Iran Press/ America: 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.
The arms 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," anti-militarism activists Keren Assaf and Jonathan Hempel believe.
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 rights 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 an arms embargo by several 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 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 using expelling the native Palestinian population and has since always maintained some form of the 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 the summer of 2014, have greatly contributed to Israel’s arms deals. For example, only two weeks after the last major attack on Gaza in May of 2021, the 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 2000s.
As long as Israel’s economy continues to rely on the military industry, its interest to preserve the occupation in Palestine and supporting armed conflicts globally will prevail, inevitably compromising the safety and security of the 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 for the corrupt nature of the ties between Israel and other oppressive regimes.
The international community must hold Israel accountable for its human rights violations, both as an occupier and as a dominant arms exporter.
Source: Mondoweiss website
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