Key Takeaways
- Rhetoric and reality do not match: Governments condemning Israel continue to rely on Israeli defense technology.
- National security reveals real trust: Countries are entrusting the protection of their citizens to Israeli systems and expertise, with a revealed preference indicating that they don’t believe what they preach.
- The accusation has consequences: Genocide rhetoric outlives political statements, shaping hostility toward Israel and Jews worldwide.
This week, Greece signed the largest defense export contract in Israel’s history. The deal is worth $3.6 billion. It buys Greece an air defense network built by Rafael and Israel Aerospace Industries: David’s Sling to stop ballistic missiles, mobile SPYDER batteries to be stationed on the Greek islands, the Barak MX system, and a national command center modeled on Israel’s own. The Greeks have given it a name. They are calling it Achilles’ Shield.
Five months earlier, Greece bought $750 million of Elbit rocket artillery, and at the time that was the largest deal Israel had ever signed. It held the record until this week.
In between those two signatures, the Greek Prime Minister stood at the United Nations General Assembly and said that no military target, however valuable, could justify the death of thousands of children and the forced displacement of a million Palestinians. Greece sat on the Security Council and put its name to a statement declaring that the use of starvation as a weapon of war is prohibited under international humanitarian law. Greek officials briefed their own press that the Israeli contracts were being slowed down because of how they looked while Gaza burned. Then they signed them.
These purchases show a revealed preference, indicating that the rhetoric about “genocide” isn’t believed by the politicians that utter the accusations. Buying weapons from a state one publicly brands as criminal or atrocious is not how governments behave when they actually believe the charge. If they actually believed the allegations, they would not support the Israeli defense industry. The trust that they place in Israel is indicative of a belief that the state is not actually immoral or criminal.
The Arrangement
Across Europe and Latin America, government after government has accused Israel of genocide, or of war crimes, or of crimes against humanity. Some have gone to the International Court of Justice. Some have severed relations. Some have passed laws with the word “genocide” written into the title. And in the same months, in some cases in the same weeks, those same governments have been buying Israeli weapons.
Israeli defense exports reached a record $19.2 billion in 2025. That was the fifth consecutive record year. It happened during the period of maximum condemnation, when Israel was being called a genocidal state in parliaments across the democratic world. Europe took the largest share of those exports: thirty-six percent.
Finland
Two days ago, Finland’s public broadcaster revealed that the Finnish Ministry of Defense had quietly locked in a decade of military cooperation with Israel. Finland proposed the extension itself, in early 2024, and asked for ten years rather than the customary five. It runs to 2034. It covers research, development ,and the procurement of defense materiel. The ministry never announced it. It was approved by written exchange, and unlike the previous renewal it was not sent to the Foreign Ministry for assessment.
Early 2024 is after October 7th, after the invasion of Gaza began, after South Africa had filed at the International Court of Justice, and in the months when the accusation of genocide had become a defining feature of European politics.
Finland bought the David’s Sling system in a contract signed on 12 November 2023, five weeks into the war, for around €317 million. Finland was the first export customer for that system in the world. Over the past decade the Finns have bought more than €800 million of Israeli equipment, and this May they hosted thirty-two Israeli defense companies at a seminar in Helsinki. When the Finnish parliament was handed a citizens’ initiative signed by more than fifty thousand people, asking only that Finnish arms purchases be assessed against international humanitarian law, the defense committee recommended rejection and the parliament followed suit. Last week Finland announced it is ending its funding for UNRWA.
And what does Finland say about Israel? The Foreign Minister, Elina Valtonen, was asked on live television what Israel’s conduct in Gaza could be if not genocide. She answered: “Well, quite so.” She has said, of allegations of Israeli forces killing Palestinians seeking food, that if this is not a war crime she does not know what is. The President has called Gaza a man-made famine and that it was shameful.
Her government has never made allegations of genocide its official position. The Finnish cabinet has not said the word. What the Finnish cabinet has done is say everything short of it, in public, repeatedly, while doubling the length of its arms relationship with Israel in private.
The Finnish Defense Minister’s explanation, when the story broke, was that Finland has cooperation documents with forty countries and Israel has long been one of them. Nothing dramatic. Standard practice.
Spain
Spain is the case where the contradiction is written into law. In September 2025 Pedro Sánchez announced a package of measures and his own office titled the announcement “measures against the genocide in Gaza.” The decree that followed carries the word genocidio in its statutory title. It bans the export, import and transit of defense material to and from Israel. Spain had already intervened at the International Court of Justice.
