Gaza war: French arms sales to Israel marked by lack of transparency and control
The parliamentary hearing on France's annual arms exports was cancelled for the second time last week.
Initially scheduled for November, the hearing - intended to question the ministers of the armed forces, foreign trade and industry - was postponed to 11 December due to a busy parliamentary agenda. However, in the meantime, the French government's censure by MPs has now indefinitely postponed the session.
The hearing was highly anticipated, as it would have been the first opportunity since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza on 7 October 2023 to clarify the sensitive issue of arms sales to Israel by the world’s second-largest arms supplier.
While the Israeli army's repeated violations of international law have been denounced by numerous international organisations, including an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the types of French military equipment exported to Israel remain unknown.
“As things stand, we have no way of knowing more,” said Aurelien Saintoul, an MP from the left-wing party France Unbowed (La France insoumise, LFI) and a member of the National Assembly's defence committee, which is responsible for conducting the hearing.
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Officially, things are simple.
Last October, President Emmanuel Macron told public radio France Inter that arms sales to Israel should stop while assuring that “France does not deliver any”.
Netanyahu described the statement as “a disgrace”, and Macron’s call surprised a number of observers.
Until that point, France had opposed an embargo on arms used by Israel in Gaza, unlike countries such as Spain, Belgium, Canada and the Netherlands, which announced the suspension of their military exports due to the risks to Palestinian civilians.
After Macron’s interview, the presidential palace clarified to French television station BFMTV that France would continue providing what it called defensive equipment to Israel, primarily for missile defence systems.
The defence ministry's 2024 report on French arms exports, which lists actual deliveries and authorised “licences”, records €30m ($31m) worth of military equipment delivered to Israel in 2023 - double the figure from the previous year.
Five days later, the minister of the armed forces assured on the same radio station that these deliveries consisted of “components on purely defensive systems, for example, ball-bearing systems, springs [for the Israeli anti-missile system Iron Dome] and armour plates”.
The issue, as 115 left-wing MPs explained in a letter published in April, is that “we are forced to take [his] word for it”. The ministry's report does not specify the type of equipment or clarify what was delivered before and after October 2023. Furthermore, the government refuses to respond to requests for additional information.
For many who would like an end to arms transfers to Israel, the distinction between offensive and defensive equipment is, in fact, not an issue.
“From a military point of view, [whether those arms are] offensive or defensive does not make much sense. We're asking for data on the type of equipment to know if what we are exporting is indispensable,” Patrice Bouveret, representative of the Armaments Observatory (Observatoire des armements), told Middle East Eye.
‘From a military point of view, [whether those arms are] offensive or defensive does not make much sense. We're asking for data on the type of equipment to know if what we are exporting is indispensable’
- Patrice Bouveret, Armaments Observatory representative
Amnesty International share similar concerns. “There is nothing inconsequential in what we are exporting. Ball bearings are inside all weapons,” Aymeric Elluin, France's advocacy officer, told MEE.
Alongside a group of French NGOs, Amnesty went to court last April to request the suspension of arms exports to Israel and access to information regarding export licences.
However, the requests were rejected, highlighting another point of tension: the administrative court systematically declares itself incompetent, citing the “act of government” theory.
According to this principle, the administrative judge considers export licences to be inseparable from the state's conduct of international affairs. In other words, the courts deem themselves "incompetent" to rule on the provisional suspension or legality of such licences.
Amnesty International has denounced this as a form of “jurisdictional immunity” on the issue.
Responsibility in international law
In any case, from the perspective of international law, the official version may prove insufficient.
“These are purely political considerations, not legal ones,” said Farah Safi, vice president of Lawyers for the Respect of International Law (Juristes pour le respect du droit international).
She bases her argument particularly on the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), to which France is a signatory. The treaty stipulates that a state must assess whether military equipment it authorises for sale “could be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law”.
‘France is taking the risk of being prosecuted one day for complicity in or failure to prevent genocide. It would have no way of saying that it did not know’
- Farah Safi, Lawyers for the Respect of International Law vice president
The notion of a defensive weapon would, therefore, not be an admissible defence argument.
