A Billion Dollars and the Men Who Ran Israel’s Wars

  by Thomas S. Karat | Nov 6, 2026 | 0 comments

The weapons a country fights with, the software that aims them, and the officers who command them were for a century things a state owned and could not put up for sale. That arrangement is coming apart. One by one these assets are being bought by private companies, financed through public stock markets, and traded like any other holding, and the firm that has carried the process furthest spent most of its life making radios for freight trains.

The shift is visible first in a component the size of a thumb. A fuze decides the instant a drone turns into a bomb: it holds the weapon inert through storage and flight and arms it only at the chosen second. An Israeli company called Gate Technologies, founded in 1996, builds these electronic fuzes, and its hardware is designed into more than ninety weapon systems, among them the loitering munitions that circle a battlefield until they dive into it. In September the fuze maker, with its Polish manufacturing partner, was bought for up to $390 million by a Nasdaq company called Ondas.

Two years ago Ondas sold radios to freight railroads. It reported $7.2 million in revenue for all of 2024, earned four hundred thousand dollars of gross profit on it, and had never turned a yearly profit in its life. Its shares changed hands for as little as fifty-five cents. In the eighteen months since, the same company has bought around twenty weapons firms for more than two billion dollars, reached a market value near four billion, installed a former director of the Mossad as the chairman of its defense arm, and moved to buy the software that aims Iron Dome. The change was bought, not earned.

The arithmetic says where the money came from. Revenue did climb, to $50.7 million in 2025, almost all of it carried in from businesses acquired in the second half of the year, and the company still lost $133 million over the twelve months, including a $101 million loss in the fourth quarter alone. What rose without pause was the share count, from ninety-three million at the end of 2024 to 380 million a year later, a quadrupling that diluted every existing holder to fund the buying. The purchases were financed by more than $1.8 billion in equity raised after June 2025 and another $960 million in January 2026, and the structure rests on a $489 million warrant liability whose value a single repricing swung by $82 million in one quarter. Having folded twenty companies into itself, Ondas tells investors to expect $375 million in revenue in 2026 and its first profit no earlier than 2028. The business is the stock, and the stock runs on the belief that the buying will keep compounding.

The purchases read as a map of modern war. Apeiro Motion for $12 million in August 2025, then three smaller firms in demining and optics across October. The counter-drone company Sentrycs for $224.6 million in November. The ground-robotics maker Roboteam, whose machines are sold as combat-proven for special operations forces, for $81.7 million in December. Rotron Aerospace, Bird Aerospace and INDO Earth inside a single month, for thirty-nine, one hundred ten and sixty million dollars. The American defense contractor Mistral for $175 million, with stakes taken in a stratospheric-balloon company and two more drone makers alongside. Earlier deals had already brought in Airobotics, Iron Drone, Omnisys and Aran. By Calcalist’s count the total since 2025 runs past two billion dollars across roughly twenty firms, the great majority of them Israeli. Laid end to end they form a whole kill chain under one ticker symbol: detection, interception, ground robots, sensors, propulsion, and what the company’s filings call long-range one-way effectors, the industry’s term for drones built to fly once and detonate.

Two of the purchases reach the center of Israel’s own defenses, and it is there that the private market meets the limit of what a state will allow. The fuzes from Gate arm the weapons. The second asset, mPrest, is the software that runs the command and control of Iron Dome, the system Israel relies on to decide what to shoot out of its own sky. mPrest is a subsidiary of the state-owned manufacturer Rafael, which would be left holding 43.25 percent once Ondas took control, and the deal values it near two hundred million dollars. The Defense Ministry’s security directorate, known by its acronym MALMAB, has frozen the transaction on the ground that the technology is classified. The question the directorate is said to be unable to settle is the one that hangs over everything the company has done. Late last year an investor whose identity Ondas refuses to reveal placed about a billion dollars into the firm, and that single infusion is what prompted the inquiry. The ministry has declined to disclose what it found, and questions put to the prime minister’s office went unanswered. The company calls its funding broad investor support. The reporting describes one unnamed backer. When the arsenal becomes a traded asset, its ultimate owner can stay anonymous, and a government can find that it no longer knows who is buying the most sensitive parts of its own defense.

