Calls for embargoes on arms sales to Israel have appeared in recent news reports. The Canadian and British governments have announced that they will cancel existing arms sales to Israel. It was reported, although later denied, that Germany would do the same. French President Emmanuel Macron has asked for a halt in arms deliveries to Israel. Strident voices in the US have argued that the American government should also halt arms shipments to Israel.
Arms embargoes are nothing new to Israel. The US embargo on arms sales to Israel lasted until 1965, nearly two decades after the state’s founding, when 200 M-48 Patton tanks were sold to the country. As a result, Israel developed a homegrown arms industry, and the country is the ninth-largest arms exporter in the world, with a focus on advanced technology. Israel’s defense exports were worth more than $13 billion in 2023. Due to the Abraham Accords, a surprising 25% of the sales were to the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco.
For instance, the development of Israel’s highly regarded battle tank, the Merkava (Hebrew for chariot), which entered service in 1979, partially aimed to design a tank that best suited Israel’s needs while also reducing reliance on external sources. Modern tanks are sophisticated machines costing several million dollars each, and perhaps only a dozen countries in the world are capable of designing and making them. (My country, Canada, utilizes Leopard tanks manufactured in Germany.) According to Yaakov Lappin of the Alma Research and Education Center, the Merkava performed well in Gaza, despite the intense use of anti-tank missiles by Hamas, and foreign buyers are expressing interest.
Today’s battles also involve cyber attacks, unmanned aerial vehicles (drones), rockets, and missiles. Rocket attacks on civilian Israeli targets by Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza led Israel to develop the Iron Dome. Iron Dome, in service since 2011, is very effective, keeping Israeli civilian casualty numbers low during outbreaks of violent attacks from Hamas and Hezbollah.
The Iron Dome neutralizes projectiles fired from two to 40 miles away. To protect from missiles fired from longer distances, Israel, in collaboration with the US, developed two additional defensive systems: David’s Sling, which intercepts missiles fired from 25 to 190 miles away, and Arrow 2 and 3, which deal with longer-range threats (up to 1,500 miles). Arrow interceptors can also operate at very high altitudes to provide protection from warheads carrying weapons of mass destruction, such as nuclear warheads.
Missile defense systems are expensive. Each Iron Dome missile, for example, costs 50,000 dollars. A far less expensive approach to defending from rockets fired at close range (six miles or less) involves a high-energy laser beam. Aharon Lapidot (Israel Hayom) writes that this system, Iron Beam, will become operational in 2025.
What does Israel’s prowess in developing advanced weapons have to do with arms embargoes? Well, for one thing, how can an embargo be effective against a country that is substantially self-sufficient in armaments, particularly when it comes to the latest technology? However, the breathtaking hypocrisy is equally concerning.
How can the German government even consider an arms embargo against Israel? Reuters and other outlets report that Germany recently purchased the Israeli Arrow 3 missile system for 4.2 billion dollars, protection from ballistic missiles with unconventional (nuclear) warheads, a need underlined by Russian threats toward Ukraine. The Finnish president was honest. When asked to defend Finland’s recent purchase of David’s Sling, a $350 million deal signed five weeks after the October 7 Hamas attack, he replied, according to Reuters, that the decision was based solely on Finland’s defense needs.
Canada’s embargo on arms sales to Israel is bizarre, given that Canada buys much more weaponry from Israel than it sells (Udi Ezion, The Jerusalem Post). In the last decade, Canada has purchased Israeli antitank missiles and Iron Dome radar systems worth more than a billion dollars. According to an article about the Iron Dome in Newsweek, the British government has also purchased Iron Dome technology from Israel, as have the governments of Azerbaijan, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia.
As for the US, as Yoram Ettinger has pointed out in the Algemeiner Journal, the arms provided by America to Israel benefit both sides. In return for providing funding for arms, all of which must be purchased from American contractors, Israel serves as a cost-free testing ground for US defense and aerospace industries, providing many billions of dollars of value by testing, evaluating, and improving American designs of the latest fighter jets and missile systems. Indeed, the FBI utilized Israeli technology (Cellebrite) to gain access to the phone used by Donald Trump’s would-be assassin.
To appreciate the importance of the Iron Dome to Israel’s well-being, one need only look at the other war zone in the news lately; that is, of course, Ukraine, where daily Russian missile attacks result in deaths and injury to many Ukrainian civilians. There’s no Iron Dome in Ukraine.
The writer, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, University of Waterloo.