This year’s Israeli arms exhibition, ISDEF2022, hosted, once again, delegations from various countries that are infamous for their severe human rights violation record. They came to examine a wide range of weaponry and technologies, some used extensively on the Palestinian population, amidst the war raging in Europe. This industry is an inseparable part of Israel’s position as a settler-colonial militaristic regime, with the investment of about 130 countries and the active support of the US and the EU. As long as Israel’s economic base is its military and security industry, continuing the occupation in Palestine, as well as arming conflicts, borders, and oppressive regimes, will remain in Israel’s interest.
Last month, the Annual Israeli Arms and Security Export Exhibition (ISDEF2022) was held in Tel Aviv. Israeli security companies such as Elbit, Masada, Anyvision, IWI, Maspenot and others, participated in the exhibition showcasing military equipment, weaponry, as well as cyber and policing technologies. Senior members of the security industry attended, including former Chief of Staff, Moshe “Bogie” Yaalon, former head of the Israel Police, Roni Alsheikh, current head of the Home Front Command, General Ori Gordin, former head of Israel National Cyber Directorate, Buky Carmeli and founder of Avnon Group, Tomer Avnon.
The ISDEF2022 was an international festival of Israel’s arms exports, attended by official delegations from around the globe, such as from Ghana, Kenya, Zambia, Uganda, the Philippines, Greece, Morocco, Kosovo, Bosnia, Bahrain, Liberia, Nigeria, South Korea, European and North American countries and more. This list of countries includes those who have been, according to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reports, consistently committing human right’s violations. A delegation from Belarus, which is currently taking part in the war against Ukraine, also attended.
Israel is the 8th largest arms exporter in the world, but per its population size, takes the first place; it has extensive and longstanding military relations with some 130 countries that are invested in Israel’s military industry by ways of import, export, training and other means, for the past decades. Some of these countries, such as Myanmar and South Sudan, are under arms embargo by a number of western countries, due to severe human rights violations and crimes against humanity that they are committing. Since Israel’s Arms Export Laws do not place any limitations on sales in the event of human rights’ violations, Israeli companies can legally export weapons and cyber technologies to any such countries.
But this is no news. Israel has in the past sold arms to the Apartheid regime in South Africa, the military Junta in Argentina and to Rwanda, when its regime was committing genocide against the Tutsi minority. With a war raging in Europe that has killed hundreds of civilians and led to the plight of millions of Ukrainian refugees, Israel once again chooses to invest its resources and promote its international standing by displaying destructive weapons and technologies.
It is not merely a coincidence. Israel’s far-right Minister of Interior, Ayelet Shaked, recently stated in a cabinet meeting that the war in Europe will make countries realize they need well-equipped armies, and thus expressed interest in utilizing the crisis in Europe for Israeli profit. Shaked’s statement reflects a longstanding Israeli policy that goes hand in hand with deporting or refusing those who have sought refuge in Israel, deporting or refusing entry from the very wars it helped arm. In the Israeli profit equation, missiles are more important than refugees.
After all, in recent years, a considerable amount of Israel’s arms export has been directed toward militarizing state borders and targeting refugees and immigrants around the world. An example of this is Israel’s cooperation with the EU in the fields of cyber-security, surveillance and facial-recognition technologies, which are undergoing major development on the global scale, and are being utilized by more and more police forces worldwide.
From a historic perspective, Israel was established by means of expelling the native Palestinian population, and has since always maintained some form of military regime over other parts of the Palestinian population under its control. Thus, normalizing its arms export as the backbone of its economy, and the extensive web of ties the arms industry has to security forces, politics, the high-tech industry and academia in Israel — seem like a natural evolution. Militarizing physical borders, as well as the political and civil spheres as well as criminalizing refugees — these expressions of the military complex are complementary with the settler-colonial psyche, that constantly seeks to expand as well to create racial segregation from, and subjugation of, the indigenous population.
