Iron Beam: Israel's first operational anti drone laser system
mod.gov.il103 points by fork-bomber 14 hours ago
103 points by fork-bomber 14 hours ago
Laser weapons appear to be advancing rapidly. Once we get to the single digit MW power range, MAD will deteriorate as the ICBM becomes a non-viable nuclear delivery mechanism.
What effect would that have? Will nukes start getting used in wars? Will we see deployment of multi ton NEFP[1] warheads that can strike targets with nuclear-propelled kinetics?
[1] <https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2017/05/nuclear-efp-and-heat.ht...>
The presupposition here being that Israel has a right to defense and that the poor people being occupied, living under apartheid, being slaughtered and displaced should possess no such right to resist, has been a hallmark of zionist propaganda for ages now.
It's not aging particularly well.
Its pretty well established in international law and the UN charter that all countries have a right to self-defense. Given this is a purely defensive weapon, i can't imagine what reasonable objection anyone could have to it.
I think Israel has a right to defense qua state and Palestinians have a right to resist qua subjects of unjust rule. These aren’t really contradictory positions, and both are pretty standard from a “this is what the UN says” ground truth[1][2].
(This is distinct from a state’s “right to exist,” which is nonsense. But once a state does exist, it has the right to defend itself by definition.)
[1]: https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/chapter-7
[2]: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assemb...
If they both have a right to kill each other, does the other really have a right to defense? Making it complicated introduces legalistic flaws and distracts everyone from actually fixing it by doing something like tying sanctions to murders of civillians.
I think everyone (myself included) has a right to actual self-defense, just not the false version we've been seeing.
Here's my peace plan: Blow up or starve kids on the other side +1 sanctions. Intercept a drone or rocket +0 sanctions. Say you're sorry and reduce arms by 10% -1 sanctions.
If the US alone did this they'd stop with all the murders in days to weeks.
Of course the state of affairs where random online commenters can think of better answers than the individuals in charge is only due to a lack of a desire for peace at high levels! There is nothing complicated about it at all.
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Zionism is not a race. The conflation police have once again been informed.
So will we get drones coated in mirrors and temperature sensors that automatically move them away from these weapons quickly? Or is the laser just too powerful?
Probably just more dystopian disposable drones from Israel featuring distress sounds including crying babies[0].
[0] https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6747/Israel-intensifie...
This isn't real. Any article that starts "the Israeli occupation army" is easy to recognize as fake.
It is exceedingly well documented that Israeli drones are shooting and killing children / civilians regularly:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7893vpy2gqo
https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/02/middleeast/children-killed-is...
https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/10/1166024
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/6/israeli-drone-chase...
I say drone, but you and I know it is the Israeli solders operators behind the drones that are doing these war crimes.
"Israeli Occupation Army" is accurate. And the drone story is real, that which I posted in the first place.
https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/...
I can post many more credible sources to this and anyone reading this should YouTube it and DYOR if in doubt.
The article you link to only quotes the first article you linked to as a source.
> As part of its ongoing genocide, which started on 7 October 2023
Well that was quickly debunked as a viable source. Israeli's didn't retaliate for Oct 7th until a few days later.
> When some of the residents went out to investigate and tried to help, they were shot at by Israeli quadcopter drones.
And another easy debunk - Israel uses explosive drones. Mounting a firearm to "shoot at" things from a drone is basically a fools errand.
Provide video. That should be trivial.
"Witnesses say Israel is using sniper drones in Gaza and they're shooting civilians"
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/19/nx-s1-5195171/witnesses-say-i...
> As part of its ongoing genocide, which started on 7 October 2023
The genocide started decades ago. The retaliation for Oct 7th began soon after.
"> When some of the residents went out to investigate and tried to help, they were shot at by Israeli quadcopter drones.
> And another easy debunk - Israel uses explosive drones. Mounting a firearm to "shoot at" things from a drone is basically a fools errand.
> Provide video. That should be trivial."
Incredibly disingenuous post altogether. Also please do clue yourself up on logical fallacies, particularly "burden of proof". Countless surgeons from The West have testified that Israeli drones have shot the hell out of people of all ages, to the extent that it seems indiscriminate.
If Israeli drones were kamikaze-only that would be a well understood thing by now.
There was a genocide committed against Bangladeshi Hindus by Pakistan and another being done right now by Bangladeshi govt in power now. A genocide is being committed in Nigeria by boko haram. Another in Sudanese war committed and funded by uae and other Arab nations.
But let me guess, the only genocide worth committing your verbiage is the one where a certain people belonging to the favorite religion is facing issues after voting in a terrorist organization by the name of Hamas which went in and attacked a community which was persecuted and butchered for close to 2500 years. All provoked by a religious ideology and Arab theocratic pan nationalism.
> The genocide started decades ago. The retaliation for Oct 7th began soon after.
In that case, the article you linked to is even more off.
(I’m not well-informed enough to comment on the rest, so I won’t.)
There are recordings of Israeli drones engaging in psychological warfare against the civilian population by playing those horrible sounds
I watched your video, the only thing on it is a drone warning people away from a dangerous area.
It’s psychological genocide. Just like everything is a bubble everything is a genocide now.
Genetic fallacy. Like all propaganda it's suspect, but not all propaganda is fake.
Don't Get Distracted
This is a good article. I disagree with its implications. I would agree that the average us citizen is much too far removed from the defense industrial complex and that creates these situations where a Google engineer (not necessarily this guy) is perfectly willing to help destroy American society with his advertising tech but balks at automating image tagging for the dod's big data lake because would rather have another 9/11 than be responsible for a false positive in the ME.
How is cell phone tracking going to prevent another 9/11? And looking at the historical track record, the DoD has done a lot of killing and very little 9/11 prevention in the past 24 years.
hey man what country were the 9/11 hijackers from? What counties did we invade and which did we give f-35’s to?
This is designed to save people.
