Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, on display during a visit by US President Joe Biden. Photo: Ariel Hermoni / Ministry of Defense

Israel has become the world’s seventh-largest arms exporter, steadily increasing its share of global weapons sales even amid a multi-front war and mounting international criticism, according to a new report.

On Monday, the Swedish-based Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) released its latest report on global arms exports, analyzing trends from the last five years (2021–2025) and comparing them with the previous period (2016–2020).

For the first time, Israel has surpassed Great Britain to become the world’s seventh-largest arms exporter, with its share of global weapons sales rising to 4.4 percent in 2021–2025, up from 3.1 percent in the previous period.

“Despite conducting the war in Gaza and attacks in Iran, Lebanon, Qatar, Syria, and Yemen, Israel still managed to increase its share of global arms exports,” Zain Hussain, researcher at SIPRI’s Arms Transfers Program, said in a statement. 

According to the newly released report, Israel also ranked as the 14th-largest arms importer in the world, acquiring most of its weapons from the United States (68 percent) and Germany (31 percent), with a small share from Italy (1 percent), showing that arms embargoes and international criticism have done little to slow its defense trade.

Overall, the total volume of the global arms trade rose by 9.2 percent in the last five years compared to the previous period, with European nations more than tripling their weapons imports to become the world’s largest arms-importing region amid rising regional tensions with Russia and escalating conflict in the Middle East.

The US continued to be the world’s largest arms exporter in 2021–2025, holding a 42 percent share of global sales, followed by France (9.8 percent), Russia (6.8 percent), Germany (5.7 percent), China (5.6 percent), Italy (5.1 percent), and Israel.

Among Middle Eastern countries, Saudi Arabia leads as the top purchaser of American arms with 12 percent of sales, followed by Qatar and Kuwait, while Israel ranks 12th globally, receiving just 3.1 percent of all US arms exports

SIPRI’s latest report comes as the Jewish state faces growing international pressure, with European states among the most vocally critical and threatening arms embargoes over Israel’s defensive war against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza and its military campaign against Iran.

Despite these threats, Israel’s arms exports have continued to grow, solidifying its position as a leading player in the global weapons market.

For example, the UK and Germany have pressed ahead with arms purchases from Israel despite repeated threats and public warnings to suspend defense trade, signaling the limits of international pressure.

Israel now supplies 8.2 percent of British arms purchases, second only to the US, which accounts for 85 percent.

In Israel’s biggest-ever arms export deal, Germany recently acquired the Arrow missile defense system, marking the largest weapons sale in the country’s history.

According to the SIPRI report, Israel’s growth in global arms exports was driven primarily by international sales of air defense systems, even as the country faced heavy domestic demand for weapons amid a multi-front war.

Overall, Israel sold arms to 23 European countries (41 percent of its total exports), 10 Asian countries (40 percent), five in North and Latin America (8.6 percent), and seven African nations.

This week, I settled a lawsuit that I filed nearly five years ago against the synagogue in New Jersey where I was sexually abused in the 1990s while learning to read Torah. The settlement agreement is significant because of its restorative focus, which I designed intentionally to help make my childhood community a safer place for children. Here is my full story.

I am glad to see these developments. But it should not have taken years of litigation to force a synagogue to implement protective measures that should be part of the work of every Jewish organization that counts children as part of its community.

My experience, and the enablement of my abuser by multiple Jewish institutions, fuels my passion to advocate for change in how Jewish institutions approach child safety.

Many Jewish institutions still struggle to follow basic policies and procedures for handling these kinds of incidents when they are put to the test — although, in recent years, more have proactively adopted policies and procedures and implemented training programs that help.

But safeguarding Jewish institutions from child predators requires more than a set of rules. It requires that Jewish leaders have an informed understanding of the topic, and more importantly, have the courage to speak up and make difficult decisions. The Jewish community desperately needs more of both.

Here’s what needs to be done.

Appreciate the danger within

Combating child sex abuse starts with understanding that 93% of sex crimes committed against children are perpetrated by someone the child knows and trusts. Jewish institutions must begin to reckon more thoroughly with that fact.

