The Myth of Israeli Innovation
Israel has long relied on Western patrons for arms and backing—even as it has cast itself as a security “innovator” the West can’t afford to do without.
Israeli soldiers patrol along the destroyed fence near the Gaza Strip, October 17th, 2023.Eddie Gerald via Alamy
October 27, 2025
On June 4th, The Times of Israel reported that in 2024, annual Israeli arms exports had reached an all-time high of $14.8 billion, with Europe buying 54% of the weapons. The article noted that Israeli officials had previously been concerned that Western European allies may cancel weapons deals or sanction Israeli manufacturers over the country’s war of extermination in Gaza. Once the record-breaking export figures came out, however, Israel’s war ministry publicly argued the opposite, claiming that the campaign in Gaza was what had led to the spike in exports by demonstrating Israel’s “unprecedented operational achievements” and “combat experience.” In particular, war minister Israel Katz emphasized that the growth in Israeli arms sales was “a direct result of the successes of the [Israeli army] . . . against Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, the ayatollah regime in Iran, and in other arenas where we operate against Israel’s enemies.”
Katz was not the only one making such statements. Since October 7th, 2023, the narrative of Israel as a powerhouse of “security innovation”—already a core feature of the country’s self-representation for decades—has steadily gone into overdrive. In April, Hadas Lorber, head of the Institute for Applied Research in Responsible Artificial Intelligence at Israel’s Holon Institute of Technology, told The New York Times that Israel was engaged in “crisis accelerated innovation, much of it AI-powered,” which had “led to game-changing technologies on the battlefield and advantages that proved critical in combat.” In the same month, Rotem Mey-Tal, CEO of the Israeli business management and weapons technology company Robel Innovations, told The Jerusalem Post that whereas “before the war, people were building apps to find parking in Tel Aviv . . . now they’re coming back from reserve duty and building drones, battlefield support systems, and paramedic technologies.” As a result, Mey-Tal noted that seed funding for new defense start-ups had reached $4 million in each round, all thanks to “innovation” propelled by the war on Gaza.
It hasn’t just been Israelis who have advanced the claim that unprecedented Israeli “innovation” is the story of the post-October 7th moment. The narrative has become so pervasive as to be echoed by foreign reporters, corporations, governments, and even critics of the state. A recent New Yorker article, for instance, parroted the idea that “the most prominent real-time laboratory for using AI in warfare is in Israel,” a framing that is ubiquitous across the Western press. American politicians have directly echoed these talking points. “We have seen some of the best innovations coming out of Israel,” Zach Nunn, a Republican congressperson from Iowa, recently said. Nunn, who is currently spearheading a congressional proposal requiring the Pentagon to open a Defense Innovation Unit office in Israel, went on to argue that the US government should focus on how “the best technologies—and candidly the best tactics, techniques and procedures that Israel is literally field testing right now—can be replicated” by American forces. A version of this characterization has also found purchase on the left, with a range of critics arguing that the development of cutting-edge Israeli weapons technologies is a defining feature of this moment. This argument casts Gaza as a “laboratory” for repressive Israeli technology; what is first battle-tested in the Strip, such thinkers argue, later makes its way to places in the West and around the world, helping remake the entire planet in Gaza’s image.
To be sure, Israel has used new technology to deadly effect in the past few years, effectively automating mass aerial bombardment under the guise of precise targeting. But what the ossification of such facts into a “security innovation” narrative obscures is that technological transformation is not the story of Israel’s recent campaigns. This is particularly clear in the case of the Gaza genocide. From North American settlers destroying bison herds to starve Native communities to Germans weaponizing hypothermia, disease, and hard labor in concentration camps in Namibia, perpetrators of genocide have always grasped that mass atrocity can be carried out without highly advanced technologies. Israel is no different in this regard, blending a range of old, crude tactics like building demolitions, sniper attacks, fire, disease, and starvation with AI-driven aerial bombardment and drone warfare to kill and maim tens—if not hundreds—of thousands of Palestinians. Much the same can be said about Israel’s war in Lebanon. Israel was celebrated for its unparalleled technological sophistication, especially after the pager attacks of September 2024. But it’s worth remembering that Hasan Nasrallah was killed not by new, innovative, or even Israeli weapons, but by 2000-pound “dumb” US-made bunker buster bombs that leveled an entire residential block. In this case, it was not Israel’s advanced precision that was notable, but its continued willingness to intentionally target civilian infrastructure with massive, disproportionate force.
