The Israel Trade Fairs and Convention Center was bustling with military personnel. Tall, broad-shouldered soldiers donning masks and sunglasses had their guns at the ready, and a mini-drone built at Ariel University, an Israeli school located in the occupied West Bank, went up in the air, flying high as the press snapped photos. This was not war, but one of the many demos held at the ISDEF e xpo , an annual June event that attracts thousands of security officials and professionals interested in weapons. Arms fairs in Israel showcase the latest products the profitable Israeli weapons industry manufactures — and the demos are the perfect place to show those products off. As the demo was beginning, Jonas Zelken, a presenter at the weapons fair, looked on as the soldiers — who formerly served in an Israeli counterterrorism unit — threw a mock grenade into a model home in what looked like enemy territory in an Arab country. Zelken eagerly explained to attendees that they were seeing “beautiful” soldiers setting up a mock communications base during battle and a “sexy” drone. He also reeled off the names of companies whose products the soldiers were showcasing at the Israeli arms expo: Spuhr, a Swedish company that makes rifle mounts for sight; InteliComm, an American company that produces communications equipment; and Netline, an Israeli company that manufactures a jammer to prevent improvised explosive devices from going off.

As weapons demos and presentations on Israeli fighting tactics took place, officials from the Czech Republic, Mexico, Singapore, Germany, Greece and other countries, many of them in uniform, walked around the center, checking out the shiny wares they could buy for their own militaries — including drones, armored vehicles and rifles. Attendees eagerly picked up the rifles and pretended to fire them, while others played with toy drones meant to look like the real thing. The featured arms companies, like the attendees interested in buying their products, came from around the world, but Israeli companies far outnumbered other nations. The fair is put on with the active help and cooperation of the Israeli government, and the ISDEF expo board of advisers is composed of elite former Israeli military officers. The U.S. Department of Commerce is the only foreign governmental body to co-sponsor the event. Israel has established itself as a leading hub for weapons makers, capitalizing on the constant state of conflict the country is in and the close coordination between the military and the weapons industry. At the ISDEF opening ceremony, Ziva Eger, the Israeli Ministry of Economy’s director of the division for foreign investment and industrial cooperation, boasted about how Israel takes “technology from the defense sector and just implements it to the civilian sector.” In Israel, nearly 6,800 individuals deal in weapons exports at over 1,000 companies, according to Defense Ministry data from 2013. The country’s weapons industry brought in about $5.6 billion last year, making Israel the eighth largest weapons exporter globally, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Former Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has said that 150,000 Israeli households rely on the weapons industry for income. While last year’s earnings were actually a drop from a high of $7.5 billion in revenue in 2012, a decrease attributed by Israel’s Defense Ministry to budget cuts in the U.S. and Europe, Israel is among the world’s top arms exporters per capita. In fact, the U.S. effectively provides a subsidy to the Israeli weapons business: While about 75 percent of the $3.1 billion in U.S. military aid to Israel must be spent on American weapons, 25 percent can be spent on domestic Israeli arms makers — a situation unique to Israel. Even when Israel buys U.S. arms, it sometimes requests that those weapons be built with Israeli components. The U.S. subsidy is helping to fuel the business of war in Israel. It’s a booming industry due in no small part to the ever-increasing frequency of the country’s battles with militant groups in neighboring Lebanon and Gaza, the coastal strip that Israel holds under a crippling air, land and sea blockade. In 2006, Israel went to war in Lebanon, killing at least 900 civilians. Two years later, Israel invaded Gaza in what a U.N. Human Rights report called “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population.” Operation Cast Lead, as the 2008 – 2009 attack was called, killed 1,400 people, more than half of them civilians. In 2012, Israel bombed Gaza for about a week before a U.S. and Egyptian-brokered ceasefire went into effect. But the most devastating Israeli attack on the strip occurred last summer, when Israel waged a 50-day battle against Hamas that killed 2,200 people, the majority of them civilians. The wars on Gaza have had a devastating impact on the population there, leaving half of Palestinian adolescents with symptoms of full or partial post-traumatic stress disorder, according to a study published in Arab Journal of Psychiatry. But in Israel, the wars are good for business. In 2013, Yotam Feldman, an Israeli journalist and filmmaker, released The Lab, a documentary positing that war is beneficial for the Israeli economy. Feldman’s film argues that the Palestinian territories are the “lab” where Israel uses its weaponry. Israeli companies profit from war because their products are “tested” on Palestinians, Feldman argued — particularly the residents of Gaza. “After every campaign of the kind that is now taking place in Gaza, we see an increase in the number of customers from abroad,” Eli Gold, CEO of Israeli arms company Meprolight, told the Israeli daily Haaretz last year. The weapons makers at the fair had no qualms with Feldman’s argument.