Given the reality in which merely existing as Palestinian serves as grounds for criminalization and being accused of terrorism — using the Palestinian population, particularly in the Gaza strip, as guinea pigs for state-of-the-art weaponry, is inevitable, and further advances the militarization of Israeli police forces, with Palestinian citizens of Israel serving as the link between “internal crime” and the “outside enemy”.
Israel’s bombardments of the Gaza strip in the past decade, especially in summer 2014, have greatly contributed to Israel’s arm deals. For example, only two weeks after the last major attack on Gaza in May of 2021, Israeli Aerospace Industry (IAI) closed a $200 million drones deal with an Asian country. Cyber and surveillance technologies, such as facial recognition, cell phone hacking, wiretapping etc., were also developed in Palestine as part of Israel’s surveillance and control of the Palestinian population.
This state of affairs serves two parallel goals: Preserving the subjugation of Palestinians on the one hand while profiting from the advantage of having battle-tested weapons, on the other. In 2020 alone, a third of the global cybersecurity expenditure was invested in Israeli-owned cyber companies, many of which are run by former intelligence officers and military commanders in the IDF. That same year, the Israeli arms industry made approximately 8 billion dollars in revenue – 4 times more than it did in the early 2000’s.
As long as Israel’s economy continues to rely on the military industry, its interest to preserve the occupation in Palestine and support armed conflicts globally will prevail, inevitably compromising the safety and security of its own citizens it claims to protect. Twenty-five percent of Israel’s state budget is allocated to security, not including the nuclear budget, which alone receives billions of dollars. The intersection of colonialism, militarism and global capitalism is detrimental to the weakest of communities in Israel-Palestine, and provides a slippery slope toward ever-expanding state-sanctioned violence. Groups situated lowest in the socio-economic hierarchy, such as Ethiopian, Mizrahi and former Soviet-Union Jews and of course Palestinian citizens of Israel, will be the first to suffer the consequences.
The veil of silence and ambiguity draped over Israel’s military industries, including its nuclear power, is a longstanding tradition that has been normalized and widely accepted. This silence allows the Israeli arms industry to continue operating with no supervision and in a complete lack of transparency, enabling Israel’s occupation of Palestine in exchange for military, security and nuclear agreements, backed by the US and EU. All of the above provide an irrefutable foundation to the corrupt nature of the ties between Israel and other oppressive regimes.
As Jewish Israelis, we believe that such critique of the Israeli regime is crucial in order to enable Israelis to strive toward a decolonized presence in the region, that is not based on superiority and violent expansion but rather a democratic state for all its citizens. Our demand that Israel (and other states) limit their investments in the military industry and allocate budget to health, welfare, marginalized communities and true safety and justice for all — is part and parcel of resisting the militarized settler-colonial paradigm. The international community must hold Israel accountable for its human rights violations, both as an occupier and as a dominant arms exporter.
Keren Assaf and Jonathan Hempel
Keren Assaf and Jonathan Hempel are anti-militarism activists, directors of a Database of Israel’s Military and Security Export.
“The Lab”: Israel Tests Weapons, Tactics On Captive Palestinian PopulationBy Jonathan Cook
“The reason is that there are massive profits to be made from testing Israeli military innovations on the more than four million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
According to Feldman, that trend began with Operation Defensive Shield, Israel’s re-invasion of the West Bank and Gaza in 2002, which formally reversed the process of Israeli territorial withdrawals initiated by the Oslo accords.
Following that operation, many army officers went into private business, and starting in 2005 Israel’s arms industry started to break new records, at $2 billion a year.
But the biggest surge in sales followed Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s month-long assault on Gaza in winter 2008-09, which killed more than 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis. Record sales in the wake of that attack reached $6 billion.
These military operations, including the most recent against Gaza, last year’s Pillar of Cloud, the film argues, serve as little more than laboratory-style experiments to evaluate and refine the effectiveness of new military approaches, both strategies and weaponry.