Sure, until someone says "hey can we stick this on a truck and use it against cars?" "Hey can we stick this on the belly of a plane and use it on a building?" "Hey what happens if we do a flash of this at protestors?"
It’s not going to do anything useful against cars, let alone buildings. It would blind people, and that would be bad, but it’s a very expensive way to hurt people. I think this one is for what it says it’s for.
"It's a very expensive way to hurt people" has historically never been a real deterrent to motivated nation states to bring costs down
There is no such thing as a defensive weapon.
You might be tempted to say "what about a missile shield?" but such a thing allows the owner to act with impunity with levels of violence we arguably haven't seen since 1945.
As a real example of this, the only reason a deeper conflict didn't develop with Iran this year was because Iran demonstrated they could overwhelm the various layers of Israel's missile shield and Iran seriously depleted the various munitions used by those air defense systems (eg interceptors, THAAD) and those take a long time to replenish.
> There is no such thing as a defensive weapon
I agree if we reframe it as “purely defensive,” though there is a bit of tautology invoked with the “weapon” qualifier.
That said, there is legitimacy to developing defensive arms, even if one doesn’t like the ones doing it.
> the only reason a deeper conflict didn't develop with Iran this year was because Iran demonstrated they could overwhelm the various layers of Israel's missile shield
This hypothesis is not sustained by Iran’s reduced firing rate throughout the conflict. All evidence suggests Iran lost its war with Israel and would lose it again if they go for round 2.
If you want society to be more vulnerable to military action, then the biggest innovation is health care. Improved health care is what allowed nations to create and maintain larger military forces. Through out history, disease and malnourished caused more death by a large margin than actually violence in combat, and many war campaign stopped suddenly because one or both sides became unable to continue.
> You might be tempted to say "what about a missile shield?" but such a thing allows the owner to act with impunity with levels of violence we arguably haven't seen since 1945.
I would still say "what about a missile shield?".
If a missile shield is a weapon, because of its affordances, then any object is a weapon. And while that's marginally true I don't think we get anywhere by entertaining category errors.
If something enables aggression, because it makes counter attacks unreasonable, that seems like a fairly nice thing to have more of, in a world where destruction is far too easy and construction is fairly hard.
> As a real example of this, the only reason a deeper conflict didn't develop with Iran this year was because Iran demonstrated they could overwhelm the various layers of Israel's missile shield and Iran seriously depleted the various munitions used by those air defense systems (eg interceptors, THAAD) and those take a long time to replenish.
Lol no, Iran was utterly humiliated in this conflict, and outed as a paper tiger.
That’s gross. You’re basically saying that hundreds of millions of people need to be held as hostages to ensure good behavior, and that trying to rescue those hostages is morally wrong.
Could definitely be used in an offensive capacity. I don't think it'll be a red alert 2 style prism cannon, but I do think it can be used to gain air superiority. With a long enough runtime, this thing could definitely take out a plane.
That said, it's pretty tame. We can already take out planes with flak cannons. This is just more efficient.
From Rafael’s site: https://www.rafael.co.il/system/iron-beam/
100kW laser is nothing to joke about, but seems a good application for anti drone tasks. Fiber lasers are pretty snazzy.
It's quiet the power requirement. I wonder how long it has to focus on a drone to eliminate it. Like how long is this thing consuming 100kW?
Good question, probably depends a lot on how much energy actually makes it to the target some distance away. And then how much is actually absorbed. Probably depends more on the power density then, rather than total power?
Can't imagine they get a very small spot at multiple km unless they use gigantic lenses or multiple independent laser focused on the same spot
Maybe it involves multiple converging beams to reduce transmission losses?
Even small divergence angles add up if they’re trying to intercept at visual ranges outside of traditional munitions.
That being said, probably ~10kW/m^2 is enough to overheat or disable a UAV
It'll get a lot of time to react at that energy as it's not going to "instantly" fry anything*. That's probably less energy/m2 than consumer heat guns, especially if consider that these drones are likely going to get sprayed in reflective paint. Easy defense for the drone would be just: get into a spin to get roasted evenly -> shut off -> fall for a few hundred meters, cooling using air that rushes by to counteract the laser further -> catch itself once it lost the laser.
That would force these laser systems to point each drone until it either visibly goes up in flames or impacts the ground (which means you also need to be able to track them all the way down), otherwise you can't be sure it won't just snap back to life once you started engaging the next drone.
I don't feel like 10kw/m2 would be anywhere near useful. It's gotta be more than that.
* Stadium floodlights aren't going to instantly grill any bird that flies in front of them either, and they reach that ballpark.
Huh, to what degree is this technology gatekept by battery advances?
A few decades ago lasers were dismissed because they involved chemical reagents for high power and explosive capacitors for even low-power applications.
> Huh, to what degree is this technology gatekept by battery advances?
Not too much. The power delivery was doable even 15 years ago. It would have just been more expensive and heavier.
The bigger issue I believe would have been the lens and tracking capabilities. For the tracking to work you need some pretty good cameras, pretty fast computers, and pretty good object recognition. We are talking about using high speed cameras and doing object detection each frame
> The power delivery was doable even 15 years ago.
Not really. It took a long time for solid state lasers to make it to 100KW. That's the power level military people have wanted for two decades.
Megawatt chemical lasers are possible, and have been built. But the ground based one was three semitrailers, and the airborne one needed a 747. Plus you ran out of chemicals fairly fast.
I guess they are using it in pulsed mode, continuous mode would be a little bit much power
Hm, you think longer than the laser is firing? Could there be windup?
I imagine there's some sort of storage system, like a huge bank of ultra-capacitors, that are constantly kept charged.
