Israel’s ‘Iron Dome’ missile defence system has often been used – especially since 7th October 2023 – as both a way to promote jewish supremacy via the logic of what Cecil Roth famously termed ‘the jewish contribution to civilization’ as well as tool for ‘public diplomacy’ (aka PR but better known by the Israeli term ‘Hasbara’). However, when I looked into the origins of this missile defence system, I quickly noticed a few points of interest that suggest that ‘Iron Dome’ is much less of a jewish invention than might superficially seem to be the case.
We can see this in the ‘Jewish Virtual Library’ entry on ‘Iron Dome’ which states that:
‘The decision to build the Iron Dome system was made by the Ministry of Defense in 2007, following a year in which Hezbollah fired thousands of missiles into northern Israel during the Second Lebanon War. Israel had also experienced rocket attacks on its southern communities from the Gaza Strip, mainly carried out by Hamas.
Between 2008 and 2010, the Iron Dome system underwent a number of comprehensive tests and was declared operational in March 2011. On April 7, 2011, the system successfully intercepted its first projectile, a rocket fired from Gaza toward Israel.’ (1)
The primary development and testing phase was then between 2007 and 2011 not when the idea was first developed by the IDF’s Brigadier General Daniel Gold – who was then the newly appointed head of Israel’s Ministry of Defence's Research and Development Department – in March 2005 and which he awarded – rather illegally as it happens – to Israeli defence contractor Rafael Advanced Defence Systems. (2)
The interesting thing about this is that Israel didn’t try to fund this themselves, but – perhaps predictably – demanded that the US government – and thus the American people – foot the research and development bill as Charles Levinson and Adam Entous noted in their article on the origins of ‘Iron Dome’ for the ‘Wall Street Journal’ for 26th November 2012:
‘But if the government hoped to have enough Iron Dome batteries to provide meaningful protection against rockets, it would need more money than that. Israel's Defense Ministry approached the U.S. administration of President George W. Bush with a request for hundreds of millions of dollars for the system. The reception at the Pentagon was frosty, according to current and former U.S. defense officials.
Mary Beth Long, the assistant secretary of defense who oversaw the Iron Dome review process, sent a team of U.S. military engineers to Israel to meet with the developers. After the trip, in a meeting in her office, the team voiced skepticism about the technology, citing poor performance in initial testing, Ms. Long said in an interview.
Rafael's Mr. Drucker recalls an even harsher U.S. response. He said the U.S. team told them: "This is something that cannot be done."
Some U.S. military officials argued that Israel should instead consider using a version of the U.S.'s Vulcan Phalanx system, which the Army was deploying in Iraq to try to shoot down incoming rockets, current and former defense officials say. Gen. Gold's team had already considered and dismissed the Phalanx system.’ (3)
Aside from the fact that Drucker is probably deliberately misquoting the US military engineers to make it seem like they were more negative and dismissive than they in fact were so as to make his (and also Israel’s) achievements look more ‘miraculous’; it is clear that the US military believed that ‘Iron Dome’ was not worth investing in because its initial performance was poor – this incidentally is not disputed by the Israelis – and the cost would likely be prohibitive - (4) as well as likely fall on the US taxpayer as the Israeli government wouldn’t want to pay it which have both incidentally proven to be the case – (5) so the US military engineers suggested Israel use the US’ Vulcan Phalanx system instead. (6)
As a result of this an upset Israeli government ended up reluctantly funding the initial development of ‘Iron Dome’ to the tune of $200 million, (7) but even this likely came from the $3 billion a year that the United States was providing Israel by 2007. (8)
Then in September to October of 2009 a second American team was sent to Israel by the Obama administration to evaluate ‘Iron Dome’ led by a pro-Israeli jew named Dan Shapiro.
As Levinson and Entous write:
‘At the direction of a White House working group headed by then-National Security Council senior director Dan Shapiro (who today is the U.S. ambassador to Israel), the Pentagon sent a team of missile-defense experts to Israel in September 2009 to re-evaluate Iron Dome. The decision raised eyebrows in some Pentagon circles. Iron Dome was still seen as a rival to the Phalanx system, and previous assessment teams had deemed Iron Dome inferior.
In its final report, presented to the White House in October, the team declared Iron Dome a success, and in many respects, superior to Phalanx. Tests showed it was hitting 80% of the targets, up from the low teens in the earlier U.S. assessment. "They came in and basically said, 'This looks much more promising…than our system,' " said Dennis Ross, who at the time was one of Mr. Obama's top Middle East advisers.
That summer, Mr. Kahl's office drafted a policy paper recommending that the administration support the Israeli request for roughly $200 million in Iron Dome funding.
Mr. Ross said the threat posed by Iran was also part of the calculation to invest in Iron Dome. By showing how seriously the U.S. took Israel's security needs, the administration hoped Israel would "provide us the time and space to see if there was a diplomatic way out of the Iranian issue," Mr. Ross said.’ (9)
The interesting thing here is two-fold: in the first instance that the second U.S. team was led by a jew involved in pro-Israel advocacy and suddenly the ‘Iron Dome’ prototype is reported to have been hitting more than 80 percent of its targets up from just over 10 percent a little over a year earlier. Such a huge step change in technology is possible but unlikely and it has never been explained how this was achieved – and no that isn’t classified per se – but it does make one suspicious that there is manipulation/fakery involved in such a change.
This is especially true because – as we have seen – Israel clearly wanted the United States to pay for the research and development of ‘Iron Dome’ and didn’t want to pay for it out of its own pocket or even the normal US military aid of $3 billion p.a. given to it, which is the second noteworthy thing in that in 2009 as the direct result of Shapiro’s report; the Obama administration immediately gave Israel the $200 million it had asked for in 2007-2008 to develop ‘Iron Dome’.
