How ‘Made in Israel’ is powering European security

Por Antoaneta Roussi — Foreign policy – POLITICO

How ‘Made in Israel’ is powering European security

The EU’s sovereignty push is colliding with growing reliance on Israeli defense firms.

By ANTOANETA ROUSSI
in Brussels

Illustration by Ricardo Tomás for POLITICO

On the last day of August, a group of Greek military officials arrived in Tel Aviv, led by Major General Ioannis Bouras, to sign what would become one of the largest defense export deals in both countries’ histories. 

The €3 billion agreement — called Achilles Shield — will provide a suite of Israeli tech to protect Greece against a wide range of threats, including missiles, aircraft and drones.

The deal is the latest installment in a growing relationship between European governments and the Israeli defense sector. As the continent races to rearm, it has largely relied on the United States for guns, tanks and aircraft. For many of the less-visible systems now at the center of modern security — sensors, interceptors, surveillance technology — governments are increasingly turning to Israel.

That dependence is deepening even as Europe’s political relationship with Israel grows more strained. The wars in Gaza and Lebanon have fueled tensions between the European Union and Israel, even as the bloc’s governments have become increasingly dependent on the country for critical systems — but those disputes have done little to slow cooperation between Israel’s defense sector and individual countries.

“Looking right now on our relations with the EU, yes, there are challenges,” said Avi Nir-Feldklein, Israel’s ambassador to the bloc. “But when you look at what we’re doing on the bilateral level with EU member states, the constructive, practical cooperation is intensive and flourishing.”

Israel’s advantage begins with its military. Young engineers serve in elite intelligence and cyber units, where they work on real-world security threats. After leaving the Israel Defense Forces, many join defense companies or launch security start-ups. The result is a conveyor belt between the battlefield and commercial product development.

Israel’s top three defense companies — Israel Aerospace Industries, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Elbit Systems — are either state-owned or maintain deep institutional links to the Israeli defense establishment, with senior military figures embedded in their governance structures.

“Israel is an excellent example of how defense or private companies are so well integrated,” said Kaupo Rosin, the head of Estonia’s foreign intelligence service. “And that makes them very capable.”

Israel’s broader security sector has also become a magnet for investment: Its firms attract nearly a quarter of global cyber investment, according to the Israel Innovation Authority 2025 High-Tech Report, with Google’s $32 billion purchase of Israeli start-up Wiz this year underscoring the sector’s attractiveness. 

Hiba Tareef, spokesperson for Israel’s Mission to the EU and NATO, said the appeal lay in the close integration of government, academia and the private sector — and in technology shaped by real-world operations. 

“By leveraging our real-time operational experience, we enable our partners to shift from a reactive to a proactive posture, significantly bolstering our collective resilience and defense,” she said.

Deepening dependence

A complete picture of Israel’s role in European defense is difficult to establish. Many contracts are undisclosed on national-security grounds, and some Israeli companies operate through European subsidiaries. But dozens of entries in the European tender database reviewed by POLITICO show Israeli firms becoming go-to suppliers for military communications, surveillance and electronic warfare.

Many of the public contracts — including the €3 billion Greek deal — were awarded directly to Israeli firms without opening the work to competing bids as is preferred by EU law, according to the tender notices.

European procurement rules treat competition as the default, even in defense and security. Direct awards are allowed only in narrow circumstances — for instance, in cases of genuine technical exclusivity or narrowly defined national-security concerns.

“‘No-tender’ routes are exceptional, evidence-based, and must be robustly justified,” said Annette Rosenkoetter and Andrea Pomana, partners at the legal firm FPS Law in Germany, which specializes in public procurement and European cases.

The pattern matters because direct awards can deepen dependence, as governments become reliant on a specific producer. The European Court of Justice ruled in January 2025 that highly specialized systems can lock in a buyer if they are designed in ways that only the original supplier can maintain or upgrade.

The Netherlands offers a glimpse of how that works in practice. In 2025, Elbit Systems’ C4I and Cyber — the company’s cyber division — won a €25 million contract to supply battlefield-management systems to the Dutch Ministry of Defense. It was a direct award, with no competition, and justified on the grounds that the ministry required additional services from the company it had originally contracted.