The wind up would be if that bank is depleted and they need to recharge. Delivering 100kW for a short period of time is definitely a feat.
few seconds. it (lower power version) was deployed during war with hezbollah and intercepted 40 drones (big one, not fpv).
there is footage of intercepts out there. was released about half an year ago
They say it's first operational system in it's class, but it seems very similar to the Australian Apollo system, with Apollo being able to go up to 150kW
https://eos-aus.com/defence/high-energy-laser-weapon/apollo/
The thing that worries me isn't the drone/anti-drone escalation. It is the fact that these weapons aren't actually limited to anti-drone use. Recently we have seen clear examples of countries, including Israel, that will use automatic id technology to mass tag a population. If you then have tools that can automatically track and mass kill, which this type of weapon represents, then we have reached a type of warfare that is new in the world and deeply scary. It isn't hard to imagine a scenario where person x is killed since they are marked as a 'bag guy' and as part of being marked every person they were next to for the last few days was also marked as likely enough to be bad guys to kill as well. All that has to be done is push a button. It is a scary, and unfortunately all to possible, future if not now.
A lot of comments decrying new weapons tech, but I think drone defense tech is particularly critical right now and going to save a lot of lives. Put another way, I don't think we would be against new clothing that made bullets less effective, even if it remains terrible that such clothing is needed.
Especially as AI becomes better and cheaper and suicide drones become more nimble and autonomous. If you have seen any of the horrifying footage out of Ukraine you will understand how badly we need more effective and cheaper drone defense as soon as possible.
That laser station will not last in Ukraine an hour and will be destroyed either by missiles or drone swarm.
What Ukraine have found a net launcher is effective and cheap solution against drones and may allow more use of tanks and heavy armor vehicles again in 2026. Then shotguns with a special ammunition is effective. Then against fiber drones a fence with moving wire works surprisingly good to cut the fiber.
you should tell it to ukrainians. because they are busy developing their own laser system https://thedefensepost.com/2025/04/15/ukraine-unveils-laser-...
Yeah, I see this as ultimately a wash.
In Russia/Ukraine, drones have proven to be a very real threat to deal with (arguably also in Iraq).
What this means is wealthy nations will snatch up or recreate this and deploy it. That will stop smaller resistance forces from either defending or attacking. Depending on the nation in question this could both good or bad. Just like drones, guns, or tanks.
Effectively, this puts the status quo back to where it was before mass drone deployments.
Which, IMO, is better than having swarms of cheap bombs flying around.
Taken to the extreme, I also prefer the current status quo vs. everyone having a nuclear-tipped ICBM, and would welcome a countermeasure if cheap ICBMs became a thing.
Israel saw over 16,000 rocket attacks last year from fundamentalist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and Yemen. The Iron Dome intercepted ~90% of them, resulting in thousands of lives saved.
Iron Beam is the newer incarnation of this technology that uses lasers to intercept incoming rockets and drones with precision and much lower cost. Wonderful technology.
Lets send some over to Ukraine.
And Putin gives a nuke to Iranians then it's game over since Iranians don't care about MAD doctrine. Anyways the risk of the tech falling into Russia's hands is too high. Ukrainians have the smarts to develop it themselves now that it is proven as a viable tech.
Why would Russia give nukes to Iran? The Russians themselves would be harmed by an open nuclear exchange.
No, Putin's threats to Biden and Trump were more along the lines of, 'See the Houthis shooting shipping, imagine that capability spread to rebels and terrorists worldwide'
Ah yes, fundamentalist groups. You know, ethno-theocracies. There's one missing from your list here.
Each Iron Dome interception cost many times more than the cost of the rockets. This will make it cheaper for other poorer nations to afford and operate.
Next up we'll be hearing about the virtues of V2 in the Nazi arsenal. Fun tech. Still does not erase the bad feelings from seeing kids shot at intentionally from drones, or submarine launched drones throwing incendiary munitions at a flotilla featuring my fellow countrymen from the same fucking country designing this laser. Fuck Israel.
> seeing kids shot at intentionally from drones
Anytime somebody makes a claim about a drone operating a firearm, you should be extremely skeptical. There's a reason everyone uses explosive drones, not "drone with a machine gun". Small flying machines trying to fire off rounds doesn't work out.
> submarine launched drones throwing incendiary munitions at a flotilla
Per the Greek coastguard, someone left a lit joint by a fuel canister. Maybe the Greeks are in on the deep conspiracy.. or potheads are just forgetful.
There isnt much information here. What is the total power per m^2 and what is the frequency (range). As we know the sun alone is 1kW/m^2 over quite a range.
Someone should give people in Gaza or the West Bank or Lebanon the same tech.
Gaza (Hamas), the West Bank (Fatah), and Lebanon (Hezbollah) are the reason this technology is needed in the first place: violent religious fundamentalists firing cheap rockets at Jewish cities because of religious hatred. Over 16,000 rocket attacks on Israel last year alone.
Thanks to the Iron Dome technology, nearly 90% of such attacks were intercepted, saving thousands of lives.
This new Iron Beam technology is more precise and cheaper, and will likely save even more lives.
All lies. Conflating antisemitism with zionist agenda is all that's left, really. Israel has lost any moral argument.
> violent religious fundamentalists firing cheap rockets at Jewish cities because of religious hatred
So, the greater Israel project is not some bullshit based on an ancient story book? Do tell.
The moral argument for a modern, rights-based society is cleanly on Israel’s side. I’m glad they’ve developed this technology, so they can continue defending themselves at a lower cost to their citizens. The engineers involved have done a very good thing.
Your snide tone can’t obscure that the moral issue is straightforward, if you’re aiming at a world where people can be free to live, grow, and flourish. If you want a society that enables builders and engineers to express themselves by creating new things, i.e., on in which people are permitted to think, then you are aligned with Israel’s basic cause.
The central difference is that Israel’s government is essentially secular and free, whereas its enemies — especially Hamas — are essentially theocratic and totalitarian. In Israel, the general trend is that people of all types, including Arab Muslims, have rights and live happy, free lives. If Hamas was to conquer Israel, as is their stated aim, those same Arab Muslims would have no rights - those individuals would be oppressed by exactly the type of vicious theocrats you falsely suggest Israel is composed of.