What ultimately prevents states from doing what Israel has done in Gaza or Lebanon is not a lack of technological prowess, but of weapons, funding, and political will.
Indeed, most modern states’ militaries would have no difficulty carrying out similar airstrikes on a place like Lebanon, which lacks air defenses, and almost any state could impose an aid blockade and shoot starving people in an occupied enclave such as Gaza. What ultimately prevents other states from doing these things in plain sight, or for such prolonged periods of time and with such intensity, is not a lack of technological prowess, but of weapons, funding, and political will. Looking at matters this way, it becomes clear that Israel’s true “innovation” in this moment is political: the feat of securing unique access to an endless supply of Western weapons, intelligence, and most of all, political backing, all of which have given it a destructive capacity that may truly be unprecedented in modern history.
Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of US aid in the post-World War II era—having been granted a staggering $174 billion in American bilateral assistance and military funding since its founding. In the past two years alone, the US spent over $30 billion on military operations supporting Israel, enabling the country to purchase a range of US-made munitions, including bombs, mines, guns, explosives, and aircraft parts. It is these American weapons and weapon parts that have served as the core pillar upholding Israel’s supposedly ingenious military. As conflict studies scholar Tariq Dana notes, for instance, Israel’s “ostensibly domestically-designed Merkava tank incorporates key American-made components like its engine, transmission, and fire control systems,” meaning that Israel cannot sustain the Merkava program without US support. Similarly, the Israeli AI systems that have facilitated the Gaza genocide could not function without foreign capital and assistance from US companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Dell. Recent reporting has revealed that Unit 8200 of the Israeli military—which was spotlighted in The New York Times for its innovative, AI-powered assassinations—in fact depended on the aid of Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. Without Azure, The Guardian notes that Israel would have lacked “sufficient storage space or computing power” to manage its surveillance data on Palestinians. (Microsoft has since suspended Israel’s use of Azure, prompting unease in the Israeli press.)
In addition to providing weapons, Western countries like the US, Britain, and France have also intervened militarily in order to sustain Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its assaults on neighboring countries, most notably by intercepting incoming missiles and drones from Yemen and Iran. Israel, of course, has attributed its relative security from these missiles to its supposedly unparalleled missile defense systems, but what has become ever-more visible over the past 21 months is that it has been US rather than Israeli systems, some operated by US troops, which have shot down many of the incoming projectiles. Such efforts to protect Israel are estimated to have cost the US as much as $3.6 billion between October 2023 and July 2025. This is not counting offensive military support, such as the US launching bombing campaigns in Yemen and Iran, or the UK flying reconnaissance flights for Israel.
Perhaps even more crucially, it has been Western political and legal backing, rather than domestic “security innovation,” that has given Israel the ability to carry out unprecedentedly destructive military campaigns without any interruption. This support is seen in the US’s six vetoes against UN Security Council resolutions calling for permanent ceasefires in Gaza; its refusals to enforce previous ceasefires it brokered in Gaza and Lebanon; its tacit support of Israel repeatedly sabotaging negotiations with Hamas; its attempts (alongside other European states) to challenge the legitimacy of the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court in response to legal proceedings against Israeli leaders; its defunding of UNRWA and decimation of Gaza’s humanitarian aid systems—the list goes on. Ultimately, it is this unbridled access to Western largesse and protection that has enabled Israel to hold together any pretence of its own solidity and inevitability.