The coincidence shouldn’t be lost on you since despite claims that it is a purely Israeli invention the ‘Jewish Virtual Library’ is quite specific that it isn’t that but rather:
‘Was designed and developed jointly by the United States and Israel.’ (10)
So, we know the United States funded the research, development and re-supply of ‘Iron Dome’ – currently to the tune of just over $2.9 billion between 2009 and 2024 – (11) but ‘Jewish Virtual Library’s’ way of putting it suggests that the United States was far more involved than Israel wants to claim and indeed most of the major development of ‘Iron Dome’ seems to have occurred from 2009 to 2011 when the United States began funding the development of the programme. (12)
The key to this seems to have been the involvement of the US defence contractor Raytheon who developed and produce such legendary missiles as the Sidewinder and the Tomahawk as well as various missile defence systems with Raytheon’s own website implying significant involvement in the development of ‘Iron Dome’ (13) well beyond the 2016 tests in the United States. (14)
We can thus see that something is wrong with the ‘Israel developed Iron Dome’ claim because it doesn’t really work and the United States appears to have been far more closely involved than Israel – or the United States for that matter (largely for diplomatic reasons I’d suggest) – want to claim.
What I’d propose probably happened is simple: the original American military engineering corps visit of 2007 under the George W. Bush administration saw that the ‘Iron Dome’ prototype system was completely ineffective (with a just above 10 percent success rate) as well as would be massively expensive to run and reported as such to their superiors.
Thus, when Israel demanded the United States government – and thus American taxpayers – pay them ‘hundreds of millions of dollars’ to fund the development of ‘Iron Dome’; the US had enough sense to reject such a ridiculous proposal and instead suggested that Israel use its newly increased $3 billion p.a. in military aid from the United States to purchase an American-made system causing Israel to fume and use $200 million of that $3 billion in American money to fund ‘Iron Dome’.
With the change in administrations from the Presidency of George W. Bush to Barack Obama in 2008-2009; Israel used the fact Obama’s pick for a senior official was a pro-Israeli jew – Dan Shapiro – to get a second team of ‘missile experts from the Pentagon’ (aka not a US military engineering team but a far more politically-linked group) to ‘evaluate Iron Dome’ once again and in this instance the tests are heavily manipulated or the data falsified – we know this was going on around this time with the famous manipulation/faking of intelligence by pro-Israel jews in the Pentagon being Saddam Hussein’s (non-existent) ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ which was the basis for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 that US politicians and military figures defended as real for years even though they knew differently so it not at all unlikely – (15) to create the basis for Obama’s newly-ensconced government of the United States to fund the programme or rather simply refund Israel for the money they’d already used from their $3 billion p.a. military aid from the United States to do so.
This funding also included substantive cooperation from important US defence contractor Raytheon – using the huge amount of funding the United States began allocating to ‘Iron Dome’ in the next few years and their own long established expertise in missile and missile defence technology – (16) to create what the Israeli defence contractors could not: a working and quite successful missile defence system and then Israel as well as Rafael Advanced Defence Systems simply took the credit, while Raytheon simply took (likely significant) payment for their consulting services either from Israel and/or the US government directly, which hid the United States’ role in developing ‘Iron Dome’ – allowing Israel to claim it was a ‘jewish invention’ – to prevent any diplomatic fallout or issues for the United States at an increasing sensitive time (remember this is right around the time of ‘Operation Cast Lead’ – Israel’s 2008-2009 invasion of Gaza – which caused high tensions between the Arab and broader Islamic world and Israel as well as its main supporter: the United States).
Plus it would give the United States the technological edge when – and if – they came to develop their own variant of ‘Iron Dome’ – which they have now begun under the aegis of ‘Golden Dome’ – (17) because the Israelis would have tested the technology and systems used by ‘Iron Dome’ significantly in actual combat/war scenarios allowing the United States’ own system to be far superior than that of the Israelis.
Thus, we can see that – although my case is speculative; it also makes a great deal more sense than conventional ‘Iron Dome is a great Israeli invention’ narrative (which also plays into the much-pushed Hasbara myth of Israel as the ‘start-up nation’) – (18) Israel’s famous ‘Iron Dome’ missile defence system is not likely a ‘jewish invention’ at all but at best a jewish idea that was funded and largely developed by non-jewish Americans while Israel (and the jews) merely took the credit and got a free high end missile defence system to boot.
References
(1) https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-iron-dome
(2) https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324712504578136931078468210
(3) Ibid.
(4) Ibid.
(5) On the cost per missile see: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-20385306 and on the US footing the huge bill for Israel’s defence using ‘Iron Dome’ see: https://breakingdefense.com/2025/01/israel-orders-more-iron-dome-interceptors-using-new-tranche-of-us-funding/
(6) https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324712504578136931078468210
(7) Ibid.
(8) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/aug/16/israel.usa also see https://afsc.org/news/5-things-know-about-us-funding-israels-iron-dome
(9) https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324712504578136931078468210
(10) https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-iron-dome
(11) Ibid.
(12) Implied by the timeline in Ibid. and https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324712504578136931078468210
(13) https://www.rtx.com/raytheon/what-we-do/integrated-air-and-missile-defense/
(14) https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-iron-dome
(15) On this see: Grant F. Smith, 2006, ‘Deadly Dogma: How Neoconservatives Broke the Law to Deceive America’, 1st Edition, Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy: Washington D.C.
(16) https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-iron-dome
(17) https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cyvmj6mem70o
(18) On this see: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2019-01-15/ty-article/.premium/debunking-startup-nation-how-israels-economy-cut-itself-off-from-the-world/0000017f-e4ad-d7b2-a77f-e7afeb830000 and https://jweekly.com/2018/12/17/the-myth-of-the-startup-nation-and-the-brainy-israeli/