Do Kwon Extradited To The United States From Montenegro To Face Charges Relating To Fraud Resulting In $40 Billion In Losses
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Investigation: elite Australian big business group monetises Israeli war machine
Blue chip business lobby the Australia Israel Chamber of Commerce is associated with funding illegal settlements in Israel and sponsorships by notorious Elbit Systems whose weapons are deployed in war crimes.
Israel’s “innovation ecosystem will be supercharged” by the war, Dave Sharma said. Indeed, the bloody rubble of Gaza has been a human testing ground for drones and all manner of new military technologies.
Sharma, the Liberal Party senator and former ambassador to Israel, was addressing corporate moguls at the 2024 summit of the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce (AICC).
The Chamber is, perhaps with the exception of the Business Council of Australia, this country’s preeminent big business lobby; holding regular junkets, summits at lunches at ritzy five-star hotel ballrooms where business leaders deliver their speeches before packed audiences spending thousands of dollars per table.
It is the premier networking organisation for Israel in Australia and high-tech is at the vanguard of the lobbying. The ‘Start-Up Nation’ begins with the Israel Defence Force’s (IDF) intelligence units.
While the soldiers are given unlimited access to the army’s deep pockets and free reign to innovate, the subjects of the experiments are the Palestinian people. And the illegal military occupation of Palestinian land is being richly monetised.
The Chamber’s role in this is to showcase military products on Australian shores where they are marketed as “battle-hardened”.
The Chamber’s objective is to promote collaboration between the two countries. It describes itself as “Australia’s pre-eminent international Chamber of Commerce and one of the country’s most prestigious and active national business organisations”, with over 1,000 member companies.
Despite its sizeable media presence, finding public information about AICC proved difficult.
There are at least 9 AICC ABNs according to the ASIC database, but the profiles rarely interlink with ASIC Connect, nor do they show up easily in searches. Often their ASIC profile lacks basic compliance like a ‘company extract’.
The Chamber’s website disclosures also lack these details.
The majority of AICC businesses, including the NSW Division, are membership-based body corporates. So they are tax exempt.
The AICC NSW Division is one primary AICC entity. It’s is formerly known as – and simply trades as – the name AICC, has three separate ACNs, and hosts the annual summit.
It is standard for business councils to list their members. The Business Council of Australia and Minerals Council of Australia do this, but the AICC does not.
Much of the Chamber’s website has been scrubbed since the outbreak of the war in late 2023, specifically the defence industry sponsorships.
However, it would be unusual for a business council to be handing out free favours. The allure of membership and sponsorship of the Chamber includes invitations to its prestigious events and junkets, and an expectation that your business’s interests will be represented and advanced.
https://michaelwest.com.au/aicc-monetises-israeli-war-machine/
The IDF’s AI ‘kill list’
The latest hotshot project of 8200 is AI-generated kill lists. The Lavender program deems Palestinians as ‘terrorists’ according to a point-ranked system and feeds those lists to the army’s drone operators.
If a low-ranking private has an opportunity to kill a Palestinian on the list it is considered an order as if given by a commanding officer, even if dozens of civilian deaths are inevitable.
The Lavender kill list often feeds into the ‘Where’s Daddy?’ AI program, which notifies Israeli drone operators when a person on the kill list is most vulnerable to a drone strike: the moment they are at home with their children.
Antony Loewenstein writes in his book, The Palestine Laboratory, that “8200 watches every Palestinian, regardless of their involvement in the resistance”.
The Unit can eavesdrop on any phone call, SMS, and email in Palestine. When the messages reveal a personal secret – closeted sexual identity, an extramarital affair, or an invisible illness – 8200 sees it as a tool for blackmailing a potential informant.
Essentially, Loewenstein writes, 8200 marks IDF’s targets; who by fire, and who by blackmail.
Monetising the Occupation
Many of the Unit’s ventures are taken by recent graduates straight into the private sector.
80% of alumni are offered jobs three months before finishing their service, job offers can read “meant for 8200 alumni”, and alumni earn 20% more than the industry average.
Cybersecurity start-ups that promote themselves as having been founded by alumni from 8200 and other intelligence units feature prominently among AICC’s past and present sponsors. They include CISCO, Votiro, Skylight Cyber, Cyberark, Check Point, Claroty, Nice, Orca Security, Razorlabs, Wix, and Wiz.
Other defence industry sponsors include Elbit, Elbit Systems of Australia (ELSA), Forcepoint, El Al, and drone-maker Aerobotics.
The Israeli company Cisco has been among the Chamber’s most dedicated and consistent sponsors for over a decade. It also has multiple $100m contracts with the IDF, seven hubs in Israel’s illegal settlements, and has installed 10,000 CCTV cameras around Jerusalem, including occupied East Jerusalem.
Aerobotics, also Israeli-owned, ensures a constant presence of ‘large’ surveillance drones over civilian Palestinian areas, preempting an attack, and readying to provide the IDF with the critical information. It has recently fast-tracked the development of its Iron Drone Raider in response to escalating war.
Victoria invests
The former Chairperson of Young AICC Brad Gofman (2016-2024) simultaneously managed Invest Victoria projects in UK, Europe, and Israel (2018-present).
Invest Victoria opened an office in Tel Aviv in 2017 through an exclusive agreement with the IACC and the AICC, who ‘deliver services’ of their sponsor Elbit Systems to the office.
A pair of ‘Victoria-Israel Defence Industry Opportunities Webinars’ in 2020 were co-promoted by the IACC, Israel’s Ministry of Defence, and Invest Victoria.
In 2021 Elbit Systems of Australia (ELSA) returned the favour, setting up an office in Melbourne. For a short time afterward, Gofman managed the defence policy for Invest Victoria.
Weeks later, Australia’s Army HQ directed the Department of Defence to cease using Elbit’s command and control system, claiming the Israeli company had designed a backdoor through which they could spy on and access the computers.
More recently, in April it was an Elbit Hermes 450 drone that murdered Australian Zomi Frankcom and six other World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza. The drone hunted the aid worker’s cars down as they traveled along an IDF-approved route, switching cars three times in an attempt to shake the drone off.
Australia’s sovereign wealth fund, Future Fund, did their best to hide that they had invested heavily in arms dealers, including Elbit which made a 172% return.
AICC has also been addressed by then-Future Fund chairman, David Gonski, and by current head of private equity, Alicia Gregory. In 2017, Gonski went back for seconds, taking Future Fund director Michael Wachtel on an AICC junket to Israel.