Israel has fully embraced the “war on terror,” and richly profited from it. One of the most successful though bloody counterinsurgency battles of the early 21st century was the Sri Lankan government’s destruction of the Tamil Tigers militant group. Israel played a key though largely unpublicized part in Colombo’s successful campaign in a civil war that killed and disappeared more than 200,000 people mostly Tamils over a quarter of a century that ended in 2009. Israel sold Kfir fighter jets and trained the Special Task Force, a brutal unit of the Sri Lankan police. Sri Lanka borrowed the Israeli playbook during the last stages of the Civil War, and ignored calls by NGOs, human rights organizations, and foreign governments to cease violence. The military stopped when the Tamil Tigers were completely decimated at Velupillai Prabhakaran, its leader, killed.
Israel also helped generations of Sinhalese politicians build and maintain singer Sinhalese enclaves in the north and east of Sri Lanka, areas where most Tamils live.
The aim was to create buffer zones around Tamil territory, Tamil majority areas and establish an unofficial occupation of Tamil territory. These plans continued after 2009 and Sinhalese colonization has never stopped. These ideas were directly taken from ease Israel’s presence in the West Bank, where Palestinian sovereignty is denied with numerous fortified Jewish colonies.
Israel signed a $US50 million deal with Sri Lanka in 2021 to upgrade the country’s could Kfir fighters. – Antony Loewenstein in The Palestine Laboratory.
Jonathan Srtiranganathan, who is from the Tamil diaspora interviews Sam Watson at the Ferra Engineering, a weapons manufacturing plant at Tingalpa. Sam is one of the activists trying to shut down the weapons industry in that part of Brisbane.