The September 11, 2001, terror attacks on New York and Washington turbocharged Israel’s defence sector and internationalised the war on terror that the Jewish state had been fighting for decades. On the night of the attack, former Prime Minister Netanyahu was asked on American TV what the attacks had meant for relations between the two nations. “It’s very good,” he immediately said. He quickly corrected himself: “Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.” He thought that the assault might “strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive haemorrhaging of terror.” Seven years later, in April 2008, Netanyahu gave a speech at Israel’s Bar Ilan University and reiterated the same message. “We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq,” he said. These events had “swung American public opinion in our favour.”
Netanyahu was only partly right because he likely did not consider, or even care, that the Western public might become increasingly repulsed by indefinite occupation. Still, by 2004 Israel’s economy had recovered from the dot-com crash of 2000 and the Palestinian Intifada, which had scared away international investors. For years Israeli companies did not bother holding their annual meetings in Israel because so few foreigners showed up.
But Israel had products that the world wanted. Its arms industry fully embraced the homeland security sector, bringing in billions of dollars in revenue for missiles, drones, and surveillance equipment. The message was unambiguous: “We have been fighting a War on Terror since our birth. We’ll show you how it’s done.”
After the 2008 global financial crisis, Israel’s resilience in the face of economic collapse was spun into a narrative of unique self-determination. It was best summariz\sed in a 2009 book released by the Council on Foreign Affairs called Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, written by Dan Senor, a former advisor to the US occupation in Iraq, and his brother-in-law Saul Singer, former editorial page editor of the Jerusalem Post. The thesis was that Israel thrived due to a range of factors but principally forced conscription. The IDF was a model for the world, the authors claimed, because of the close relationship between the Israeli government and tech start-ups, the former funding and supporting the latter.
In a 2014 interview, Singer expanded on the book’s thesis, explaining that Israel is itself a start-up: “That is an idea that took a lot of drive and risk-taking to turn into a reality.” Furthermore, Israel is a “country of [mostly Jewish] immigrants, and immigrants tend to be more driven and willing to take risks.” In countless interviews over many years, Singer and Senor spent time talking about “innovation” but little about what was actually being developed to generate the biggest profits: defence companies whose primary aim was to monetize the occupation and sell that experience in controlling another people to a global market. In one section of Start-Up Nation, the authors gush over the IDF and American military, believing that both in different ways provide a model for leadership and success, completely ignoring the realities of what these organizations have done in the last decades, particularly in occupying Muslim lands. “While a majority of Israeli entrepreneurs were profoundly influenced by their stint in the IDF,” they write, “a military background is hardly common in Silicon Valley or widespread in the senior echelons of corporate America.”
The collective belief among Israeli Jews in supporting a Jewish-majority state was supposedly essential for developing world-class weapons and technology. One Israeli entrepreneur, Jon Medved, compared this unfavourably to the US: “When it comes to US military resumes, Silicon Valley is illiterate. What a waste of kick-ass leadership talent coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan.”
This kind of thinking led to more than a decade of Netanyahu pushing for Israel to become one of the world’s leading tech developers, with expertise in weapons, surveillance and cyber tools. Both the Israeli government and private companies promoted their products as effectively battle-tested on Palestinians. For example, Israeli technology was sold as the solution to unwanted populations at the US-Mexico border where the Israeli company Elbit was a major player in repelling migrants. European governments also wanted to monitor refugees, so Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) drones were employed for the task.
The start-up nation ideology requires constant marketing, however, because the competition is fierce. In 2022 IAI launched an advertising campaign to lure potential new recruits from the often better-paying tech sector. The ads aimed to convince young Israelis that working in the defence sector was the most ethical decision they could make. Not everyone was convinced, with one person tweeting in response: “They [IAI] should have just written: ‘Instead of writing code that will get thousands of people addicted to poker [when working in tech], come work with the IAI and write code that will kill those very same people with guided missiles, drones and smart munitions’.”
“Cyber is a great business,” Netanyahu told Tel-Aviv University’s seventh annual cybersecurity conference in 2017. “It’s growing geometrically because there is never a permanent solution, it’s a never-ending business.” A Forbes contributor, Gil Press, who attended the event, later wrote that after briefings from Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he concluded that the success of Israel’s surging cyber sector was due to massive government support and placing the military as a “start-up incubator and accelerator.” It was taking a large part of the then global US$82 billion cybersecurity industry by often testing new cyber defences in Israel before making them global. What this meant in practice was that many of the “problems” that Israeli firms were positing would be “solved” by veterans of the IDF.
More than two decades after September 11, 2001, Israel’s gamble paid off with a surging global interest in its defence and surveillance sectors. In 2020, Israel spent US$22 billion on its military and was the twelfth biggest military supplier in the world, with sales of more than US$345 million.
Excerpted with permission from The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, Antony Loewenstein, Pan MacMillan.
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