Last, to clarify the kernel of truth that your point relies on through distortion: while it is true that Israel contains a set of backwards theocratic tribesmen, their importance is marginal. Tel Aviv’s builders and entrepreneurs are the dominant cultural force in Israel, and they are proponents and practitioners of secular modernity.
Do not falsely conflate a marginal group with Hamas’ explicit cause, which is to destroy Israel’s free society and replace it with religious tyranny.
Unless, perhaps, that is what you really regard as moral?
The "backward tribesmen" are currently providing the Minister of Finance/special Minister for the West Bank (Smotrich), Minister of Police (Ben Gvir), Minister of Diaspora Affairs that happens to also manage access to aid orgs in gaza (Amichai Chikli), Minister for Cultural Heritage (Amihai Eliyahu), Minister of Settlements and National Missions (Orit "Time of Miracles" Stook) and probably others. So much for "marginal influence".
> In Israel, the general trend is that people of all types, including Arab Muslims, have rights and live happy, free lives. If Hamas was to conquer Israel, as is their stated aim, those same Arab Muslims would have no rights - those individuals would be oppressed by exactly the type of vicious theocrats you falsely suggest Israel is composed of.
The Arab Israelis have those same rights on paper but face discrimination in practice. But that's beside the point and you know it. What about the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank who are under Israeli rule but have no rights and no representation in Israel at all? But I guess all seven million of them are "Hamas" and therefore don't count as humans?
Also note that while the secular liberals from Tel Aviv and the deeply religious settlers from the West Bank disagree on lots of things, they have no fundamental disagreement on the occupation.
All lies?
Hamas and Islamic Jihad shooting thousands of rockets before, during and after October 7 massacre is documented[1] by Wikipedia (that does have documented anti-israel bias[2])
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_and_the_Israeli%E2%8...
Sorry but doesn't fly. Also Islam has nothing to do with Palestinian resistance. This theme of "Palestinians and Muslims are all Jihadists and all seek to kill Jews" is also getting really really old.
2026 will bring more enlightenment to the masses. Also, Israel loves messing with wikipedia as it has done for years.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/aug/18/wikipedia-edit...
That's not how it looks like though with the way Israel acts like the judge, jury and executioner of the region. You get the feeling that only Israeli lives count in the Middle East.
>This new Iron Beam technology is more precise and cheaper, and will likely save even more (israeli) lives.
There fixed it for you. last I checked, Israelis are using drones to summarily execute Palestinian kids with impunity. the idea of these people having even more weapons at their disposal paid for by MY tax dollars leaves me a bit disgusted.
Probably a dumb question, but could a ploy drone fitted with a directional mirror redirect the beam back to the source to damage or destroy it?
Mirrors are not effective enough. Shielding drones from energy weapons seems like a similar problem to entering Earth’s atmosphere, you want to shield it in a way that will blast away safely and ideally diffuse the laser, so the energy is spread over a larger space. I suspect larger lasers will likely aways win, since there is only so much shielding can do. At which point we could end up with transformers like drones that are built to be broken apart mid flight and yet still deliver damage. I feel like defending drones could become possible with energy weapons but only under ideal weather conditions.
I'm not certain, but I think the returned beam would likely be significantly out-of-focus.
No, but an AI drone like the one Turkey has can probably detect the source of the beam by hiding behind some sacrificial/decoy drones and watching them blow up then shooting a missile at the laser source. It's not like the laser is coming out of thin air.
Shooting down missiles is what this is for.
actually it's for shooting anything that is close enough and can be intercepted. during the war with hezbollah (drones were issue due to topography) lower power version of iron beam was deployed on trial bases and scored around 40 intercepts
Personally I think that defensive technology like this is fantastic. It means that innocent citizens will be protected from constant bombardment or thread of bombardment by cheap mass produced rockets or drones. Israeli civilians have faced bombardment by tens of thousands of rockets from Gaza for the last 20 years [1].
Outside the Middle East there's many areas threatened by combatants with similar cheap missiles. Perhaps Ukraine is an obvious one. We're seeing rises in conflicts across parts of Africa, Cambodia/Thailand, Pakistan/India. Many governments are looking into buying these to protect their countries.
This technology hopefully can protect populations from destabilizing forces funded on the cheap by foreign powers. Machine guns changed warfare [2] and drones have been a similar massive change in warfare making it cheaper and easier to attack and destabalize regions. Though of course there's downsides as well [3].
1: https://www.mideastjournal.org/post/how-many-rockets-fired-a... 2: https://online.norwich.edu/online/about/resource-library/how... 3: https://claritywithmichaeloren.substack.com/p/iron-dome-part...
> It means that innocent citizens will be protected from constant bombardment or thread of bombardment by cheap mass produced rockets or drones
One could also hope that e.g. Iran starts focusing its economy on the wellbeing of its people versus playing regional cop to America’s world police.
Three thoughts:
1. Just to repeat myself from another comment on this thread, there is no such thing as a defensive weapon. Were it not for the various missile shields, the Israeli state wouldn't act with wanton abandon against its own citizens and its neighbours. All of the various war crimes and terror attacks are a direct consequence of the effectiveness of a "defensive" missile shield.
Let me pose this question to you: if these were purely defensive technologies, why don't we give them to everyone, including the Palestinians? and
2. Israel has already ruled out giving Ukraine the anti-missile (and assumedly anti-drone) defenses [1]; and
3. Many people, yourself included it seems, need to examine these conflicts around the world through the lens of historical materialism.
Take the genocide and conflict in Sudan. The SAF are arguably the ones with the "cheap rockets" here. Should we be giving the RSF anti-drone technology? The RSF are backed by the UAE using US weapons. Why? To loot Sudanese gold.
