Forty-five years ago, Mel Brooks imagined a comic future in which ultra-Orthodox Jewish astronauts protected the Jewish people from gentiles. At the end of his 1981 film History of the World, Part I, the joke was science fiction. Today, the idea of Israel taking military power beyond the atmosphere is no longer quite so distant.
Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz has publicly called for the country to become a pioneer in offensive space warfare, arguing that Israel must not merely protect satellites and other systems in orbit but develop the ability to attack from space towards targets on Earth.
“Space is where the territory you hold below has no significance; the size of your population has no significance,” Katz told a conference of the National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing. “We also need to operate from up there toward the earth: by disrupting systems, which will happen sooner, and also with kinetic attacks. Today, no country has the capability for a space-based attack, so I’ve declared for the defense establishment the need to be first in attack. We are now recruiting the best minds.”
The remarks, reported and examined by Haaretz, mark an unusually direct articulation of an ambition that until recently belonged largely to military fiction and strategic theory. The idea is not simply to make space another place from which Israel gathers intelligence or maintains communications. It is to make it a potential source of offensive power.
Katz’s comments attracted raised eyebrows, partly because of the defence minister’s reputation as a political figure rather than a traditional member of Israel’s defence establishment. But experts interviewed by Haaretz did not dismiss the proposal as fantasy.
Noam Segal, CEO of the satellite imaging company ImageSat International, argued that Katz’s distance from the defence establishment may have helped him recognise the strategic importance of space and push the system more rapidly than some of his predecessors.
“He acted decisively to push the system, remove organizational barriers and create a force-building plan that would enhance Israel’s space capabilities in a way that none of his predecessors in the last 20 years and maybe longer have done,” Segal said.
For Prof. Dan Blumberg, former chairman of the Israel Space Agency, Katz’s message was directed not only at Israel’s enemies but also at its partners and domestic defence industry. Israel, he said, does not want to remain merely a player in intelligence and communications.
“In the last war we showed that we were capable of projecting our power over greater distances, but we became very dependent on the Americans,” Blumberg said. “So I think Katz wants to say: We will build our capabilities to reach far, based on Israeli technologies, with space becoming a very important component.”
The significance of that ambition is already visible in modern warfare. GPS jamming and spoofing can disrupt navigation, while satellites provide surveillance, communications, missile warnings and intelligence. During the war, Israeli electronic warfare operations against drones and GPS-guided missiles affected navigation systems, including instances in which Waze redirected motorists from the Trans-Israel Highway towards Beirut’s airport.
The broader military dependence on space is global. The United States regards space as a warfighting domain, while China, Russia and India possess or are developing systems capable of interfering with or attacking satellites. These include anti-satellite missiles, electronic warfare, cyberattacks and, increasingly, systems designed to collide with enemy satellites.
Yossi Yamin, founder and CEO of biotech company SpacePharma and former head of the Israeli army’s satellite unit, argues that the first conflict involving space warfare may already have occurred between Israel and Yemen.
“The first war in space involved Israel and Yemen, not Russia and the United States. Israel and Yemen. Who would have believed that was possible?” he said.
The next stage could be more ambitious. Israel already operates the Arrow 3 system, which intercepts ballistic missiles in outer space. The United States is pursuing its Golden Dome concept, which would include space-based missile interceptors. Clayton Swope of the Center for Strategic and International Studies described that development as a paradigm shift because it would open a new chapter in the military use of space.
The most provocative concept, however, is space-to-ground attack.
Known as orbital global strike, the idea involves using systems in orbit to deliver destructive force against targets on Earth. The concept has an American precedent. Project Thor envisaged satellites carrying tungsten rods capable of striking targets at extraordinary speed. Each proposed rod would be 6 metres long, about 30 centimetres wide and weigh roughly 10 tons. A constellation of 10 to 15 satellites was envisioned as capable of striking any point on Earth within 15 minutes.
The economics that once made such a concept almost unimaginable are also changing. According to the material examined by Haaretz, the cost of launching 1 kilogram into space has fallen from about $54,000 to about $2,500, largely because of the revolution in private space services led by companies such as SpaceX. Even so, a single tungsten rod would still cost tens of millions of dollars, and technical problems remain.
Studies cited in the material question whether such projectiles would achieve their maximum destructive potential at extreme speeds. At around Mach 5, the heat and pressure generated during impact can erode the projectile itself, turning portions of it into plasma.
For now, therefore, the question is not whether Israel is about to begin bombing targets from orbit. Experts point to a much broader process: the transformation of space from a largely supportive military domain into a potential battlefield.
That prospect troubles Blumberg, who points to decades of civilian scientific cooperation in space involving climate change, natural disasters, medicine, biology and physics.
“Now they want to turn it into a domain for tanks,” he said. “It’s hard for me to accept, but the space race has always stemmed from geostrategic and geopolitical considerations and competition between powers.”
Israel’s ambitions are nevertheless already being backed by substantial investment. A source familiar with the matter confirmed that the Defence Ministry has been building up its space capabilities after a long period of neglect in several areas, particularly space.
The planned investment is about 16 billion shekels ($5.4 billion) over a decade. It is linked to Katz and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s goal of increasing the defence budget by up to 400 billion shekels over the next decade. The Finance Ministry opposes the move because funding has not yet been found.
That leaves the scale of the programme uncertain. But the direction is clear. Israel is seeking to extend its military reach beyond the limits of territory, aircraft and conventional weapons — towards an arena where, as Katz put it, territory and population size have little significance.
The joke about Jewish astronauts defending Israel from space may have belonged to Mel Brooks. The military debate about doing it for real belongs to a very different era.
