French President Emmanuel Macron scolded Prime Minister Naftali Bennett following a report that Moroccan intelligence services used Israeli tech firm NSO Group's Pegasus spyware to keep tabs on him and other senior officials in France.
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The European Union also decried the report and called the affair completely unacceptable. Several members of the US Congress from the Democratic party, meanwhile, compared the sale of the software to selling guns to the mafia, even going as far as saying the Israeli company should be blacklisted.
The Israeli software is now being linked to the assassination of Saudi journalist Jamaal Khashoggi at the Saudi Arabian embassy in Istanbul, along with the persecution of journalists, politicians and social activists in Hungary, the Persian Gulf and elsewhere.
Because NSO Group is an Israeli company that requires a special export license from the Defense Ministry, and due to claims that the Israeli government allowed and even promoted the sale of Pegasus and other software to a host of countries as part of its efforts to improve diplomatic ties with those states – the brunt of the criticism has been aimed at Israel rather than the company itself.
The concern in France, and in Washington incidentally, while touching, is tainted with quite a bit of hypocrisy: espionage is a severe violation of personal privacy, but – and this is a big but – it doesn't kill. On the other hand, weapons and other related systems certainly do kill, and these are sold by the French, and by the Americans, too, at a large scale across the globe.
France, for example, is the third-largest weapons exporter in the world, after the US and Russia. Over the past two years, the scope of its weapons exports has amounted to some two billion dollars. Israel, in comparison, sold weapons last year for an estimated price of around $345 million, around 10% of France's total. The US is the leader in this market by a wide margin with annual sales of around $10 billion.
However, such activity isn't considered a human rights violation and doesn't entail spying on journalists and civilians; it merely involves weapons that are used to kill nameless, faceless human beings and is, therefore, somehow, far less troubling. We all recall France's involvement in building the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq some four decades ago. France provided the technology for the reactor and even promised to give the Iraqis the enriched uranium necessary to make it operational – all in exchange for Iraqi oil.
The reason for the anger at Israel is hard to gauge. Everyone sells weapons, everyone spies on one another. Perhaps they are mad because Israel has been able to join the "big boys club" and has become a player in the fields of weapons and technology. Or maybe this is also an attempt to turn Israel into a punching bag for progressive forces around the world.
It would behoove Israel to tighten oversight over the weapons and cyber industries in the country, but they must also be bolstered as they have been the growth engine for the economy in recent years. In any case, the attempt to pin the world's problems on weapons or technology produced in Israel is extremely hypocritical.
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