On a recent visit to a Jewish day school, an administrator told me that she runs background checks on everyone who enters campus, including every vendor and contractor, without fail. When I asked if she ran a background check on me, she demurred.

I understand why. But Jewish institutions need to find a way to effuse warmth and community without shortcutting safety.

Train kids and parents, not just teachers

One way to begin this work is to bring children and parents into abuse prevention training, in which teachers are already generally required to participate. This kind of training teaches us how to recognize grooming behavior, which is prevalent in most cases of child sex abuse.

Professional training also helps parents learn how to talk to their children about sensitive topics, which reduces a predator’s ability to prey on a child’s natural curiosity. My own children’s day school recently hired ChildUSA to audit its child safety policies. Later, it conducted age-appropriate student training, followed by an abuse prevention workshop for parents. It’s an easy but highly effective example that all day schools should follow, yet few do.

Draw clearer lines

Another way that we can reduce child sex abuse is by better defining red lines, and by proactively responding to inappropriate behavior.

A few years ago, I alerted a Chabad rebbetzin that a regular congregant watched pornography on his cell phone during Rosh Hashanah services. “It only happened once,” she said, and besides, “he has dementia — where’s your compassion!” Other colleagues breathed a sigh of relief — “at least he didn’t touch anyone.”

Our instinct is to try and explain malbehavior through an innocent lense, but when it comes to sexual boundaries, we should resist that urge. Sexual predators intentionally push both physical and conversational boundaries to normalize their behavior. We need to recognize boundary-pushing and appreciate its role as a grooming tactic.

Prioritize the safety and wellbeing of survivors

Yes, our tradition teaches us to be slow to judgment and quick to compassion. It’s a wise dictate, but not one appropriately applied to convicted child abusers, especially as data shows they often reoffend. The Orthodox community in Englewood, New Jersey allowed my abuser to fully participate in communal life long after discovering he had hidden multiple convictions. Some leaders admonished their community as insufficiently compassionate for having concerns about his involvement.

Their mistake: practicing more compassion for a child abuser than for his victims.

Predators tend to find many ways to get close to their victims, and often frequent multiple communities to maximize their pool of victims and to avoid detection of their behavior. These are both textbook characteristics of how my abuser has long operated. Jewish leaders need to speak up, both within their own communities, and when they know predators have moved to new ones.

Conduct transparent investigations 

When faced with a case of suspected abuse, it’s imperative that institutions conduct a transparent, independent investigation, and disclose its entire contents, redacting only information that could identify a victim.

Too often, Jewish institutions conduct internal reviews, only disclosing a summary rather than exposing the entire process to public scrutiny. Such exercises often allow an institution to maintain legal privilege over the contents of the report, thus preventing its contents from being used against it.

These investigations are, therefore, largely performative. Putting children first means Jewish institutions should commit to complete transparency to allow the public to fully understand what occurred and how it was handled, and to ensure that conflicts are properly managed.

Prioritize accountability

Holding Jewish institutional leadership accountable for their actions — and inaction — is needed to ensure that child safety is handled professionally. Accountability means articulating standards of expected conduct, and taking remedial action — like relieving bad actors of their jobs — when conduct falls below the standard.

Community members, lay leadership, and the professional organizations that provide the backbone for institutional Jewish leadership — such as the Rabbinical Assembly — need to be more proactive in holding clergy accountable.

If you sit on the board of a day school, camp or synagogue, you must ask whether your institution is doing everything possible to create a safe environment for kids.

Do you have a child safety policy? Does your board include people with a background in child safety and abuse prevention? Have you participated in abuse prevention training?

If your institution is dealing with a sensitive matter, are you working with professionals who have experience in abuse prevention? If your institution mishandled a case, have you owned up to it?

And finally, if you’re reading this and survived being sexually abused as a child, I believe you and I support you. It’s not your fault. And you have the right to speak up and be heard at the time of your choosing.

The post I was sexually abused at my synagogue as a child. Here’s how our community can protect others from that horror appeared first on The Forward.

Should we survive the next three years, the odds are good we will look back on Donald Trump’s second presidency as the “Years of Living Absurdly.”  This, at least, is the view of media outlets, ranging from the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times to The Daily Beast and The Guardian, on the dizzying variety of the president’s words and actions.