Accounts of Israel’s autonomous military dominance paradoxically unlocked the very Western investments Israel needed to develop and sustain such dominance.
Zionist mythologies of combat-proven “innovation” profoundly mystify this story of dependence—a pattern that builds on long established precedent. Since its founding, Israel has relied on Western patrons for the necessary resources to sustain its endless aggression, but it has done so while maintaining that the West depends on Israel, an “innovator” that the West cannot afford to do without. Throughout the 20th century, these innovation myths have served to obfuscate, and indeed sustain, the fundamentally dependent nature of the Zionist project. In the 1950s, for instance, the Israelis convinced French officials like General Maurice Challe that they were (in his words) “consummate artists” at managing the unruly Arabs, and that the kibbutz offered the French an alternative “model” for the French pacification of Algeria. In the coming decades, Israel turned to America with similar stories of its supposedly unparalleled martial prowess and its role as a model—for effective counterinsurgency in the post-Vietnam moment, defending against “international terrorism” during the Cold War, and fighting “Islamic” insurgencies after 9/11. In each of these cases, accounts of Israel’s autonomous military dominance paradoxically unlocked the very Western investments Israel needed to develop and sustain such dominance. That dynamic continues to this day, with stories of Israeli AI innovation facilitating the US’s authorization of hundreds of millions of additional dollars in American government funding to Israel. These developments highlight the paradox at the core of Zionist project: namely, that its breathless claims to stand-alone innovation are part of its efforts to further imbricate itself into Western empire.
From the beginning, the Zionist colonization of Palestine was dependent on external benefactors. In 1901, Palestinian fellahin (peasants) resisted the attempts of the Jewish Colonization Association to remove them from the land; in response, the Association solicited and received assistance from Ottoman authorities in repressing the fellahin. British Mandatory officials later augmented these dispossession efforts by creating their own on-the-ground police units, some of which joined with Zionist paramilitaries to carry out night raids on Palestinian villages. British military support and knowledge was thus indispensable to the colonization of Palestine and the eventual establishment of the State of Israel; indeed, many of the Zionist paramilitaries that carried out the Nakba were directly trained by British counterinsurgency expert Orde Wingate, a pioneer of the night raids strategy.
Early Zionist ideologues like Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Theodor Herzl were all too aware of the centrality of this dependency in realizing their settler colonial mission in Palestine. In 1896, Herzl noted that future Zionists would have to remain “in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence” in the face of inevitable resistance from the displaced natives of Palestine. But while Zionist leaders privately acknowledged the reality of their reliance on Western imperial backing, they sought to consolidate it by advancing the opposite public narrative: one of self-sufficiency and innovation. In the run-up to the Nakba, Dwight Eisenhower, then the US army’s chief of staff, recounted a meeting with envoys of the Jabotinsky-founded Hagana paramilitary, whom he knew to be “anxious to secure arms for Israel.” Once face to face, though, the envoys “boastfully claimed that Israel needed nothing but a few defensive arms and they would take care of themselves forever and without help of any kind from the United States.”
In 1896, Herzl noted that future Zionists would have to remain “in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence” in the face of inevitable resistance from the displaced natives of Palestine.
Throughout the 1950s, the US—eager to challenge rising pan-Arabism and Soviet influence in the Middle East—did supply Israel with some covert funding for weapons purchases. But Zionist leaders wanted more, relentlessly pushing the US to make Israel a strategic asset in the region (even as they kept their own options open by pursuing a policy of non-identification in the Cold War). These bids for additional Western support came against the backdrop of Israel’s nonstop aggression toward its Arab neighbors leading up to the Sinai War of 1956. The naked belligerence of some of these campaigns alienated Israel’s would-be patrons: For instance, a December 1955 attack that killed more than 50 Syrians compelled the US to keep its military support for Israel covert for several years to come. But Israel’s aggressive posture was also attractive, showing the country to be capable of imposing quick and decisive military defeats on rising Arab nationalist powers.
