Occupation B.V.: The Dutch Infrastructure Behind Israel’s War Economy

Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

In April 2025, a Dutch government official organised a networking event for Israeli investors in Tel Aviv. More than 50,000 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza. The International Criminal Court (ICC) had issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister and Defence Minister. She put the photographs on LinkedIn.

Six months later, she left the Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency (NFIA) and joined Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP), a fund built from the alumni network of Unit 8200, Israel’s military signals intelligence unit, whose flagship exit ran through a no-employee Dutch shell company and ended in a $25 billion acquisition. Nobody wrote about it.

Three weeks after she signed her contract at JVP, the Netherlands signed Pax Silica.

IMAGE: Buildings lie in ruin, following a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip, January 21. (Siurce: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas)

There is more. The Dutch company that serves as European headquarters for Israel’s state-owned arms manufacturer lists a London address that has been closed and unused for years. The Israeli minister banned from entering the Netherlands in July 2025 for inciting ethnic cleansing has kept full control of that state arms company’s weapons factories across Germany, the United Kingdom, and Spain, through a The Hague letterbox with no employees. And on June 23, 2026, the Netherlands and Israel co-signed a Joint Statement on AI Opportunity inside a US State Department summit, a joint political commitment to the future of artificial intelligence, five months after a Dutch court found a grave risk that Israel is committing genocide.

None of that has been reported before now. What follows is how it connects.

Forty-One Days

On November 6, 2025, the Hague Court of Appeal handed down a ruling that should have changed everything. The case was brought by Al-Haq and a coalition of human rights organisations against the Dutch state. The court found what it called a “grave risk” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, confirmed the Netherlands’ binding obligations under the Genocide Convention to take all available measures to prevent it, and issued ruling ECLI:NL:GHDHA:2025:2290 into the public record.

Forty-one days later, the Netherlands joined Pax Silica, and Israel was already inside.

Pax Silica is the United States government’s flagship initiative on artificial intelligence (AI) and semiconductor supply chain security, launched by Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg at a Washington summit on December 12, 2025. Israel was one of the seven founding signatories. Five days after that founding summit, on December 17, the Netherlands signed on as a partner.

READ MORE: Pax Silica Hands the Philippines to Israel’s AI Empire

On June 23, 2026, Dutch Foreign Trade Minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma flew to Washington and formalised the Netherlands’ full membership at the Second Pax Silica Summit, signing in front of Helberg. Sjoerdsma told reporters: “The Netherlands plays a unique, leading role in the global chip industry. Pax Silica presents opportunities for the Dutch economy and will strengthen the Netherlands’ trading position.”

IMAGE: Dutch Foreign Trade Minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma signs the Netherlands into Pax Silica, Washington D.C., June 23, 2026 (Source: IO+)

Hours later, the European Commission signed the same declaration on behalf of all 27 European Union (EU) member states. The Commission had not been a founding member. The Netherlands had been inside since December, positioning  ASML, its nationally strategic chip equipment monopoly, at the centre of an alliance structure that was waiting for Europe to follow. Europe followed.

On X, Helberg announced the Dutch accession with language worth keeping:

Today, the Kingdom of the Netherlands joins the Pax Silica Initiative as our 16th partner.

We are deciding who we trust to build our chips, power our AI, and secure the technologies that will define the future. The Netherlands is a global leader in advanced and emerging… pic.twitter.com/fPYJJJS3fn

— Under Secretary of State Jacob S. Helberg (@UnderSecE) June 23, 2026

The Netherlands is the home of ASML, the only company on earth that manufactures extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines, the devices without which no advanced semiconductor can be produced. Every significant chipmaker on earth, including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), Samsung, and Intel, depends on ASML.

IMAGE: A High NA EUV tool is seen before the attachment of its top module as it is assembled at ASML’s headquarters in Veldhoven, Netherlands, November 14, 2023. (Source: ASML/Michel de Heer/Handout via REUTERS) 

By signing Pax Silica, the Dutch government placed that monopoly inside an alliance that designates Israel a “trusted technology partner.” The same alliance published the Joint Statement on AI Opportunity at the June summit, signed by both the Netherlands and Israel, committing all signatories to a shared philosophy of AI governance, “promoting a pro-innovation and pro-growth approach to AI” while “emphasising secure AI supply chains.” The Netherlands and Israel have now co-signed, in a US State Department document, a joint political statement on the future of artificial intelligence. The Hague Court of Appeal ruling sits six months behind it.