The people arrive with the money, and they come straight from the offices that until recently ran this industry. In August, Ondas named David Barnea the global president and chairman of its defense arm, two months after he stepped down as director of the Mossad, a post he held from 2021 to 2026 across the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, the pager operation that detonated across Lebanon, and the bombing campaigns against Iran. The company says the appointment carried full approval from the Mossad’s legal advisers and is separate from his public service, and it says it hired him to open doors to foreign defense ministries and procurement bodies, which means selling to the establishments he spent his career inside. The market priced the hire within hours and lifted the shares eleven percent in two days. Behind him came the former chief executive of Rafael, Yoav Har-Even, a former head of military research and development at the Defense Ministry, and a line of other Rafael and ministry veterans. The distance between what the state asks of its departing officials and what this company takes from them is measurable in months: a former defense-research chief joining as a vice president was made to observe a ten-month cooling-off period imposed by a Jerusalem court committee, while the former head of the Mossad observed two, a speed a security source said the agency had once treated much more strictly.

Above the hardware sits the software, and here the ownership is not Israeli at all. In its own results Ondas describes what the arrangement buys: access to the full platform of the American data company Palantir, including its Maven targeting system and the advanced command and control used to run a mission. In March, Palantir joined Ondas and a stratospheric-sensing firm in a partnership built around three programs, with integration across the Ondas fleet to begin late in 2026. What Palantir does with that software elsewhere is a matter of its own disclosures. In early 2024 it agreed with Israel’s defense ministry to supply technology for “war-related missions”. A shareholder resolution filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, drawing on reporting by The Independent, Reuters and the New York Times, states that Maven was used to identify targets in hundreds of strikes during the United States and Israeli bombing of Iran, and records the company’s chief executive crediting it with most of the targeting in Ukraine. Palantir denies building the automated targeting tools the Israeli military used in Gaza, and the reporting the filing cites ties its platform to those systems regardless. Two large pension managers, Norway’s Storebrand and the Dutch fund ABP, have sold out over the exposure. This is the layer that will bind the Ondas arsenal together, and it is the layer the Israeli review of mPrest never reaches, because the review stops at Israeli ownership and the software is American.

The model has an origin, and it runs back to the agency that first used it. Palantir was carried through its early years by In-Q-Tel, the venture arm of the CIA, which made two rounds of investment totaling more than two million dollars, and from 2005 to 2008 the agency was the company’s only customer, shaping the product through years of testing while the venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s own forty million dollars kept it alive. A state grew its intelligence software inside a private company, and twenty years on that company supplies the command layer for a conglomerate assembling an allied state’s arsenal on a stock exchange.

What began with the fuze ends with a frontier. Ondas has formed a joint venture, 51 percent owned, with the German press-machinery maker Heidelberg to build inside Europe’s largest defense market, and its Airobotics subsidiary has won a government tender to ring a national border with a system designed around thousands of drones and the software to fly them.

None of this is the story of one strange company. Ondas is the clearest form of a general process, the turning of the security state into an asset class, in which the weapons, the software that aims them, the plants that build them and the officers who ran them are bought, financed through share sales, and traded like stock in anything else. The thing that market cannot deliver is the thing a state once took as a given, that it knows whose hands its own arsenal is in. The one purchase the Israeli government has refused to wave through is the one that reaches the brain of its own shield. The investor behind everything else has still not put his name to any of it, and the longer that holds, the more it looks less like an exception than a preview.

Thomas Karat writes investigative work published at karat.substack.com and the Libertarian Institute, drawing on a corporate career and academic training as a behavior analyst to examine how institutions manufacture consent and influence.

https://original.antiwar.com/thomas_karat/2026/11/05/a-billion-dollars-and-the-men-who-ran-israels-wars/