By John Pickard
The Israeli economy as a whole has taken a nose-dive since the war on Gaza started. It crashed by 20% in the final quarter of last year, as hundreds of thousands of reservists were called up and the state geared up for yet another war.
Last week, the international credit agency, Moody’s, downgraded Israel for the first time in the state’s history, as a direct consequence of the war. But one part of the Israeli economy is looking at bright skies – its burgeoning arms industry.
In 2022, Israel was the ninth largest exporter of arms, an astonishing feat for a country with such a small population. Its several defence companies have revenues of more than $3.5bn annually and Israel exports to well over a hundred countries. It has a past history of exporting arms to the most vicious dictatorships, including apartheid South Africa and Pinochet’s Chile. It currently exports to states like Myanmar, but also to dictatorial Arab states, like Morocco and the United Arab Emirates.
Exports include cyber software that can be, and is, used to spy on the phones of political dissidents. Total arms exports in 2022 reached $12.5bn. According to Al Jazeera, Israel is currently the largest exporter of military drones.
A video worth watching is this twenty-five minute programme on Al Jazeera. It describes how the Israeli arms industry has used the occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, and more so today in Gaza, as a laboratory to test new weapons and systems. These Israeli companies then hawk their wares at arms fairs around world, with the boast that they are “battle-tested”.
For decades Israel has used the occupied West Bank and Gaza as testing grounds for new weapons. Rubber-coated steel bullets have been used for years – sometimes lethally – on young children throwing stones at armoured vehicles. The Al Jazeera programme shows a terrifying example of a drone, fitted with a loudspeaker, to warn Palestinian families in Arabic, not to “resist” as IDF units conduct incursions their neighbourhoods.
One of the worst incidents of wanton murder was in 2014, when four young children, between 10 and 12-years-old, playing football on a beach in Gaza, were killed. This incident, according to a researcher on the programme, involved the first ever testing of a new drone-based guidance system. The IDF later claimed that the killings were a ‘ tragic accident’ and no-one was ever punished. But the episode will not have prevented arms exporters bragging about the ‘accuracy’ of their drone-guided missile systems.
The war in Gaza, as one of the speakers in the programme suggested, is a massive “assassination laboratory”. The IDF boasts that the new ‘Smartshooter’ sighting system for rifles was “changing the face of modern warfare”. Pictures of IDF soldiers fighting in Gaza with the new rifles are all over the IDF website and the websites of military suppliers.
The IDF claims that ‘sophisticated targeting systems’ can pin-point the whereabouts of Hamas militants to eliminate them effectively. But as the Hamas raid on October 7 shows, an over-reliance on electronic and cyber intelligence leads to disaster. Without a knowledge of what is really happening on the ground, the IDF are killing at least twenty, thirty or fifty non-combatants, mostly women and children, for every Hamas militant killed.
Not that civilian casualties are an important consideration for this Israeli government. We have seen the deliberate murder, by sniper fire, of children and their parents, and others – including three Israel hostages who had escaped their Hamas captors – who were killed holding white flags. There was nothing ‘sophisticated’ in the technology around these murders.
The Al Jazeera programme pointed to a Facebook account by one of the arms manufacturers. I checked, and there it is: the Facebook page of ‘Smartshooter’. One of its posts boasts, “One of the most useful new items being demonstrated on the battlefield is the Smash sight targeting and firing system for small arms developed by Smart Shooter.”
Another post reads: “Today in the Wall Street Journal – The surge in drone warfare has prompted the Pentagon to establish a new school for US troops in Oklahoma. They’ll be utilizing the cutting edge #SMASS3000 sight to train thousands of military and government personnel from all services…”
The military prowess of Israel in the field of high-tech warfare has not gone unnoticed in the higher echelons of the UK military either. Viking Police and Military, which is linked to Smart Shooter, boasts “We’ve been working with Smartshooter and the British Army to equip UK soldiers with game-changing new tech…”
In Gaza and the West Bank, the Israeli ‘Defence’ Forces have been operating without any legal or ethical constraints for decades. The savage, one-sided genocidal war that is being conduced in Gaza today is only a logical conclusion of decades of preparation and planning. And they have been very profitable decades of preparation and planning.
The exposure of the scale of Israeli arms exports by Al Jazeera and in the book, The Palestine Laboratory, by Antony Loewenstein (one of the programme’s contributors), raise again the issue of Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel. It shows that a BDS campaign must look in both directions: not only involving trade unionists in transport and industrial workers in preventing arms sales to Israel, but in preventing the purchase by governments of the lethal arms produced by Israel and tried and tested on defenceless Palestinians.
The Al Jazeera @AJStream programme can be seen here. [Picture top is a still from the programme]
