Finally, Some Jewish Space Lasers?

Georgia GOP Congresscritter Marjorie Taylor Greene made headlines a few years ago with talk of so-called Jewish Space Lasers, but Israel’s development of real-world antimissile lasers is accelerating to ludicrous speed.

The PJ Media Slack channel lit up over the weekend with Twitter images of what was purported to be Israel’s Iron Beam defense system in action, shooting down at least two incoming projectiles. But when I finally got around to checking Slack on Sunday night, every single tweet featuring Iron Beam had been deleted. Apparently, internet pranksters had again used videos generated by the Arma 3 platform to fool Twitter into believing that Iron Beam was already in use.

While that doesn’t appear to be the case, at least not yet, various sources report that Israel is working furiously on their close-in air defense system as the Hamas War rages on in the Gaza Strip.

But about that name…

Iron Dome is Israel’s well-known and fully operational missile defense system. Unlike America’s various ballistic missile defenses, designed to shoot down small numbers of nuclear-tipped missiles incoming from China, Russia, or some rogue state like North Korea or Iran, Iron Dome is a strictly local affair. In service since 2011, Iron Dome is a truck-towed, mobile air defense system whose primary job is shooting down Hamas and Hezbollah rocket attacks against Israeli cities.

The problem with Iron Dome is that while homemade missiles like Hamas and Hezbollah use are inexpensive, antimissile missiles run up to $150,000 a pop, and each missile battery costs about $50 million to manufacture. The costs don’t exactly work in Jerusalem’s favor.

ASIDE: For the record, MTG never used the phrase “Jewish space lasers.” But, before she was elected to Congress, she did once share on Facebook a rumor about the possibility that secret lasers controlled by the Rothschilds — intended to clear land for then-Gov. Jerry Brown’s high-speed rail project — had started a series of deadly wildfires. I have no room to criticize because my entire Twitter feed is one disqualification from public office after another.

Enter, Israelis with fricken laser beams. Iron Beam is a “100kW class High Energy Laser Weapon System (HELWS). It’s designed to intercept a wide range of threats such as Rockets, Artillery, and Mortars (RAM) and UAVs.”

Israeli defense firm Rafael revealed Iron Beam at the Singapore Airshow in 2014. Its job is to defend at ranges too short for Iron Dome — and for a lot less money, too. Firing a laser beam and an incoming projectile costs just $2,000. Cheap at twice the price!

Just a year ago, Defense News reported that deployment had slipped to at least 2024, maybe 2025. Could Rafael speed things up in time for use during the current conflict? Rafael exec Michael Lurie told Defense News back then, “We don’t have a technology problem or a scientific problem anymore… it’s now an engineering problem.”

Maybe they’ve rushed things along enough over the last 12 months to produce a working prototype, but I wouldn’t bet money on that I couldn’t afford to lose. But I’d wager a mortgage payment that the IDF has at least one working battery in time for the next major war.

What does it all mean? It means that Israel is taking one more step towards fulfilling the prophecy of the great Mel Brooks.

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Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene as serving from the State of Florida. We apologize to our readers for this error.