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In late May, Haaretz reported that the Israeli Defense Ministry refused to authorize QuaDream, an Israeli cybersecurity firm, to enter into a deal with Morocco, leading to the closure of the company. The paper also reported that the sale of the notorious Pegasus spyware, created by the Israeli cybersecurity firm NSO, to Morocco was similarly aborted. Israel seems to have narrowed the list of countries — mostly Western democracies — to which it is willing to openly export its spy technology, a list from which Morocco is now officially excluded.

This apparent change in the Defense Ministry’s policy was likely brought about by the work of the Pegasus Project, a massive investigation conducted by Amnesty International and a journalist-led non-profit project, Forbidden Stories, along with other journalists and human rights organizations. The project has revealed a long list of human rights activists, journalists, and politicians across the world who have been targeted or served as potential attack targets by NSO’s Pegasus software, including Spain’s prime minister and defense minister, as well as the cellphone of French President Emmanuel Macron. The revelation led the U.S. to sanction NSO, sending Israel’s Defense Ministry scrambling to repair its relationship with its American counterpart.

Though the Defense Ministry is usually reticent to share information on its arms deals with other governments, the media reporting on the deals with Morocco was relatively clear and confident. It seems that the ministry needed these news reports after its previous attempt at PR spin bordered on the absurd, with the Defense Ministry’s announcement that it would require the regimes who purchase spy systems to sign a statement pledging they would only use the spyware to fight terrorism and serious crime. Even if they agreed to do so, however, in many non-democratic countries, opposition to the government and even journalism can be criminalized as such.

Morocco’s poor human rights record suggests that it would likely have used Israeli technology to further repress its people. Human rights defenders can, therefore, justifiably celebrate the cancellation of these deals.

But the history of Israel’s relationships with repressive regimes suggests that Moroccan activists should worry about whether these deals really were canceled, and even if they were, that other weapons and surveillance systems sales from Israel to Morocco are likely to take place regardless. Given so much of the information on these deals remains confidential, we won’t be certain of their nature until — or even if — the files in the Israel State Archives are opened to the public. Until then, however, we already have access to unsealed files in the state archives from 1948 to the 1990s that show Israeli government officials and military industry leaders repeatedly giving false reports on the nature of their international dealings. In spite of statements they made to the public and the media indicating otherwise, telegrams in the state archives show that military export transactions frequently did not actually stop in response to public or political pressure — they simply continued in different and more sophisticated ways.

Israel masked its arms deals to repressive regimes for decades. Here’s how

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