But there is the politically absurd and, well, the philosophically absurd. For the latter, a good place to start is with the contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel, who was born to German-Jewish refugees living in prewar Belgrade who then immigrated to the United States after the war’s end. Perhaps understandably, Nagel had an ironic take on the word.

In 1970, this professor of philosophy at New York University, perhaps best known for his essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, published “The Absurd,” an essay which could be thought of as  “What Is It Like to Be in an Absurd World?” In a dozen sharp and snappy pages, Nagel makes the case — unusual for most professional philosophers who treat the “absurd” with either skepticism or scorn — that “absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics.”

Of course, when we hear the word “absurd,” some of us tend to think of Albert Camus. That we do so is not at all absurd. After all, when he was still an unknown 20-something, he declared that “the feeling of absurdity can strike us in the face at any street corner.” In other words, at one point or another in most of our lives, we have reason to look to the skies and ask what the reason is to our lives — and fail to receive an answer.

“The absurd is born,” Camus writes, “from this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”

The young Camus eventually found the reason in rebelling against this absurd condition, finding meaning not beyond, but in this world. Yet Nagel did not fall for this youthful and heroic response. “It seems to me,” he drily observes, “romantic and slightly self-pitying.” But he nevertheless acknowledged that Camus was on to something essential and enduring. It is simply that our absurdity “warrants neither that much distress nor that much defiance.”

Though I fell hard for Camus, I wonder if Nagel is on to something important. He suggests that we think of the absurd as a form of epistemological skepticism. By this, he means our unbreakable habit of taking the world, and everything which constitutes it, for granted. We cannot help but do so even though we can always provide excellent philosophical reasons for not doing so. You know the familiar variations on this tune. For example, how do I know that what I unthinkingly take for reality is not a dream (or nightmare)? Or, for that matter, how do I know what I unconsciously take for my embodied or physical self is not simply an electrical impulse sent to a brain floating in a vat? And so on.

Despite these skeptical doubts that reason cannot satisfactorily answer, I nevertheless experience the table where I am now sitting as very real and not a dream. And I live my life as if “I” am the white-haired figure I see in the mirror, one who also enjoys life. Nagel quotes a famous line by the Scottish skeptic, David Hume: “Since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices…I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and I am merry with friends.” As for the skeptical speculations, they are filed away for another day of philosophizing.

To think absurdly, Nagel suggests, is not unlike to think skeptically. It happens when we question not the reality of the world, but instead the seriousness with which we treat it. While I might well insist on the very real possibility that life is meaningless — a position I underscore in my existentialism class with all the gravitas an aging academic can muster — I confess that, phony that I am, I do take my life very seriously. And, moreover, this is what I wish my students would do.

When we step away, if only mentally and momentarily, from the world we take so seriously, Nagel believes we win something important — namely, the ability “to appreciate the cosmic unimportance” of our situation. By “transcending ourselves in thought,” we adopt a view from above — an ironic perspective — that provides the critical distance necessary to take our lives less seriously.

We can and must, as Camus argues, rebel against an unjust and unraveling world. The situation in which we find ourselves as a nation — one at the mercy of a merciless and monstrous ego — is existentially important.  But is it not, from a certain perspective, also absurdly unimportant? This is the gift of ironic distance; by “making us spectators of our own lives,” we can smile at the spectacle in which we all have roles.

But irony, if I understand Nagel rightly, is also a burden. Our late-night comics are masters at slicing the men and women who run our country down to size, but here is the rub: While we are busy delighting in the deflation of these oversized egos, we are also delighting in the inflation of our own. We take comfort in our superior smarts and morals, but as we all discover sooner or later, this comfort proves as lasting as a May fly.

As the philosopher Alexander Nehamas has suggested, true irony, or at least the irony practiced by Plato in his dialogues, is meant not only to knock the fools in power down a peg or two, but also those who are busy laughing — e.g., you and me. In an age which pits one half of the country against the other, no lesson — one that teaches modesty and humility — seems more vital.

The post This Jewish philosopher knows our politics are absurd — and why that’s a good thing appeared first on The Forward.