Defense independence impossible without the US
There should be a statue somewhere in Israel to honor the French war hero and president Charles De Gaulle for deciding in 1967, after the Six Day War, to cut ties with Israel and impose an arms boycott on the Jewish state.
And that is exactly why De Gaulle deserves the statue.
Until then, France had been Israel’s main defense ally. The IDF flew Mirage fighter jets; jointly developed missiles with Dassault; and even the Dimona nuclear reactor had its beginnings in France.
His boycott lit the spark that turned Israel into the military-technological superpower that it is today and helped make it one of the world’s top 10 weapons exporters with annual sales reaching $12 billion. What De Gaulle did was teach Israel an important lesson: to survive, the Jewish State could not rely solely on foreign assistance. It needed to find a way to develop its own R&D and production capabilities. De Gaulle taught us that this was a matter of survival.
Over the last few months, mostly in discussions behind closed doors in the Israeli Defense Ministry, the French embargo has again come up. Defense Ministry Director General Eyal Zamir and his staff have been working closely with local Israeli defense companies, discussing opening new production lines for certain weapons and munitions, including building new factories as needed.
The systems that Israel wants to be able to manufacture independently vary. There are air-to-ground bombs, assault rifles, guidance systems for munitions, and even simpler products such as tactical helmets and protective vests, of which so many were missing in the first weeks of the war.
This is a smart move that is long overdue, but people should not get ahead of themselves as some did this week when celebrating the announcement of the new line of assault rifles. (It seems that they thought Israel was renewing the Lavi project, the famed Israeli fighter jet from the 1980s that was shut down due to pressure from the United States and not just a newer version of the M-16.)
And while it is true that Israel can create some measure of independence, it is not to the level that some people expect, especially when it comes to the United States.
The reason is simple: The IDF’s reliance on US military platforms is not just an assault rifle and a one-ton explosive ordinance. When looking at the IDF today, software, cyberware, radars, sensors, drones, tanks, armored personnel carriers, and much more are developed and manufactured in Israel.
Yet about half the procurement of weaponry takes place outside of Israel.
Almost every aircraft flown by the Israel Air Force (IAF) is American-made. This includes F-15s, F-16s, F-35s, Apache helicopters, Blackhawks, Sikorsky CH-53 Sea Stallions, C-130s, G550 Gulfstreams, Boeing refueling tankers, and more.
FOR A US administration to stop a war one day it doesn’t have to refrain from supplying M4 carbines or JDAMS. All it has to do is stop the flow of spare parts for the IAF’s fleet of F-15s, F-35s, and Apache Longbows. When a squadron is in combat, the planes require maintenance as well as a steady and regular flow of spare parts. To be clear, if a military does not have spare parts it can sometimes be forced to ground entire squadrons. As a result, while more independence is always a blessing, in this day and age it would be almost impossible to fight a sustained conflict without active US support.
Therefore, instead of just thinking about how to create independence, Israel should also be thinking about how to shore up support in the United States.
While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently claimed that Israel’s polling numbers in the US are positive, a Gallup poll released this week showed Americans’ opinions of Israel are at their worst in 20 years. Changing this is clearly not
as simple as opening up a production line for one-ton bombs, but considering the IAF’s fleet and Israel’s many other interests, there is not really an alternative.
Israel needs to preserve its relationship with the US and must do more to ensure that it can outlast this president or another. The challenge is based both on where America is heading in general terms and on the trajectory of the current government – and rising to it will be an almost herculean task.
That is why the visit of Benny Gantz to Washington this week could have been of strategic importance, instead of serving as a political football for Netanyahu and President Joe Biden to kick around.
In a normal world, the prime minister
would have no problem sending his highest-ranking minister to Washington to talk in an intimate setting with the leaders of Israel’s most important ally. Sadly, we are not in a normal country and politics takes preference over the country’s security.
However, once the prime minister asks a minister not to go on a diplomatic mission, for that minister to go nonetheless is not right either. A country has one political leader at any given time, and while the Americans likely enjoyed seeing Netanyahu sweat, Gantz should have known better. His whole reasoning for the trip was to show to the Israeli public that he is a statesman and can hold the same meetings as Netanyahu in the US; without the controversy that invariably follows. the
manner in which it was carried out, however, demonstrated the contrary.
And here is one more point to bear in mind: If the attacks on October 7 taught us anything, it is the need for humility. The hubris of Israel’s intelligence community and political echelon and their failed appreciation of Hamas’s capabilities led us to where we are today, almost 155 days into this war.
Israel should not think that it can just break away from the US or dictate to Washington the way things need to happen. This would again be a case of negligent hubris.