Ultimately, the perception of Israeli toughness won out, compelling Washington to become increasingly unequivocal in its support. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy finally broke the embargo that had previously blocked overt American arms sales to Israel. Declaring that the US and Israel were in a “special relationship,” Kennedy acceded to Israel’s longstanding request for US Hawk anti-aircraft missiles. This was followed by years of significant US weapons deals, including the Johnson administration’s 1965 decision to supply Israel with 200 Paton tanks and a 1966 deal to sell Israel 48 Skyhawk bombers. Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban welcomed this inflow of American heavy weaponry, calling it “a development of tremendous political value” that “enabled Israel to strive for a continued intensification of the existing US commitments.”
The intensification would come following the Six-Day War in 1967, when Israel achieved a swift and decisive military victory over Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan. As before, it was European and US materiel and funding that had given Israel the edge in combat, enabling it to easily obliterate the Egyptian air force within just a few hours. Thanks primarily to its French-supplied planes, Israel’s aerial advantage in particular was so overwhelming that one strategic commentator remarked a month after the war that “Arab armor, infantry, and motor columns were sitting ducks for the Israeli air force.” But in the aftermath of the war, Israeli officials retrospectively changed the narrative, now selling 1967 as an unlikely and even “miraculous” feat of Israeli military ingenuity. Officials like then-army chief of staff Yitzhak Rabin began arguing that the war testified to the uniqueness of the Israeli army, which had carried out an air assault with “such accuracy that no one understands how it was done.”
This understanding of 1967 was quickly picked up by strategic affairs publications and the American mainstream press. In the weeks and months that followed, Life magazine released an issue dedicated to “Israel’s Swift Victory” and The Atlantic published a report entitled “Israel’s Swift Sword,” which focused on the question “how did [Israeli forces] do it?” In all cases, American journalists’ answers drew heavily on Israeli sources, leading The Atlantic to claim that Israel’s capacity to win the war stemmed “primarily” from “the brainpower with which this people was endowed . . . channelled for the first time since [Exodus] into the military art in defense of their homeland.” The articles also amplified Israeli talking points disavowing the country’s dependency on the West. While acknowledging that many top Israeli commanders “have studied briefly at the command and staff colleges in France, Britain, and the United States,” for instance, The Atlantic stressed that Israeli officials “unanimously maintain [a] refusal to acknowledge any debt to foreign methods or doctrines and insistence on their independent development.” In these ways, post-1967 media narratives actively cemented a story of Zionist exceptionalism, which, in the words of political scientist Rami Ginat, transformed Israel’s image “from a needy protégé . . . to a strategic asset.”
Post-1967 media narratives actively cemented a story of Zionist exceptionalism, transforming Israel’s image “from a needy protégé . . . to a strategic asset.”
Israel fires on the east bank of the Suez Canal, July 15th, 1967.
The cover of Life magazine’s June 1967 issue.
The narrative blitz had a strong effect. In the years following 1967, the US finally took up Zionist leaders’ longstanding calls to incorporate Israel as a US strategic asset in the Middle East—a significant upgrade to the Kennedy-era “special relationship” that came with long-term political and military support. By 1969, incoming President Richard Nixon had noted in a memorandum dictated to Henry Kissinger that he did “not want to see Israel go down the drain” and thus sought to make “an absolute commitment” to ensuring that “Israel always has an edge.” Making good on this promise meant a rapid increase in aid: from $360 million in 1968 to approximately $2.2 billion in 1973.
Israel found its American funders willing to buy into this dynamic not only thanks to Cold War strategic calculations, but also because of the ways that post-1967 Israel came to be positioned as a model for the West writ large—particularly against the backdrop of the disastrous US campaign in Vietnam. While “American setbacks in Vietnam no doubt make the idea of guerilla war more popular,” the historian and political commentator Walter Lacquer wrote in a May 1968 article, Israel’s victory in 1967 had shown that “guerilla warfare will not work against Israel,” an argument that clearly offered Israel as a template for Western dominance. As the American Studies scholar Melani McAlister has noted, in such narratives “Israel, or a certain image of Israel, came to function as a stage upon which the war in Vietnam was refought—and this time, won.”