While the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 26 January said that it was plausible Israel had breached the Genocide Convention, Safi is unequivocal: “France is taking the risk of being prosecuted one day for complicity in or failure to prevent genocide.
“It would have no way of saying that it did not know,” she stressed.
This possibility was made even more concrete by revelations from investigative media outlets Disclose and Marsactu. Last spring, they uncovered that France had exported two types of military equipment that could be used by the Israeli army against civilians in Gaza.
The first type, shipped in late October 2023, included spare parts for machine gun cartridges. The second, authorised by the government earlier this year, involved communications equipment manufactured by Thales, of which the French state holds a 25 percent stake, intended for use in killer drones.
The ministry responded by stating that these parts were not meant for Israel's use but for re-export.
However, according to the same investigation, France does not control the re-export process, and it is impossible to confirm whether the components were used by the Israeli army or re-exported.
For Safi, France’s responsibility is clear in this case as well.
“A state must, before authorising an arms export, assess the risks. Here, we have no ministerial communication on how a possible assessment was made."
A powerless parliament
The same question arises regarding licences, the mandatory state authorisation that allows a French company to export weapons. According to the 2023 ministerial report, France authorised exports to Israel worth €176m that year.
This time, we know the categories of weapons, but the specifics remain unclear.
Some of the details raise questions. For example, the report mentions material within the cannons or explosive materials categories. The ministry assures that these are components of equipment used for defensive purposes but does not provide evidence.
‘We are a country where the government is not held accountable... France is a textbook case of how everything is done to avoid giving information’
- Aymeric Elluin, Amnesty International advocacy officer
When it comes to sales authorisations, it is impossible to know which specific parts will or have actually been exported.
With its hearing cancelled, the French parliament has almost no room to manoeuvre in controlling the government's actions. This is due to both the French constitution, which requires little oversight of the ministers’ actions, and the fact that military affairs fall exclusively under the executive branch.
“We are a country where the government is not held accountable. In the United States, beyond $200m, parliament must be consulted. France is a textbook case of how everything is done to avoid giving information,” Elluin said.
Elluin also points out that this same opacity applies to exports to other countries, such as Saudi Arabia or Egypt, which are similarly scrutinised.
‘Irreproachable’
Yet, since 2023, the military programming law has required a “parliamentary commission to evaluate the government’s policy on exporting war materials and similar materials”.
Saintoul, who defended the adoption of this measure, explains that he had to fight to get it implemented, even though it was passed.
“We wrote in January 2024 to have an update on its status. The commission was finally formed in April with elected officials who had never worked on this and who were not really hostile to the government,” the MP told MEE.
Except for a socialist senator, the members of the commission were all from the centre-right to the right, like the government itself, which was not reassuring for those calling for greater oversight of state actions in this area.
In the end, the commission never met, as Macron dissolved the National Assembly and called for snap elections after the far-right victory in the June European poll. A new parliament has been in place since July, but the commission was never reconstituted. MPs have not been kept up to date and are now left with no option but to wait for the chance to question the ministers.
For those who are calling for an end to French arms exports to Israel, the relatively small amount of equipment sold - 0.2 percent of the total of French military exports, according to the ministry - is less important than its geopolitical impact, which must be scrutinised.
"France does not want to offend and wants to continue to have access to markets," Elluin said.
After his statement on arms deliveries, the French president quickly called Netanyahu to assure him of “France’s commitment to Israel’s security”, in another example of Paris’ attempts to maintain balance since the war started.
Saintoul also regrets the lack of transparency regarding other markets that may link the two countries.
“We should probably not look for dependence on the export side but on the import side. In the field of surveillance, Israel’s footprint is increasingly significant,” he noted.
This footprint, exposed around the world through the Pegasus scandal involving Israeli malware used to spy on hundreds of activists and journalists worldwide, remains largely unknown in France. There is no global report on imports of military equipment into the country.
This is a point Saintoul had hoped to question the ministers about. In the civilian sphere, Disclose revealed in November 2023 that French police had illegally used video surveillance software with facial recognition developed by the Israeli company BriefCam.
Regarding all of these issues, the defence ministry told MEE that it would not make “any particular comment”. France continues to claim that it is "irreproachable" on the matter.
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