What Was Already Built

In 2024, Israeli companies sent €44.9 billion into the Netherlands, more than half of all Israeli foreign direct investment globally, nearly four times what went to the United States. The Netherlands invested €27.3 billion into Israel, making it the second-largest external investor in the Israeli economy after only the US. Roughly two-thirds of all European investment into Israel passes through the Netherlands first. The Dutch Central Bank‘s own language suggests the country is one through which corporations “channel large sums of money” for “legal and tax reasons.” The Tax Justice Network ranks it seventh-worst in the world for enabling corporate tax abuse.

A new five-part investigation by SOMO, the Amsterdam-based Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations, published June 30, 2026, calls this “flag-swapping capital”, and the term is precise. Israeli investment does not pass through the Netherlands as its identity of origin is replaced with a Dutch one that comes with access to 75 bilateral investment treaties, a participation exemption shielding dividend income from taxation, no withholding taxes on cross-border interest or royalty payments, and private advance tax rulings negotiated by the Dutch Tax Authority behind closed doors. The Tax Justice Network calls these the “crown jewels” of corporate tax avoidance. The NFIA lists them on its website.

The Dutch state built this. When Israeli chemicals conglomerate ICL was choosing where to put its European headquarters in 2014, Prime Minister Rutte made personal calls. The NFIA wrote to ICL’s chief executive officer (CEO) and told him to open negotiations with the Dutch Tax Authority, which would show him “how favorable a ruling would be in your case.” The NFIA offered to pay half of ICL’s KPMG consulting fees. The ruling “met the expectations of ICL.” The company opened in Amsterdam in 2015. Dutch bilateral investment treaties have since been invoked in 106 known investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) cases globally, generating claims totalling $105 billion, of which arbitration tribunals have awarded $18.2 billion in compensation, 71 percent of cases filed by letterbox companies created purely to access the treaty network.

IMAGE: PostNL Dutch postal service, automatic package pickup and delivery point locker system. 24 7 accessible lockers for packages and mail (Source: Alamy Contributor, Harry Wedzinga)

Any Dutch government that attempts to freeze Israeli assets or cancel the bilateral tax treaty risks billions in arbitration claims from companies that purchased Dutch corporate nationality by routing investments through Dutch shells. The legal architecture was designed to make itself expensive to dismantle.

The Woman Who Ran the Tel Aviv Office

Jacqueline Bouscher was Area Director and Head of the Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency (NFIA) Tel Aviv office from January 2021 until September 2025, on the Dutch government payroll, inside the Dutch Embassy compound, under the Ministry of Economic Affairs. The April 2025 investor event she organised was not unusual. In fact, it was the job, four and a half years of it.

IMAGE: Dutch Embassy Tel Aviv (Source: The Siasat Daily)

In September 2025, she left the NFIA and joined Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) as Head of Business Development Europe. What isn’t trivial is the fact that JVP co-founded the Unit 8200 alumni accelerator with Israel’s Ministry of Economy. In January 2017, it signed a formal cybersecurity partnership with the Dutch state; Crown Prince Constantijn attended in his capacity as Special Envoy for StartupDelta, alongside the Hague Security Delta (HSD) and KPN Ventures, to “create and nurture a cybersecurity ecosystem involving Israel, the Netherlands, and New York.” JVP’s flagship investment was CyberArk, backed from a $120 million company into a $25 billion acquisition completed by Palo Alto Networks in February 2026.

IMAGE: The 2017 signing of the JVP–Hague Security Delta cybersecurity partnership, attended by Crown Prince Constantijn of Holland, that linked Dutch state security infrastructure to Israeli military intelligence alumni networks (Source: HSD Foundation)

Palo Alto Networks routes its Israeli operations through a Dutch holding shell, Palo Alto Networks (Holding) B.V., with no employees and $522 million in assets. Between 2017 and 2019, that shell issued three interest-free loans to the Israeli subsidiary totalling $485 million. In 2023, it moved $704 million in cash through the same structure to fund the acquisition of two Israeli cybersecurity startups. In March 2026, a Palo Alto Networks partnership won Israel’s largest network security contract, “critical network infrastructure” for an undisclosed “major Israeli customer“, worth up to new Israeli shekels (NIS) 500 million.