Israeli leaders worked to feed this conception. In the aftermath of the October 1973 Arab–Israeli war, for example, Israel offered its US partners tours of key battle sites in occupied Syria and Egypt in the hopes of teaching them Israeli combat lessons. American generals returned with the impression of Israel as proof of concept that with proper equipment, tactics, and training, conventional military battles remained winnable; within a year, these and other “lessons” from Israel were taught to US troops at Fort Knox. As the Israeli psychology scholar Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi noted in his searing 1987 book The Israeli Connection: Who Israel Arms and Why, “what Israel offer[ed] the embattled West . . . is the victory of the few over the many . . . The battle cry of Israelis (and other right-wingers around the globe) is, ‘the West can win!’”
This cry resounded louder than ever in a period of renewed crisis for the US following 9/11. As early as September 12th, 2001, Israeli officials were explicitly putting themselves forward as models for the US’s counterterrorism campaigns to come—arguing that Israelis were the first to have experienced so-called global, Islamic terrorism and to demonstrate a record of successfully fighting it. Initially, such claims were narrowly focused on presenting Israel as an expert on airliner hijacking and a progenitor of what came to be known as homeland security. But as US-led quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan dragged on, recalling past failures in Vietnam, Israel became more broadly representative of an alternative counterinsurgency model—one focused on pacifying unruly populations by asserting total dominance over their built environment (in other words, an urban occupation). In partnership with Israeli think tanks, US strategic forums soon began to echo this fetishization of the “Israel model,” releasing report after report that represented past and present Israeli military operations as the future Western counterinsurgency. “[Israel’s] military actions have been—and are—a laboratory for methods, procedures, tactics, and techniques for the United States, which now faces the same Islamist adversaries across the planet,” one 2007 Hoover Institution report declared, going on to recommend that the US, too, might “capture terrorists for intelligence,” “assassinate diabolical masterminds,” and “target insurgent strongholds” with airstrikes, as Israel did.
“What Israel offers the embattled West is the victory of the few over the many. The battle cry of Israelis is, ‘the West can win!’”
Through such narrative labors did Israel’s image, over the course of several decades, shift from that of a questionable geopolitical investment to that of an utterly indispensable model for the West. Far from being a burden, the country’s history of unending war—when reframed as a story of innovation—could now be plausibly represented as a national asset, allowing it to deepen Western aid flows and court new foreign investments as a “start-up nation.” By 2018, these resources had rendered Israel so seemingly secure that the Israeli army’s chief of staff had declared his country “invincible.”
But this mythology of prowess was spectacularly shattered on October 7th, 2023, when Hamas-led fighters breached the Israeli siege of Gaza by land, air, and sea in a surprise attack. Israel’s vast infrastructures of fencing, guard towers, and surveillance proved fickle, surprising even leading Palestinian leaders, who recalled how Israeli military units “just evaporated” under attack. Since then, Israel’s military failures have only compounded. The Israeli army may still dominate the skies with American planes, and kill civilians with cheap, consumer-grade Chinese drones, but it has shown itself to be incapable of strategic achievements in ground combat—repeatedly suffering from major operational blunders in Gaza and being forced to constrain its 2024 ground invasion of Lebanon in the face of Hezbollah resistance. These failures have severely damaged the prevailing image of Israel’s sleek martial efficiency, as well as the parallel exceptionalist claim that Israel’s use of high-tech “solutions” for political problems offered a replicable standard for the West.