Why did Russia invade Ukraine? Territory, access to the Black Sea, resources and to create a land bridge to Crimea that had otherwise become extremely expensive to maintain as a colonial outpost. Like, just look at a map of controlled territory.
But why is it in a stalemate? In part because Russia is a nuclear power but also because the West is unwilling to let Ukraine do the one thing it could do to defend itself properly and that is to attack Russian energy infrastructure. Despite the sanctions, Russia is still allowed to sell oil and gas to places like Hungary, Slovakia, France, Belgium, India and China.
Back to the Middle East, we have Yemen, who was devastated by war and genocide at the hands of another US ally, Saudi Arabia.
The solution to these conflicts isn't more weapons, not even "defensive weapons". It's solving the underlying economic conditions that created that conflict in the first place.
[1]: https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-rules-out-giving-ukr...
> The solution to these conflicts isn't more weapons, not even "defensive weapons". It's solving the underlying economic conditions that created that conflict in the first place.
Collectivism will not save us. The day after we abolish markets, prices, and capitalism, there will be as many disagreements about resource allocation as there were the day before. Some of those disagreements will spiral into conflict.
'people shouldn't have locks on their doors, they discourage them from improving society'
'moving from wooden shingles allows society to be negligent when it comes to fire/forestry management and makes the world worse'
Iron Dome, Iron Beam… what next, Iron Curtain?
Flying disco balls when?
They certainly have those for radars! Although the reason for using them is different.
100 kW. That's a lot. I wonder how many kW will be needed to save them from God's wrath
Just in time for Iran 2.0
In the war in June, Iran fired 500kg warhead ballistic missiles. These were the only lethal munition they used, killing a couple dozen civilians.
The Iron Beam is not relevant against ballistic missiles.
> Iran fired 500kg warhead ballistic missiles
Iran also fired “over 1,000 suicide drones” [1].
Shaheds are heavy and big and I doubt that the new laser system can damage them. An interceptor drone is much cheaper and effective against them. This is more like defense against smaller FPV drones targeting bigger anti-missile systems.
I wish they would make a demonstration
It’s disappointing to keep being shown that if HN was around in the 40s, it would overall be condemning the Warsaw ghetto uprising and arguing all those living there should be further punished.
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Yes, that’s exactly the kind of language the Nazis used. You merely further prove my point.
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Please read about the history of the region. This seems to be a good unbiased source, which is hard tobfind these days: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/09/why-israel-pal...
In particular, put attention to this:
""" What happened to the Palestinians who were living there?
About 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled – about 85% of the Arab population of the territory captured by Israel – and were never allowed to return. Palestinians called the exodus and eradication of much of their society inside Israel the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, and it remains the traumatic event at the heart of their modern history.
Arabs who remained in Israel as citizens were subject to official discrimination. They were placed under military rule for nearly two decades, which deprived them of many basic civil rights. Much of their land was expropriated and Arab Israeli communities were deliberately kept poor and underfunded. """
Let's not pretend that the Jews just appeared there. 800k Jews were kicked out of middle eastern countries. If we rewind the clock shouldn't those Jews also get their Middle East land back? Or did they not terrorize enough people and hijack enough airplanes to qualify?
Source: I was born in Baghdad. Father and other relatives were tortured and murdered there.
At this point, aren't we all descendants of Abraham with high probability? Maybe we should just give the land we identify as Israel to the world.
“How did the occupied Palestinian territories become occupied? In 1967 Israel launched what it said was a pre-emptive defensive war against Jordan, Egypt and Syria, as they appeared to be preparing to invaded.”
The problem with these summaries is everyone can always somewhat legitimately claim a prior offence. The 1967 offense resulted from the shitshow that was the 1948 war [1], which itself resulted from a history of French, British and Ottoman control.
It sounds like they both suck.
> It sounds like they both suck
They both suck and they both have legitimate grievances.
They’re also both proxies on like four major axes (Iran vs Saudi Arabia, America vs Russia, America vs China and whatever Turkey is up to) and more minor axes than I’ve seen anyone even bother keeping track of.
It’s a deep and deeply fucked conflict that doesn’t lend well to armchair border drawing from an ocean away from first principles.
Hamas isn't Palestine.
According to Wikipedia, "Gaza" is the largest city in Palestine, and "Hamas" is the government of Palestine.
Putin isn't Russia either. By that logic Russia didn't attack Ukraine?
If one wants to avoid nationalism, then yes.
As the russians were not asked about it.
The russian government decided to do so and to supress any oposition.
(But their army is largely made up of volunteers)
> If one wants to avoid nationalism, then yes
How do you do that when dealing with nationalist governments waging nationalist wars? The most generous framing of either side’s ask in the Gaza war is for nationhood.
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You are thinking of Ashkenazi. Vast majority of Israeli jews are Mizrahi. This is in addition to 2 million Palestinians who are Israeli citizens and are doing just fine. Your hatred comes from ignorance.
Are they afforded the same rights as jewish israelis? What about Gazans and West Bank palestenians whose families came from elsewhere in the earlier Palestine and were driven out to these areas, now living in terrible conditions. For simplicity lets pretend it is Sep 2023 for this argument, as the conditions were terrible then, due to Israels policies.
> What about Gazans and West Bank palestenians whose families came from elsewhere
I’m sympathetic to the argument that there should be reparations—from Israel but also France, Britain and Turkey—for victims of the Nakbah.
But let’s be clear on a right of return: this logic applies to almost every human in Europe or Asia when it comes to the Middle East if we go back far enough. We’re talking about the closest coast to the cradle of civilisation.
You don't have to go 'back' to find Palestinians alive, today, who can point at their settler-occupied homes on a map, and tell you the day they were kicked out. I think that's a reasonable cutoff point for right of return.