The company was founded by Nir Zuk, who ran software development for Unit 8200, the Israeli military’s signals intelligence unit whose AI-assisted targeting systems helped identify bombing sites in Gaza and whose mass surveillance operations against Palestinians The Guardian documented in 2025. That same year, Microsoft terminated the Israeli military’s access to its core technology specifically over Unit 8200’s surveillance programme.

Bouscher spent four and a half years recruiting Israeli companies to the Netherlands on behalf of the Dutch state. She then joined the venture capital firm whose flagship exit was absorbed by a company using a Dutch shell to finance Israeli military cybersecurity acquisitions. The 2017 Dutch-JVP partnership her future employer signed with a Crown prince in the room helped build the investment corridor that made the $25 billion deal possible. None of this required any arrangement. It is just how the system works when nobody decides it should stop.

The picture that emerges from her own public record is not of a Dutch civil servant who happened to work on Israel. It is of someone personally rooted in Tel Aviv, fluent in Hebrew, who moved through the Dutch state’s foreign investment infrastructure and used it to open European corporate doors for Israeli companies, before returning, for what she describes as personal reasons, to Jerusalem Venture Partners: a firm whose founder chaired the Knesset’s Cybersecurity Taskforce, whose portfolio includes a company founded by a former Shin Bet director, and which has partnered with Unit 8200, Israel’s military intelligence corps. The NFIA never asked who that infrastructure was really serving. Perhaps it should have.

IMAGE: Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence corps — whose alumni built the cybersecurity industry, and whose AI targeting systems were used to identify bombing sites in Gaza. (Source: NoonPost)

From 2020 to 2025, Bouscher served simultaneously as Vice Consul of the Netherlands in Tel Aviv and Head of the NFIA office based inside the Dutch Embassy, the same office officially mandated to recruit Israeli companies, on a confidential basis, into Dutch corporate structures.

The Security Delta source is undeniably one of the most revealing links, as it confirms JVP, Prince Constantijn, and the Hague Security Delta (HSD) all in one room three years before Bouscher took over the NFIA Tel Aviv post, which fed directly into the same pipeline.

The Letterbox with a London Address That No Longer Functions

In The Hague, there is a company called ERCAS B.V. Zero employees. Registered director listed at 1st Floor Gallery Court, 28 Arcadia Avenue, London, an address Declassified UK found to have been closed and unused for years. It publishes almost nothing under Dutch law, classified as a “small company.” It holds £181.2 million in assets. It is the European headquarters of  Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, one of Israel’s three largest weapons companies, and the man on the UK Companies House filing as its active director is Yoram Aldo Aron.

IMAGE: Rafael Iron Dome (Source: Portail Aviation)

Before Rafael, Aron spent nine years at Elbit Systems building thermal imaging and targeting equipment. He moved to CONTROP Precision Technologies, an Israeli manufacturer of electro-optical surveillance systems, leading European and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) marketing. In July 2022, he was appointed Managing Director of Rafael in the United Kingdom (UK) and simultaneously appointed director of ERCAS B.V. He sits on the board of Pearson Engineering, Rafael’s UK subsidiary, alongside Lord John Hutton, former British Defence Secretary, who joined the board weeks after Rafael acquired Pearson for £100 million.

Through ERCAS B.V., Rafael runs arms manufacturing across three European countries. Dynamit Nobel Defense in Germany recorded €146 million in 2024 revenue, making missile launchers and vehicle protection systems for the German military and NATO partners. Pearson Engineering makes countermine and improvised explosive device defeat systems for US and allied armoured forces, what the company calls “decades of support to the US Army and US Marine Corps.” PAP Tecnos is the primary weapons supplier to the Spanish Armed Forces; the Spanish government suspended its €285 million anti-tank missile contract with PAP Tecnos in 2025 over Rafael’s Israeli connections.

Rafael is wholly owned by the Israeli state, under the authority of the Ministry of Finance. Since 2022, Bezalel Smotrich has run the ministry. In July 2025, the Dutch government declared Smotrich persona non grata, his statements, in the government’s own language, “incited settler violence and called for ethnic cleansing.”

