Record-breaking Spike in Countries Buying Israeli Arms and Cyber
Last year, Israel approved the marketing of drones to 145 different countries, with a 25% increase in the number of countries to which intelligence and cyber systems were sold – reveals data disclosed in response to a Freedom of Information request
The number of countries to which the Defense Ministry has authorized exports of weapons and security-related cyber systems has skyrocketed in recent years, according to its own official data. The figures coincide with the export records of Israel’s defense industries, which broke their own records two years in a row.
Reasons for the boom in defense exports include an increase in arms deals with signatories of the Abraham Accords, and the war in Ukraine, which led to increased security expenditures in Europe and NATO countries. The record-breaking growth is expected to continue, in part due to the unprecedented sale of an Arrow 3 missile defense system to Germany for about $3.5 billion, a deal that was signed last week.
The data, provided by the Defense Ministry in response to a Freedom of Information request from human rights lawyer Eitay Mack, reveals that the number of countries to which the ministry approved the sale of drones grew by 40 percent in three years: from 40 to 56 countries in 2022. The number of countries to which munitions were exported grew by 45 percent, from 42 to 61; training programs were sold to two countries three years ago, but is currently being supplied to 17; and the sale of cyber and intelligence systems grew from 67 to 83 countries in 2022.
These numbers concern countries to which the Defense Ministry’s Defense Export Control Agency approved export. Prior to this approval, arms companies must obtain a marketing license, which is required for any action from sending an email to mounting an exhibition or hosting at the companies’ factories. “It’s a two-stage mechanism,” said Racheli Chen, head of DECA, last year in a Knesset hearing on the sale of Israeli weapons to dictatorial governments. “The marketing license is the filtering stage. … Those who are refused a marketing license will not apply for an export license. Those we approve for marketing, we’ll probably approve for an export license. That’s the mechanism’s rationale as we have determined.”
The number of countries with a marketing license is thus the true indicator. Here, there is no category in which the number of countries was under 100. In each category except for the export of training, there has been an increase in the last three years. That number is likely even higher, since Israel has exempt over 100 countries from needing a marketing license for some technologies.
At the top of the list is the drone-sale sector – in 2022, marketing of drone technologies was approved for 145 countries. In the intelligence and cyber category, 2022 marketing licenses were granted to 126 countries – a significant increase after the dramatic decline of 2021 brought about by the exposure of widespread use of Pegasus spyware in non-democratic countries, and by NSO and Candiru being blacklisted by the U.S. government.
Exposing the international Pegasus Project, in which TheMarker and Haaretz took part, shocked the Israeli defense establishment. When the dust settled it was reported that Israel had dramatically restricted the list of “exempt countries,” or countries to which offensive cyber capabilities can be marketed without a special marketing license, to 37. However, the Defense Ministry refuses to disclose which countries and cyber products were on the list.
Determining whether qualification for offensive cyber exports was indeed made stricter following the Pegasus scandal is made even more difficult by the ministry’s choice to include intelligence exports and cyber technologies together in the same category.
Speaking in the same Knesset hearing, DECA head took pride in the rigor of the agency’s criteria preserving human rights. “This is a process that is set in law… it is not a process that we change according to whether one minister or another minister is elected.” “It is a policy to be careful and pay attention to human rights as one of the very central criteria that we consider in every request,” she said.
Chen added that DECA first examines whether a potential buyer is on the list of pre-approved countries, then inspects the regional and intra-country security and political maps: “what is the state of human rights in the state itself? Who is the final user? If they are asking for a product for police use that is not appropriate for the police to have, we will not allow it.”
And yet, if one cross-references the number of countries in each of the Defense Ministry’s export categories with the The Economist Democracy Index, one is hard-pressed to find the results of such rigor. In the latest index, 59 countries were defined as “authoritarian regimes”; only 24 countries were defined as “full democracies”; 48 were defined as “flawed democracies” (including Israel, the United States, Hungary, Poland, and Ghana); and 36 were defined as “hybrid regimes” (including Zambia, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sierra Leone). In total, there are 108 countries that are not explicitly tyrannical regimes (and at least a third of them are notorious for violating human rights). Simple math shows that apart from the “ammunition and armament” category, the State of Israel must have signed off on the marketing of military and dual-use technologies to “full-fledged” dictatorial regimes.