> I think that's a reasonable cutoff point for right of return
I do too. The contours of how that works with their descendants, and when we draw the line for the living, has been debated in good faith (and bad, increasingly recently) for decades [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_right_of_return
>Are they afforded the same rights as jewish israelis?
Yes [1]
Thanks for the link. There are counterpoints in the linked article, including:
> Yousef Munayyer, an Israeli citizen and the executive director of The Jerusalem Fund, wrote that Palestinians only have varying degrees of limited rights in Israel. He states that although Palestinians make up about 20% of Israel's population, less than 7% of the budget is allocated to Palestinian citizens. He describes the 1.5 million Arab citizens of Israel as second-class citizens while four million more are not citizens at all. He states that a Jew from any country can move to Israel but a Palestinian refugee, with a valid claim to property in Israel, cannot. Munayyer also described the difficulties he and his wife faced when visiting the country.[301]
Hope over time this changes for the better. If they can start letting people expelled years ago to return too. Maybe not to their old address but work something out.
If all the money poured into conserving status quo was spent on creating better conditions for Palestinian refugees in any of the independent Arab states, Middle East would be a much quieter place
> If all the money poured into conserving status quo was spent on creating better conditions for Palestinian refugees in any of the independent Arab states
Easier said than done. The chaos the PLO caused in Jordan and Lebanon [1] raises legitimate security concerns for any country asked to accept large numbers of Palestinian refugees.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_Liberation_Organizat...
Why not US take a few million refugees, and build homes for them. Just borrow $100B from the Federal Reserve and do it.
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I look like an average white male.
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Can you give me some pointers on how to develop? I am currently farming years of professional experience, while simultaneously looking out for better job opportunities, and getting high school credits that are needed to attend a university. I'm not 100% sure if I actually need to go to university, but it's at least something if I can't find anything else.
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> To summarize, any technique or technology designed to subjugate colonial interests will ultimately be used the citizenry in the imperial core
To emphasize, however, per your own source, this is a critical analytical tool and not a testable hypothesis nor even prediction about the world.
Zyklon-B wasn’t much of a secret - it was used all over the place as a pesticide. Most soldiers would have been about as familiar with it as we would with Raid spray or bug traps.
Israeli police had to teach American one how to do violence? Come on
Just recently, US has worked with Saudis and Ukrainians and others to supply heavy and novel weaponry to be deployed in eg Yemen, coordinating airstrikes, giving intel etc. to devastating effect and has done even more direct involvement in brutal wars, whether proxy wars of whatever. The PATRIOT act and subsequent militarization of police at home supports the GP’s statement about a boomerang. I don’t think GP meant to say it was only due to Israel or single out Israel as a source US of military cooperation and MIC job creation.
But yes, some people will only care if they can find Jewish connections, eg Zelensky being partly Jewish or MBS or Al Sisi allegedly being partly Jewish due to their stances in opposition to Islamic extremism.
There are people who blame influential Jews for everything, and they’ll go so far as to say that Ataturk was Jewish, in order to care about the Armenian genocide. But they won’t care about, say, the Hamidian massacres of Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks that took place 20 years earlier because they can’t find any evidence that Sultan Hamid was Jewish.
They blame Israel for Iraqi expulsion of Jews, until they find out the Farhud was 10 years before Israel was formed as a state.
They even finally started to care about what’s happening in Sudan when they realized they can sort of draw a tenuous line between that and Israel through UAE.
As long as influential Jews are involved they will deeply care about a conflict, eg 9/11 dancing Israelis or clean break memo of PNAC. They will ignore that presidents like W Bush called the Iraq invasion a “crusade” to “rid the world of evildoers”. They also do not like to go back further to, say, bombing of Laos and all throughout southeast Asia because, again, it is hard to blame any Jews for that.
It’s almost as if they have an algorithm: 1) find Jews involved with thing they consider bad, 2) care about that issue but ONLY to the extent they can point out Jewish connections 3) cherrypick and compile lists of Jewish involvement to make it seem that all bad things done by states, corporations, or humanity, is due to Jews. Candace Owens for example recetly said that Stalin was Jewish and that the US slave trade was “not the white man but mostly Jewish”, and that Black lives now really matter to her after years of “White lives Matter” with Ye, now that she found out Jews were behind it.
> There are people who blame influential Jews for everything
To what extent are they in the same bucket as those who reflexively blame the CIA or Russia or immigrants or white people for everything?
There is a similar mentality among humans that many fall into, the “victimhood mentality”. And many Jews themselves also have the same thing. In a conflict, often both sides use the same tactics without realizing it.
The way BLM blamed “systemic racism”, various Jews might see “antisemitism“ behind every critique of Israel. It is not just individual but group psychology. The worst scorn is reserved for heaping on defectors, who Black BLM activists would call “uncle Toms” and Jewish Zionist activists would call “self-hating Jews”.
So what’s interesting is the common tactics. I don’t mean to imply it is one sided. Both sides of an ideological conflict (eg abortion, socialism, etc) want to take over a powerful state apparatus to use for their agenda. Both sides want to cynically and hyporcitically exploit millions of people to further their agenda.
For example, antizionists (and more generally revolutionaries / “axis of resistance” supporters who may be either leftist, Islamist or whatever) want to perpetuate statelessness of millions of people in Lebanon, Syria and all over the Middle East, so they can be labeled “Palestinian” because one of their grandfathers was in Palestine circa 1947, so that they can “keep their identity” by essentially forcing on them, and maintain large numbers for “the cause” of removing Jewish majority in any area of the Levant. They oppose giving them citizenship on a jus soli basis even if they and their parents were born in another country. This happens even with Palestinians who themselves got citizenship long ago in Chile, USA, UK, Sweden, Canada etc. It is a similar mentality to “fight to the last Ukrainian” by Ukrainians abroad who left Ukraine an settled in other countries.