The Dutch Ministry of Defense did not reply to a request for comment.

Similarly, in 2024, the Spanish Defense Ministry awarded Rafael Advanced Defense Systems a €1.17 million contract without an open competition, saying the Israeli company was the only supplier capable of providing the required equipment. 

Other direct deals include a €6.5 million Elbit Systems Deutschland contract with Denmark’s Ministry of Defense in September 2025 for a device used to process and analyze electronic signals.

“Despite the political situation and animosity between Israel and the European Union, when it comes to the security dimension, the astonishing thing is that cooperation has always been very good,” said Sharon Pardo, a professor of international relations at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Political backlash

Critics warn that Europe may be creating a new dependency at the very moment it claims to be seeking greater autonomy, just as the conflicts in the Middle East are straining relations with Israel.

France has repeatedly restricted Israeli government participation at major arms shows, while the Finnish government was criticized in May for co-organizing a defense-tech seminar with the Israeli Ministry of Defense.

“If the goal is to strengthen European autonomy and sovereignty, then you cannot replace one type of dependency with another,” said Li Andersson, a left-wing Finnish member of the European Parliament.

Andersson also pointed to the way that some Israeli security companies market their products as having been tested in real-life operational conditions — in some cases, against Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.

“It should be clear that we do not engage in arms trade or defense cooperation with an actor that has repeatedly been found by several different institutions to break and disregard the most fundamental rules and principles of international law,” she said.

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar hit back at European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in September 2025 after she proposed sanctions and partial suspension of EU-Israel trade over Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Sa’ar said the assessment was based on “false accusations and legal gaps,” and insisted that Israel respected international law, arguing that the measures would only strengthen Hamas.

Hannah Neumann, a German member of the Green party in the European Parliament, warned that European countries were at risk of weakening themselves geopolitically.  

The more governments rely on Israel, the harder it will become to impose costs on its foreign policy, she said.

“I would prefer German resources and political energy to go into strengthening Europe’s autonomy,” she added.

Security first

The political backlash has done little to slow the deals. 

In January, Germany and Israel signed a memorandum to develop a cyber dome made with Israeli technology on German territory. A month later, Israel, Greece and Cyprus launched a Maritime Cybersecurity Center in Nicosia. 

Spain offers an even sharper example of the tension. Even as Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s government canceled €1 billion worth of defense contracts with Israel as part of what he called a “total arms embargo” over the “genocide” in Gaza, Madrid’s regional administration sought and received help in January from Israel’s Cyber Directorate to protect critical infrastructure.

Neither the Madrid Regional Administration nor the Cypriot authorities responded to requests for comment. The Spanish Ministry of Defense said it had “no contract relating to cybersecurity with any companies in Israel.”

Italy, meanwhile, has formally prioritized Israeli technology. In 2024, its cyber agency introduced a procurement incentive that treats Israeli cybersecurity software on par with products from the EU and NATO in public tenders. 

For small countries bordering Russia, the calculation can be especially stark, said Juha Martelius, director of the Finnish Security and Intelligence Service.

“In a country like Finland, we have never afforded to buy quantitatively as much as we would have perhaps needed or even wanted,” he said. “We always put emphasis on quality. That is, we buy the best, independent of where it comes from.”

Greece, for its part, tried to reduce its dependence on Israel. In the Achilles Shield deal, the Greek military was careful to insist on access to the system’s source code, so it could maintain and upgrade the technology independently. 

“Becoming ‘hostages,’ be it even to the friendliest foreign country or ally, is absolutely impossible,” Greek Defense Minister Nikos Dendias said in July. 

Niclas Herbst, a German center-right lawmaker who sits on the Delegation to Israel Committee in the Parliament, said that Israel offers what the European defense industry lacks, especially when it comes to cyber security threats and air defense.

“It’s for the benefit of Europe to have a stable and reliable relationship with Israel in this regard,” Herbst told POLITICO. 

Regarding criticism that Europe was using technology that had been tested on Palestinians, he noted that governments were predominantly investing in “very specialized software and sensor suites” to be used defensively.

“It’s a question of what do we want to buy?” he said. “Do we want to buy a good conscience or do we want to buy defense products?” 

Fonte: Foreign policy – POLITICO