Gaza, in particular, has become the shop window for Israel’s military industries, allowing them to develop and market systems for long-term surveillance, control and subjugation of an “enemy” population.
Given that most Palestinians are now tightly contained in urban settings, traditional policies designed to maintain a distinction between civilians and fighters have had to be erased.
Amiram Levin, former head of the Israeli army’s northern command in the 1990s and now an arms dealer, is filmed at an arms industry conference observing that Israel’s goal in the territories is punishment of the local population to create greater “room for maneuver.”
Considering the effects, he comments that most Palestinians “were born to die—we just have to help them.”
https://www.wrmea.org/013-september/the-lab-israel-tests-weapons-tactics-on-captive-palestinian-population.html
American tax payer money supports this.
A few years old but still relevant: https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/cruel-experiments-israels-arms-industry
The Cruel Experiments of Israel’s Arms Industry…The idea that the Israeli arms industry benefits from the occupation through having a captive population it can test new weaponry on is now widely accepted….”The laboratory of the occupied territories is where things can be fine-tuned, they can be tested, they can be retested,” said Neve Gordon, a politics professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. “They can say, ‘Hey this was used by the IDF [Israel’s military], this must be good.’ And that helps the marketing of the goods.”….Jeff Halper, author of War Against the People, a book on Israel’s arms and surveillance technology industries, said: “Israel has kept the occupation because it’s a laboratory for weapons.”…I asked Brom if it’s true that Israeli arms companies use the fact that their products have been tested on Palestinians to gain international business. “Of course,” he replied. “Why not? Marketing [professionals] try to use any advantage and if they can use the advantage that this system was tested operationally and it worked, they will of course use it for marketing.”
Video:
How Israel uses Judaism as a settler-colonial weapon | The Electronic Intifada
“How Israel uses Judaism as a settler-colonial weapon” – The Electronic Intifada, April 23/22, featuring Ali Abunimah .
EXCERPT’:
“This reflects the consensus among Palestinians that only their resistance on the ground can prevent an Israeli takeover of al-Aqsa.“As I told Khalek, this critical context is almost always left out by the mainstream media, if they bother to report on Israel’s attacks on al-Aqsa at all.
“At its heart the situation in Palestine is not a religious conflict, but rather a struggle by the indigenous Palestinians to survive and resist the settler-colonial takeover of their land by Zionism, a violent colonial movement founded in Europe.
“Zionism and the settler-colonial state it created have always been ready to weaponize Judaism as a pretext to conquer the land of the Palestinians.”
It reminds me eerily of the awful experiments the nazis were guilty of. It is unbelievable that these zionists can even think of imitating them, and doing what the world strongly condemned the nazis for doing to their own people.
Can this be a case of the abused becoming the abuser? What kind of evil is this? Why are the US and other Western nations pretending this could not happen? Do they want the weapons that is manufactured in their nations also tested the same way by the nation they keep sending aid and weapons too?
They are complicit in Israel’s inhumane treatment of these poor people, and the viciousness they keep directing to these helpless people under their control. You can see the raw hatred and anger Israelis have for Arabs and Palestinians (despite playing victim), in the comments by hasbara trolls, and apologists, who call the Palestinian people animals, beasts, and how much they want to inflict pain and suffering on them. Many of their leaders, including Rabbis, have spoken this way too, but we are supposed to believe the hatred only comes from the other side.
:1. Experiments dealing with the survival of military personnel
Many experiments in the camps intended to facilitate the survival of Axis military personnelin the field. For example, at Dachau, physicians from the German air force and from the German Experimental Institution for Aviation conducted high-altitude experiments on prisoners to determine the maximum altitude from which crews of damaged aircraft could parachute to safety. Scientists there also carried out so-called freezing experiments on prisoners to find an effective treatment for hypothermia. Prisoners were also used to test various methods of making seawater drinkable.”
Testing their shiny new weapons on unarmed human beings, is sadistic and cruel.