Meanwhile, Zionists have a form of that, where many of them constantly play up and almost seem to welcome how badly Jews would be treated among other countries, and downplay the role of their right wing government waging wars in a far more reckless fashion than they could have. Instead of placing the blame on that government for making Jews less safe, they say “you see? This is why you should move to Israel. You’ll be safe here among Jews.”
In short both movements cynically use their own people, almost welcoming hardship for them until they are “forced” to embrace their identity and move back to where they same place both groups are competing to demographically dominate ..
This isn’t unique to Israel. Armenians vs Azerbaijanis for example seek foreign alliances for protection. Serbs vs Albanians. Tamils vs Sri Lanka. Rohingya vs Burma. Uyghurs vs China. And so on. There are horrific proxy wars happening in Sudan now, and Congo throughout. But people don’t tend to focus on any of that because Ashkenazi Jews are famous and successful in the West. And because Abrahamic religions are based on Judaism, so Israel is quite foundational to all their religions. Not so much Sri Lanka…
You can see in Eastern cultures which are not Abrahamic, not Muslim or Christian, the attitude is the same as to any other sectarian conflict. That is proportional. But it is extremely disproportionate in the West! For the reasons I listed above.
did you see rapid rise in violence against russians after russia started war in ukraine ? did you see rapid rise in violence against azeris after ethnic cleansing that they executed recently ? against chinese for their treatment of Uyghurs. etc.. etc.. etc.. ? I guess no.
but when there is a violence against random jews across the west, somehow israeli government is the guilty one and not antisemitism.
Yep, I did. My mom taught at a school where during the war Ukrainians would gang up on Russians, both being immigrants. A lot of Russian things were “canceled” to the point that Babylon Bee ran this story:
https://babylonbee.com/news/nyc-restaurants-now-require-proo...
I have seen attacks on Asians ramp up during the start of COVID.
I say the same to both Jews and Black people (being Jewish myself): we live in the least racist, least antisemitic time in hundreds of years, maybe in history. Your grandfather had it much worse. These complaints are first-world problems. Yelling “racist” or “antisemite” on a hair trigger only serves to cheapen the actual words, same as yelling “genocide” while ignoring every other more horrific war, even 200 km to Israel’s north in Syria.
The “magarshak ratio” is the amount of outrage about something vs how many people are actually suffering. To be sure, the disproportionate navel gazing at Israel is due to Jews and Judaism. But similarly, the disproportionate navel gazing at attacks on Jews in USA or other countries, where they have been mostly protected and highly respected by eg the entire Evangelical community, is seen by some as “first world problems” while bombs are raining down in Gaza for example.
Both Azeris and Armenians hae engaged in ethnic cleansing back and forth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Azerbaijanis_fr...
Som of the biggest hyporites criticizing Jews for “dual citizenship” and “ethnic cleansing and building an ethnostate” are Armenians like Dan Bilzerian who flew to Armenia with his family to accept citizenship and serve in the Armenian armed forces. People probably just don’t see the symmetries. Or maybe they’re just hypocrite grifters.
AND THERE IS THE INTITUTIONAL LEVEL.
On that level, of governments and corporations, Israel does enjoy an immense amount of support and immunity. Name me another country where every presidential candidate has to go affirm their support at an AIPAC for, say, Italy. As a Jewish person myself, I am uneasy at Jewish participation in PNAC or the military industrial complex and neocon war machine in general. I don’t want Jews to be blamed later for the wars. Alex Karp and Palmer Luckey are of course quite supportive of Israel, but I am not thrilled at the endorsements. And so on.
I am a libertarian, I try to criticize Russia, USA, Iran other countries, and yes Israel, proportionally to what they actually have done. The wars are fought by plebs who die, the politicians stay in their ivory towers and bunkers and give speeches even as they get international arrest warrants for them.
But even just from the point of view of an Israeli citizen, or Ukrainian citizen, or Iraqi citizen etc. these politicians are horrible. Netanyahu was actively against the 2 state solution, Rabin’s wife blames him for inciting the PM’s assassination, and he literally released 1000 terrorists for 1 guy, Gilad Shalit who fell asleep and allowed himself to be captured. It included the masterminds of October 7th. Who does that? He personally allowed Qatari money to go to Hamas, ignored Egyptians’ warnings, ignored warnings from Shin Bet, oversaw a drawdown of security, and his army for hours ignored even the female spotters whose only job it was to report the threats, and who were killed while reporting it for hours! Such extreme negligence goes completely unpunished, nevermind the corruption and investigations that have been put off because of the war. You don’t have to be a leftist or a libertarian to appreciate the level of corruption and immunity from consequences and misaligned incentives of these politicians.
And the excuses the government intitutions give for the negligence or the wars are so laughable that it is hard to think they aren’t deliberately trolling us and rubbin their unaccountability in our face:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/surveillance-soldiers-say-oct-...
The current war vs Venzuela is a great example. They aren’t even trying to explain it anymore. (“hasbara” means explanation in Hebrew, but the same is done by other governments to their people - Russian govt when asked what if Russians wont support the invasion said “we will explain it to them”). The US administration now claims Venezuela is the biggest source of drugs (false) and even weren’t afraid to label drugs WMDs, not even concerned that WMDs were famously not actually found in Iraq during our invasion. They don’t even care about your consent - they know they’ll have your support later! Trump openly said we want to take their oil and land. He says the quiet parts out loud.
You’re seeing it happen in real-time. Again. But when it’s us, whether Iraq or Venezuela, most people heavily tone down their criticism that you would have had for the 73% of Russian public supporting THEIR invasion. But it’s all very similar. The symmetries are striking. 73% of US Americans also supported the invasion of Iraq.
so you have a couple example of anecdotal evidence from past . no example similar violence as it been ongoing against jews . attacks on places of worships, schools, kindergartens, holidays celebrations or just any assembly. attacks that end up with dead people. antisemitism went up on oct 7th even before cult of genocide witnesses was established
what you are doing in many paragraphs (laden with historical errors or misinformation) is whitewashing antisemitism and shifting blame back to jews.