In response to this PR crisis, Israeli politicians and business leaders have, predictably, tried to return to their standard exceptionalist script of Israeli innovation in the hopes of securing more foreign investments to keep the army (and arms sector) running. In early 2024, the journalist Sophia Goodfriend noted that Israeli military spokespeople were desperately trying to market Israel once again “as a high-tech superpower, talking up the automated weaponry and supercomputing surveillance tech being ‘battle-tested’ in its war on Gaza,” hoping “the same old slogans [could] distract from the fact that Israel is far from achieving its stated goals of eliminating Hamas.” The rising profits of Israel’s weapons industry, Israel’s capacity to continue to forge new deals with US AI giants, and ongoing European investments in the Israeli economy all suggest that this strategy of couching aid-reliance as partnership, dependency as strength, can still work. But in the past two years, the global image of Israel has nevertheless steadily moved into closer alignment with its actual character: A state that is all-too capable of using Western resources to carry out mass slaughter, but that, for all its pretensions to superiority, can never really stand on its own two feet.
For the left, this long history of Israel’s military achievements offers a critical lesson. It suggests that while we need to take seriously the profound hold that Israel currently has over the Middle East, doing so does not require capitulating to the idea of Zionism’s exceptional martial prowess. In addition to being factually incorrect, such a narrative risks projecting upon Israel a technological and military might it does not autonomously possess, while obscuring the true nature of the power that Israel has, in fact, acquired: the Western arms and political backing which enable it to engage in unmitigated mass cruelty.
If Israel is indeed a “dependent empire” rather than a hub of autonomous military innovation, then shaking loose its ties to its benefactors will be key to stopping its violence.
This reframing is not a theoretical matter. Instead, by clarifying the true roots of the destruction in the Middle East today, it directs activists’ attention toward the correct points of intervention. If the vast majority of weapons deployed against the people of Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and most recently Qatar have been US-funded and US-made rather than the result of Israeli innovation, then our energies must be squarely directed toward cutting off this flow of armaments. If, as the UN Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese has observed, it is ultimately Western weapons industry oligarchs who are getting rich off Israel’s massacres, then it is their profits that must always be our target. If it is extensive support from European and global allies that has secured the profitability of Israel’s arms industry and aided it in the “collective crime” of genocide, then it is this deep political cover and financial support that must be the focus of our interventions. And if Israel is indeed, in the words of the scholar Saree Makdisi, a “dependent empire” rather than a hub of autonomous military innovation, then shaking loose its ties to its benefactors will be key to stopping its violence.
The post October 7th moment is ripe for such work. Already, under pressure from unprecedented mass mobilizations, some Western leaders are beginning to see Israel as a liability rather than an asset. US naval official James Kilby has voiced concern that defending Israel is depleting US stockpiles of missile defense interceptors at an “alarming rate.” More broadly, the spiking cost of America’s presence in the Middle East has become a growing concern even amongst the American right, at last breaking what Edward Said called “America’s last taboo.” So too in Europe, where record arms and trade relations with Israel are nevertheless accompanied by gestures of militarily distancing from Israel—as evidenced in Spain cutting weapons transfers to Israel, Germany making moves in that direction, and the UK banning Israel from participating in one of its largest arms trade fairs.
In Israel, these developments have alarmed political and corporate leaders, who worry about the growing sense that Israel represents a destabilizing force rather than an innovative one. The threat of Israel’s political isolation turning into material isolation has become so real that Netanyahu has even pretended to embrace the possibility, invoking his predecessors’ professed creed of self-sufficiency to suggest that Israel must now become “Super Sparta”—an island of military and technological competence, dependent on no one. Such narratives may serve to save face in the short run. But history shows us that, despite its constant pretensions to autonomy, Israel cannot withstand any true withdrawal of Western support. Thus, by continuing to insist that Israel is not an indispensable partner offering innovation, but an aid-guzzling colony offering only complicity in genocide, we can take a significant step toward dismantling the political lifelines that sustain it.
https://jewishcurrents.org/the-myth-of-israeli-innovation
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