Governments, including those that denounce the Jewish state, rely on its air-defense technology when their own skies are at stake.
By Lawrence Solomon, published by Jewish News Syndicate
Go to the publisher’s website here to read the original version of this commentary.
Greece signed a 3-billion-euro ($3.5 billion) air-defense deal with Israel on Monday. On Sunday, the Finnish press reported that Finland, the first foreign customer for the David’s Sling missile defense system, had extended its defense-industrial pact with Jerusalem through 2034. Both governments did this because they need defense systems that work.
“Modern conflicts have already altered the parameters of military defense and deterrence,” said Greek Defense Minister Nikos Dendias. “Technology, ballistic missiles, satellite communications, unmanned systems, cyber threats, hybrid forms of warfare and the interconnection of fields of operations have long rendered preexisting defense doctrines completely unrealistic.”
Greece is buying David’s Sling, Barak MX and SPYDER plus Israeli radars and a national command system. It thus becomes the first E.U. country, Dendias noted, to adopt a multilayer shield comparable to Israel’s. A separate 26-million-euro Drone Dome contract was signed the same day.
In 2023, Finland purchased David’s Sling in a deal worth 317 million euros. Despite accusations of “historical shame” from the Green League opposition party, Finland unapologetically defended the extension of its defense cooperation agreement with Israel, saying, “At this stage, we have only made sure that Finland gets the best air defense system in the world, and the best technology related to it.”
These deals represent a contradiction in European politics. In public opinion, on campuses and among a growing number of parties, Israel is falsely seen as a genocidal state; BDS campaigns are a fixture; and Israel is faulted for its defensive posture, accused of imagining threats from neighbors that have spent years firing rockets, missiles and drones at its cities.
But when the subject is the defense of European homelands, those same countries—or their neighbors—buy the systems Israel builds because those threats are not imagined.
Germany has already fielded the Arrow 3 defense system, first sold for about 4 billion euros and then expanded by another $3.1 billion for a combined package of roughly $6.5 billion—the largest Israeli defense export in history. The Czech Republic is integrating four SPYDER batteries at a cost of nearly 14 billion crowns. Slovakia bought the Barak MX for about $583 million. Romania signed a 2- to 2.3-billion-euro SPYDER framework. Cyprus has already deployed the Barak MX.
Israel Missile Defense Organization director Moshe Patel, whose duties include exports for Israel’s missile-defense programs, reports “huge interest from Europe.” Most of the countries involved are NATO members focused on missile and drone threats from Russia and the Middle East—and on the cost of being unprepared.
Britain has been confronting the cost of a boycott of Israeli technology. Sky Sabre, the U.K. army’s medium-range air-defense system, runs on Rafael’s MIC4AD command-and-control software—the same architecture used in Iron Dome.
Last year, ministers were reported to be weighing a switch to a Norwegian alternative to appease Labour Party backbenchers demanding a harder line on Israel. Lord Austin, then the government’s trade envoy to Israel, warned that “the RAF would not be able to get its planes off the ground without Israeli technology” and that British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan would have taken heavier casualties without it. Lord Walney called it “inexcusable” to drop tried and true Israeli components “simply for politically convenient reasons.”
This week, the confrontation acquired a sharper edge, with London weighing a ban on trade with Israeli settlements. A senior Israeli official told The Telegraph that “countries that act against Israel are exposing themselves to counteractions.” The immediate threat was expulsion from a Gaza coordination hub. The larger point needs no translation: a relationship Britain still uses for air defense, tank protection, drones and intelligence is not a one-way street. Boycott the supplier and the supplier can turn off the faucet.
Earlier this year, Spain decided to ban Israeli defense exports and then quietly walked part of it back. It formalized an embargo, canceled a Spike deal, a rocket-launcher contract and a Litening deal, and described Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip as genocide.
The decree itself, however, reserved excepciones puntuales (“one-off exceptions”) if they are in the national interest. The cabinet then granted an exemption to keep Airbus using Israeli technology in Spanish plants, citing jobs and export potential.
Defense sources had already conceded that a clean break would be “complicated and difficult” because Spanish cybersecurity, AI and existing platforms still run on Israeli components. That is cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face, then asking for a prosthetic. The ban makes a political statement; the carve-outs admit the statement cannot be implemented without harming Spain.
Europe can afford the luxury of street politics and parliamentary resolutions. It cannot afford the luxury of an undefended sky. Israel remains an armory for democracies that prefer not to advertise the fact.
The protesters will keep marching. The contracts—3 billion euros here, $6.5 billion there—will keep being signed. The missile defense that keeps European countries intact will keep coming from the state they publicly shun and privately embrace.
Lawrence Solomon is a founding columnist at the Financial Post, a columnist at The Epoch Times, and a past columnist for the Globe and Mail. The Deniers, a #1 environmental best seller on global warming, was deemed one of the “10 Books That Drive The Debate” by the US National Chamber of Commerce.