For decades, Israel has supported many of the world’s most brutal dictatorships, contributing to the repression and suppression of democracy and popular movements across the globe

THOMAS FAZI

MAR 19, 2024

Most people know that Israel is one of the world’s top weapons producers and exporters, selling weapons to about 130 countries and controlling around 2.5% of the global export of major arms as of 2022 — an impressive feat for such a tiny country.

Yet, as a hyper-militarised society in a state of more or less permanent warfare, it’s not surprising that Israel has emerged as a global leader in cutting-edge military technology. For decades, the Israeli techno-military complex has used the conflict and occupation as testing grounds for new weapons, surveillance technologies and tools of repression that it then exports around the world — and the current war in Gaza is no different. As I wrote in a recent article:

For most of us, being hounded by robot dogs or chased by killer drones is the stuff of nightmares — or dystopian sci-fi films à la Black Mirror. For Gazans, it’s an everyday reality. Over the past five months, the Palestinian enclave hasn’t just been the site of one of the deadliest and most destructive bombing campaigns in history; it has also been a testing ground, a live laboratory, for the next generation of Israeli and Western high-tech weapons and technology — and a window into the disturbing reality of 21st-century warfare.

As the journalist Anthony Loewenstein writes in the award-winning book The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World: “Palestine is Israel’s workshop, where an occupied nation on its doorstep provides millions of subjugated people as a laboratory for the most precise and successful methods of domination. … Israel has developed a world-class weapons industry with equipment conveniently tested on occupied Palestinians, then marketed as ‘battle-tested’”.

Using Palestinians as human lab rats for the Israeli arms industry is a morally repugnant practice in itself. But there’s an even darker side to this story, which most people ignore — partly because Israel has gone to great lengths to cover its tracks — and that is the fact that Israel, especially since 1967, has used its weapons industry to arm and support some of the most brutal regimes of the second half of the twentieth century. Aside from the United States, no other single country has contributed to the repression and suppression of democracy and left-wing popular movements around the world as much as Israel has. As Loewenstein notes:

The Global South has been controlled and pacified with (principally) Israeli and US weapons. … Israel has worked closely with Washington for decades, often operating in places where the US preferred covert support rather than public backing.

This is particularly evident in region that the US has long considered its backyard, Latin America, home to some of the most savage dictatorships of the Cold War era — virtually all of which were politically and militarily supported by Israel, including at least one government that openly targeted and persecuted Jews.

(All following quotes are from Loewenstein’s book unless otherwise specified).

The Duvalier regime in Haiti

One early example was the Duvalier dynasty in Haiti, a brutally repressive hereditary dictatorship that lasted almost three decades, from 1957 until 1986, spanning the rule of the father-and-son duo François and Jean-Claude Duvalier. The Duvalier regime — which murdered and exiled numerous political opponents, and is estimated to have killed between 30,000 and 60,000 Haitians — received Israel’s Uzi machine guns, armoured vehicles and devices for placing weapons systems on aircraft.

The dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay

In the aftermath of the 1967 war, Israel hatched a deal with Paraguay, then a dictatorship that provided a home to Nazi war criminals, including Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called “Angel of Death” who experimented on and butchered hundreds of Jews in Auschwitz. 

The proposed deal involved paying sixty thousand Palestinians in Gaza, around 10 percent of its entire population, to move to Paraguay with citizenship assured within five years. A leaked Israeli cabinet document included Mossad chief Zvi Zamir claiming that Paraguay was open to taking “60,000 Muslim Arabs who are not communists, according to their definition”. The plan never materialized and only thirty Palestinians in total emigrated.

There was a reported connection between the botched plan and Israel’s decision in 1969 to stop searching for Nazis in South America, a devil’s pact suggesting that the highest levels of the Israeli government preferred expelling Palestinians to finding killers of Jews.

The Pinochet regime in Chile

Last September marked marks the 50th anniversary of the bloody coup that ousted Salvador Allende, the democratically elected socialist president of Chile, and ushered in a brutal military regime that came to be known for torture, murder, and international terrorism — as well as for imposing a radical free-market economic model. At least 5,000 people were killed and more than 30,000 tortured during Pinochet’s reign of terror between 1973 and 1990.

The US’s role in the overthrow of Allende, and its support for Pinochet’s regime, is well known. Israel’s role, on the other hand, is lesser known — but just as important.

Israel did not just train Chilean personnel to aid the repression of its own people. After a US arms embargo against Chile passed the US Congress in 1976, a cable from the US Embassy in Chile on April 24, 1980, acknowledged that Israel was a major arms supplier to Pinochet [including missiles, tanks, and aircraft].

Another US cable, on April 10, 1984, quoted the American undersecretary of state as saying that Israel was still one of the main weapons suppliers to the regime. This steady stream of defense equipment undercut any potential benefits of the US arms embargo because Israel was not part of the deal.

The “Nazi” military junta of Jorge Rafael Videla in Argentina

From 1976 to 1983 Argentina was governed by a military dictatorship led by Jorge Rafael Videla that committed horrendous human rights crimes, including torture, extrajudicial executions and the imprisonment of thousands without trial. The hallmark of political repression in Argentina, however, was the practice of enforced disappearance, in which military task forces in unmarked cars snatched defenseless men and women (sometimes with their children) from their homes or places of work, took them to clandestine camps, tortured them mercilessly, murdered them, and disposed secretly of their bodies. Around 30,000 people are estimated to have been murdered to “disappeared” by the military regime.

The Argentine junta was somewhat unique in the Latin American landscape in that it specifically targeted Jews. Blatant anti-Semitism was ubiquitous across Argentina, special torture techniques were reserved for Jewish women, and Argentinian concentration camps were filled with pictures of Hitler and Nazi emblems. According to human rights organisations in Argentina, between 1,900 and 3,000 Jews were among the tens of thousands who were targeted by the junta — a disproportionate number, as Jews comprised between 5–12% of those targeted but only 1% of the population. An Israeli academic and independent journalist, John Brown, uncovered documents about how the government was “killing lots of Jews, basically a Nazi regime”. Israel knew about this but “declassified documents show that [it] did not seem to care”, according to Loewenstein: