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Jonathan Friendly is the national editor of , which owns the weekly Jewish newspapers in Detroit and Atlanta. He is a former journalism professor at the University of Michigan and a former reporter and editor at The New York Times.
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By Jonathan Friendly
March 7, 2004
Theodor Herzl could not have imagined it!
The country whose establishment he urged as a sanctuary is now the world's fifth largest exporter of weapons systems, with annual sales of $30 billion. That's quite a change from the unarmed Jewish peasants in the Pale of Settlement who were constantly brutalized by Cossack pogroms.
But the century since Herzl has witnessed the Jewish people devastated by the Holocaust, and Israel today remains threatened by Arab and Islamic fanatics. It has been forced to develop a defense industry that allows no room for failure. It is a testament to Israeli engineers that their designs, in some cases, are proving to be even better than those of America's armaments makers.
As a recent report by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency makes clear, Israel's superior weaponry is a side effect of its existential perils. To survive amid its hostile Arab neighbors, it relied at first on military help from allies, primarily America. But as the wars continued, it developed even more effective defenses suited to dealing with nearby states.
Unlike America, which had to plan for warfare halfway round the world, Israel had to worry about Scuds from Iraq or artillery from Syria. So it concentrated on systems like the Arrow that can intercept short-range missiles, unmanned spotter planes that monitor battlefields, another sophisticated system for analyzing air battles, and very high-tech electronics systems for fighter planes.
It now turns out that those systems are much in demand from countries who fear their neighbors more than they feared the old USSR. On Sunday, the Sharon government approved selling three Phalcon airborne early-warning systems to India for $1.1 billion, Israel's single biggest export deal to date. It probably didn't hurt that India's toughest enemy is its neighbor, Pakistan, a state with an Islamic majority.
The weapons sales help Israel directly with its economy, which is slowly beginning to recover from the devastation of the 3-year-old Palestinian uprising, the intifada. The sales also help the state recoup some of its weapons development costs, giving it new capital to sustain additional research and development of what may straight-facedly be called cutting-edge weapons.
But they also pose some long-range dangers. America has become alarmingly over-invested in what former-President Dwight D. Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex." A Pentagon budget that is bloated without even figuring in the costs of the war in Iraq clings to buying weapons systems for wars it will never fight simply because it doesn't want to take the political hit for closing defense factory lines or military bases it doesn't need. Israel is a long way from that status, but uncritical reliance on weapons sales sets it on a slippery slope.
A moral question also arises, as it does for the four larger weapons-sellers, the United States, the European Union, Russia and Japan: Are they promoting warfare?
The standard answer is that the arms go to countries for self-defense and actually prevent war by showing would-be aggressors that they could not prevail. In a less-than-ideal world, we want the good guys to be able to out-gun the bad guys. America was able to force the former Soviet Union into an arms race than led directly to busting the superpower into much weaker and less-threatening individual states.
Still, it is disconcerting. The Israel of our ideals, the one with the lofty biblical role among the nations of the world, sells high-tech computer gear and the know-how for desalination plants or hydroponic tomatoes -- not radar systems and anti-tank missiles. It is somewhat disappointing, but a cruel fact of life in a very dangerous neighborhood, that Israel's light onto other nations relies on night-vision goggles.
Views expressed by the author do not
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