Published in partnership with Drop Site News
“Starting with Gaza and moving on…” said the head of a state-owned Israeli weapons company at a recent Tel Aviv military technology conference. Boaz Levy was addressing DefenseTech Week and he boasted about the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) use of his company’s products in its genocidal campaign in Palestine. Executives at other weapons firms made similar remarks in some of their most explicit comments – connecting the value of their companies to the IDF's campaign in Gaza.
Drop Site News obtained a recording of the conference, held in early December, and shared it with The Ditch and other independent media outlets across the world. Statements at the conference suggest Israel’s weapons industry has been emboldened by genocide in Gaza.
The military itself was well represented. IDF major general and director general of the Israeli Ministry of Defense spoke on day one. He stressed the weapons he spoke of are “proven”.
“These are not lab projects or PowerPoint concepts. They are combat-proven systems. This is what defence tech means in Israel and this has redefined Israel's global identity. For years Israel was known worldwide as a cyber nation. Today, we have evolved into a true defence tech nation,” he said.
Blavatnik Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center executive director Gili Drob-Heistein also said the last two years of genocide had turned Israel into a global player in the arms industry.
“Israel is known for being the startup nation and we all believe that defence tech has the potential to become the next big economic engine for Israel and beyond. Israel's technological leadership, combined with smartness, boldness and out-of-the-box thinking, continues to yield astonishing results, as we've seen recently on the battlefield during a war that was forced upon us on multiple different fronts simultaneously. Many of the technologies have both military and civilian applications,” he said.
Elbit Systems, the IDF’s largest weapons supplier and subject of multiple Ditch reports, sent their executive vice president Yehoshua Yehuda. He similarly referred to “combat-proven technologies” that allowed the IDF to strike people even when “the targets are less than a pixel.”
The United Arab Emirates, which recently signed a $2.3 billion deal with Elbit Systems, is financing and arming the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan, a militant group carrying out mass slaughter.
Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) head Boaz Levy said Israeli weapons are playing an increasing role in global conflict. “Eighty percent of our activity is really for export – only 20 percent of our activity goes to the Israeli market. I think that all of the things that we learned during this war in Israel impacts our future business capabilities. And IAI as of now has $27 billion of new orders and has something like $7 billion of sales every year.”
And the last two years have facilitated that global role.
“The war that we faced in the last two years enables most of our products to become valid . Starting with Gaza and moving on to Iran and to Yemen, I would say that many, many products of IAI were there,” said Levy.
The weapons executives did however acknowledge that boycotts threaten their businesses. “I think Israel is experiencing a boycott,” said Shlomo Toaff, an executive vice president at RAFAEL Advanced Defense Systems Ltd. “We've seen it in the Paris air show last June where we were shut down by the French.”
“This is something that we have to take into account when we're talking about what we're doing here in the industry,” he said.
