Russian-Israeli Tech Cooperation Goes Very Deep

It's a real failure of leadership by the executive branch and Congress not to be talking about this

Former Israeli foreign minister and head of the Russian-Israeli party in Israel, Avigdor Lieberman, with Vladimir Putin, 2009 / Flickr, Israel MFA

The paper by Habiba Hamid, posted below and found at this Google Drive link, has been circulating quietly for some time, and I had seen an earlier draft, but it’s public now, and very much worth reading:

The Israeli Russian Defense Pact Mapping The Axis Defense Industrial Base 0325

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There are implications of Russian-Israeli defense cooperation for American defense contracting, as well as the posture the federal government ought to take toward the State of Israel.

In general, even if you are a hard-line anti-Palestinian American, in light of these facts, it would still be necessary to act to keep Israel within the American orbit. Likewise, like many conservatives, one can favor a faster resolution to the war in Ukraine, and I do, while also seeing all this as a problem.

There’s the NATO/Five Eyes realm of defense cooperation, there’s the Russian world, and there’s the Chinese world, and they’re pretty separate, for good reasons. Israel tries to play off the West and Russia in this area in much the same way they do in many others, and that’s not really something we can accept.

Most importantly there is the suggestion in this paper that Lavina 2, the AI targeting system used on the Russian side in the war in Ukraine, is based on Lavender, the Israeli system used in Gaza. Depending on how that was done, it may have been in violation of a U.S.-led sanctions regime. The Israeli Searcher and Russian Forpost reconnaissance drones are also a persuasive example of design similarity in drones.

There are a number of other moments of past collaboration noted in the paper, and it is commended to readers.

This is a major area in which American pro-Israel influence groups ought to be making a distinction between Israeli interests and American ones. If they favor a close relationship between the U.S. and Israel, making sure this collaboration with Russian military technology is kept to a minimum is something they ought to advocate for.