Six months later, a Spanish audit found that not a single contract awarded to an Israeli company or its Spanish subsidiaries had actually been canceled, and that €1.208 billion of them remained in force. The ministry had deleted thirty-five contract announcements from its website. Deleting the announcement is not canceling the contract. The decree itself contains a clause permitting the cabinet to authorize transfers anyway, where a ban would harm the general national interest.
So the Spanish position, stated plainly, is this: Israel is committing genocide, this is the gravest crime in the international legal order, and Spain will continue to buy Israeli missiles where the national interest requires it.
The Others
Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro did not merely criticize Israel’s conduct in Gaza. His government intervened in South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice, and on 1 May 2024 he announced that Colombia would sever diplomatic relations with Israel, describing its government as genocidal. Nine months later, his air force signed a renewed contract with Israel Aerospace Industries to maintain its Kfir fighter fleet, confirmed on the record by the air force chief. Colombia’s jets are Israeli. They do not fly without Israeli engineers. The government was prepared to break relations with Israel over genocide, but not to let its own air force lose the Israeli support on which it depended.
Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said in June 2025 that Israel had crossed a line in Gaza and backed sanctions against it. By September, Denmark was telling the Security Council of starving children, famine and suffering on an “unprecedented scale,” while insisting that Israel comply with international humanitarian law. Yet that same month Denmark approved another 1.5 billion kroner to bring its Israeli-supplied rocket artillery to full operational capability. The government was arguing that Israel should face international pressure for the way it was waging war while spending another 1.5 billion kroner on Israeli technology to strengthen Denmark’s ability to wage one.
Belgium went further still. In December 2025, it formally intervened in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Its army had already bought, after October 2023, more than a hundred tonnes of ammunition from an Elbit-owned manufacturer, along with components from Rafael and maintenance from Israel Aerospace Industries. Belgium’s Defense Minister explained the contradiction with a candor his colleagues elsewhere lack. There are no sanctions against Israel, he said. Israel is a very important trading partner.
What the Purchases Prove?
These arrangements are fundamentally built on trust. When Greece puts Israeli interceptors on its islands and an Israeli-modeled command center at the top of its military, it is handing the lives of Greek citizens to Israeli engineering, Israeli software, Israeli spare parts and an Israeli supply chain that has to hold in a crisis. Finland did the same thing while sharing a border of more than thirteen hundred kilometers with Russia. That is not a transaction you enter into with a state you believe to be exterminating a people. It is a transaction you enter into with a state you trust more than almost any other, and whose competence you rate above the alternatives.
The comparison that makes it most clear is Russia. When Europe concluded that Russia was a criminal state, Europe did not wait for a ruling from The Hague. It sanctioned, expelled, seized, rearmed, and closed its borders. Finland shut its frontier. Nobody in Helsinki argued that the Foreign Ministry should decline to characterize the invasion of Ukraine until a court had pronounced. And no European government has spent the years since asking Russia to sell its interceptors.
What it Costs?
My objection is what the double posture does to the word. “Genocide” is not a rhetorical intensifier. It was built during the Shoah to name the worst thing human beings do to one another, and it was built substantially by a Jewish lawyer who lost his family to it. When a government uses that word, or stands beside it, or lets its parliament and its press carry it, and then signs a decade-long arms partnership with the accused, it tells us the word was never a finding. It was a tool. It cost nothing to pick up, it bought a week of domestic peace, and it was put down when a contract needed signing.
The accusation does not evaporate when the trade press moves on. It settles into the culture. It has become the common sense of the age. It is repeated in lecture halls and on placards and outside synagogues, by people who did not read the decree and do not know about the Kfir maintenance contract, and who have simply been told by their own leaders that the Jewish state is genocidal. Jews in Helsinki, Madrid, Athens and Brussels are then made to answer for it, in their streets, at their workplaces, at the doors of their own communal buildings. They are asked to answer for a charge their governments do not believe strongly enough to forgo an air defense system.
This is not an argument against criticism of Israel. Criticism of any government is legitimate, and Israel’s is no exception. Israelis themselves do it more fiercely than any foreign ministry. The point is that the gravest accusation in international law has been taken up by governments that do not act as though they believe it. They know Israel is not committing genocide. They are betting their cities on it.
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