Imagine you’re Black and we’re having this same conversation about systemic racism as if everyone is inherently a racist in society. Anyone who disagrees is called an uncle tom, is that reasonable?
Are there people who don’t like Jews? Of course. The most despicable were the people who came out to protest Israel in the days after October 7th, after the largest attack on Jews in Israel probably ever. And among them were rabid antisemites chanting vile things. Yes.
But look around. Are there a lot of mass shootings in USA? Yes. Many of them are not against Jews. You have to look at statistics. And this is miniscule compared to the violence in the world, eg in Mexico with the drug cartels. We have law and order. We also have a lot of homeless druggies and crazies.
But try to see others facing an entire systematic apparatus. The USA has spent decades trying to get people to hate Russians, for example, at an institutional level. First, it was that they’re commies. Then it was that they love Putin. Also Muslims by and large got similar treatment as Communists during McCarthyism and Cointelpro, after the CIA themselves funded the mujahideen and empowered jihadists (mujahideen is Arabic for jihadists, literally).
Once again, they brazenly admit they were responsible, but they are proud of it anyway. Both Democrats and Republicans:
https://www.counterpunch.org/1998/01/15/how-jimmy-carter-and...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwpR6ngoSjQ
https://www.military.com/daily-news/opinions/2022/03/01/ukra...
It always goes through the same stages with these governments. First they gaslight you. Then they engage in “special military operations”. Then they draft you. Then they invade. Then they occupy, lose a lot of money and get people killed. Then the next generation of politicians says it was “a big mistake”. Russians can’t explain to their kids why they fought in Afghanistan in the 80s, and Americans can’t explain why they fought in Iraq.
Listen to what this lady from a military family has to say for instance — it is just the latest war du jour: https://x.com/silentlysirs/status/2006133094177218711
So yeah I blame the politicians. And even if you were an Israeli, even if you were a radical right wing Kahanist, you could admit that Netanyahu and his government were negligent and call for an investigation of his handling of Hamas and the threats it posed, leading up of Octobed 7th. Agree?
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Response to “How much U.S. taxpayer money was spent on this?” - now flagged:
$1.2B
Source: https://defensescoop.com/2024/04/25/iron-beam-procurement-us...
None. The US money Israel receives is purely used for buying from US defense contractors. This is developed by purely Israeli defense contractors. The US leverages significant discounts on these Israeli developed systems compared to other countries.
Also, the amount Israel gets is in the same ballpark as Egypt and Lebanon, but interesting that that is never mentioned?
So it goes from Us Citizens to the wealthy who sell the weapon systems. That’s what none is. Cool.
This article is about an Israeli developed system, so no US tax payer money was used. It is an off topic discussion to discuss your hatred for Israel. Maybe submit a different article about that, but it is off topic for this one.
Response to “How much U.S. taxpayer money was spent on this?” - now flagged: $1.2B Source: https://defensescoop.com/2024/04/25/iron-beam-procurement-us...
Tired of this kind of talk. Everybody is looking for a scapegoat. For some it's China, for others the billionaires, yet others suspect it's all the Jews' fault, or the European Union, or wokeness, or Donald Trump or or or.. sigh, it's not new, it's just boring, and it rarely leads to any good things.
I don't see how that's relevant, considering we could already provide healthcare to all Americans simply by disbanding the corrupt Medicare and Medicaid bureaucracies and recouping the administration fees. And then do the same with welfare so we can get UBI. Hell, we'd probably save money in both cases.
> we could already provide healthcare to all Americans simply by disbanding the corrupt Medicare and Medicaid bureaucracies and recouping the administration fees
Source for this estimate?
> then do the same with welfare so we can get UBI
This is nonsense. Federal welfare spending is about $20k per capita [1]. You could get that to $30k by co-opting all state spending [2]. (And only in Alaska, Oregon and Hawaii.)
[1] https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-money-does-the-govern...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_budgets
'the jews are stealing our healthcare' seems to be a huge bot posting theme on Reddit the last week or so. Might be working and bleeding over into the zeitgeist.
It is so sad the Humanity needs to develop weapons...
On the last day of the year, I am taking a few minutes to linger on this. At face value, most would agree with this, myself included. But I think we can dive one layer deeper. There are different schools of thoughts whether mankind is inherently good or evil. Over the years, I have become pretty firm believer that every person has the innate capacity for both good and evil, and the outcome is determined by both character and circumstances. Solzhenitsyn famously wrote (quote by Gemini):
"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil."
If you subscribe to this, then a weapons system can also be a force for good, if used by an entity for the purpose of "peace through strength". The strength keeps our innate capability for evil in check, as the consequences for evil would be guaranteed. A case in point is the MAD doctrine for nuclear weapons which has prevented a world war for the last 80 years.
I'd appreciate philosophical replies. Am I wrong, either in a detail or at the core of the argument? Are there additional layers? I would like to kindly ask to keep replies away from views on the specific players in this specific press release. We'd just be reiterating our positions without convincing anyone.
(edit: grammar, slight rewording)
I totally understand the need for weapons. It is just makes me sad.
And I think Solzhenitsyn is wrong. There are psychopathic people that have no good in their hearts. Sure, with the right upbringing that could be kind and good but at a given moment they are what they are... psychopaths.
there's no such thing as a "defensive weapon" when you're talking about a genocidal settler-colonial ethnostate currently carrying out the holocaust of the century. it's like giving a mass shooter a bulletproof vest under the guise of "saving an extra life"
Someone will find a reflexive material to put on the drone. Then you have a multi kw laser that hits randomly anywhere when intercepting drones.
Also I wonder why it is not common to run interception drones that automatically fly towards incoming drones and captures them mid air. Like a wasp is capturing other insects.
So pretty much like the iron dome but not with single use rockets but reusable drones instead.