in numbers larger than “could be possible.” “For tens of thousands of officers to do it,” according to an officer cited in Yuval Avraham’s investigation published in the Israeli magazine +972.

"This is the first time that artificial intelligence has been used as a weapon," Hever asserts. It is a war run by this technology, and we must ask ourselves who is controlling whom. When a soldier is given many targets to “deal with” and he only has to check one thing, which is the gender of the target, if it is a woman he can not shoot, but if it is a man we tell him that The shot can cause 80 collateral casualties, it "shoots anyway."

Although artificial intelligence is the advanced level of technology on which the military industry sector has built its reputation in recent decades, this high technology was not able to prevent Hamas fighters from crossing the security wall, but this failure should not harm the sector, major companies, and the Israeli space industries. Famous for its marches, it is widely used for targeted assassinations.

Ben Eliezer: When Israel sells a weapon, it is already tested. This is why the demand is so strong, bringing billions of dollars into the country

Hever says, “I thought this failure of technology would lead to its rejection, but what Israeli companies are publishing is exactly the opposite,” as they claim that they have many customers, and they are mainly Western countries such as Sweden in the first place, then come Germany, the United States, Britain and Italy.

The writer concluded by recalling the film “The Laboratory” 11 years ago, about the Israeli military industry, its position in the economy, and its connections to the political class, where General Benjamin Ben Eliezer (Minister of Trade and Industry at the time) confirms, “When Israel sells a weapon, it is already tested. This is the reason for the very strong demand.” "It brings in billions of dollars," but the difference today is the number of Palestinian lives lost in the rubble of Gaza.

Among those whose shares rose sharply at the end of 2023 were emerging companies whose weapons were used by the army in Gaza. After all, military technology is one of the few industries that thrives during wartime. Many of the marketed weapon systems were tested for the first time in Gaza, said Noam Perry, a researcher at the American Friends Service Committee, in an interview with Magazine+972, an organization that tracks weapons used by Israel in Gaza. But while multinational arms companies were keen to remain relatively out of the Gaza events (due to protests over the war and prosecutions in the Court of Justice), small up-and-coming Israeli companies - such as Smart Shooter - launched extensive promotional campaigns for their products, capitalizing on the close and ambiguous relationship between the two countries. Defense industries and the high-tech sector, Goodfriend adds.

This relationship is not unique; Silicon Valley was - in the beginning - little more than an arm of the Pentagon, but the connections in Israel turned into a brand. The blurry connections between the army and private defense industry companies have made the military strategy develop, not according to the real and immediate needs of the army, but rather according to the needs of investors, to whom entrepreneurs present a rosy picture of weapons systems, electronic espionage, and artificial intelligence that promise a time when highly intelligent machines will replace humans.

Thus, just days after the October 7 attack, Aharon Kaplowitz established a venture fund called “Ventures1948,” and told reporters that the ground invasion of Gaza was an unprecedented opportunity to test new weapon systems on the battlefield, in the name of protecting Israel, of course. But the promise that technology would make shooting operations more accurate has collapsed on the rocks of reality. Swooping planes did not prevent wiping entire neighborhoods off the map with bombs weighing about a ton each, nor did sniper rifles equipped with artificial intelligence technology prevent the killing of innocents, just as the use of guidance systems did not prevent "One minute" without killing 10,000 Palestinian children.