IMAGE: Bezalel Smotrich, Israeli Finance Minister. Declared persona non grata by the Dutch government in July 2025. His ministry’s arms company transferred €129 million through a Hague letterbox to his treasury the same year (Source: NBC News)

ERCAS B.V. kept its registration in The Hague. The vehicle through which Smotrich’s ministry controls arms manufacturing in Germany, the UK, and Spain, directed by a man registered at a defunct London address, kept operating without interruption.

Rafael transferred approximately €129 million in net profit to the Israeli state treasury in 2024, routed through that letterbox, to the government whose military campaign the Dutch court found carries a grave risk of constituting genocide.

Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest publicly traded arms company, runs the same playbook through two Dutch micro-companies, namely, Truley Investment B.V. and Talla-Com Wireless B.V, both registered at corporate service provider addresses and required to disclose almost nothing. Their Romanian subsidiary ELMET is Romania’s largest military exporter. Their German subsidiary makes the EuroPULS rocket artillery system, already sold to the Dutch, German, and Greek militaries. Europe is Elbit’s largest market outside Israel at $2.1 billion in annual sales. The Dutch shells are what qualifies Elbit as a European company in European procurement.

Fort Foundry One

On January 16, 2026, ten weeks after the Dutch genocide ruling, one month after the Netherlands joined Pax Silica, the United States and Israel signed a memorandum of understanding to build “Fort Foundry One,” a chip manufacturing and AI megapark on 16,000 dunams in either the Negev or the Gaza Envelope, the ring of Israeli territory bordering Gaza. The memorandum of understanding (MOU) was signed by Brigadier General Erez Askal, chief of Israel’s National AI Headquarters, and Jacob Helberg, the same man who would stand next to Sjoerdsma in Washington five months later. The United States took a 99-year lease on the land. American technology companies will operate on Israeli sovereign territory under a framework Helberg’s own office described as serving national security.

IMAGE: Brig.-Gen. (Res.) Erez Eskel, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg, US Ambassador Mike Huckabee at signing of joint AI statement
(Source: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM via Israel Prime Minister Office)

Also within the Pax Silica framework, we find Nebius, a Dutch company based in Amsterdam, a Yandex spin-off incorporated in the Netherlands, selected by the Israeli government to build Israel’s national AI supercomputer infrastructure. The project is worth €138 million, one-third directly funded by the Israeli state. Israel’s Minister of Innovation, Science and Technology called it “an investment in national security.” Amnesty International has called on all states to stop supplying Israel with AI and cloud infrastructure supporting its military apparatus. The Dutch company kept building.

The Second Pax Silica Summit also launched “Foundry School,” a workforce development programme run in partnership with Stanford University, an advanced manufacturing and AI supply chain curriculum that Pax Silica member states are expected to adopt and deliver in their own educational institutions. The Dutch and Israeli university students who will study it have not been told what the programme was built inside of.

The Pension Funds, the App, the Prosecutors

Three of the Netherlands’ five largest pension funds, ABP, PFZW, and Bpfbouw, held investments in companies the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council listed for “risking complicity in human rights violations” in Gaza as of mid-2025. ABP, the civil servants’ fund with €533 billion under management, held €674 million across those UN-listed companies while over 2,000 of its own participants had written personally to demand divestment. Dutch financial institutions collectively held $78.6 billion in companies contributing to occupation and genocide as of November 2025, according to the annual “Don’t Buy Into Occupation” report by a European and Palestinian non-governmental organisation (NGO) coalition.

IMAGE: Pro-Palestinian protesters gather at Museumplein ahead of a 6 km march through the city as part of a protest demanding a tougher stance from the Dutch government against Israel’s war in Gaza, in Amsterdam, Netherlands, October 5, 2025. (Source: REUTERS/Charlotte Van Campenhout)

Booking.com, headquartered in Amsterdam, has been under a criminal complaint since November 2023, accused by SOMO and a coalition of civil society organisations of laundering profits from Israeli war crimes by listing rental properties in illegal settlements. East Jerusalem alone went from 13 to 39 Booking.com listings in the year following the complaint’s filing. The Dutch Public Prosecution Service sat on it. As of April 2026, SOMO and its partners were going to court to force the prosecutors to make a decision.

The Dutch Foreign Minister sent a letter to Brussels in May 2025 calling for a formal Article 2 review of the EU-Israel Association Agreement, the human rights clause. The EU found Israel in breach. The Dutch parliament voted in April 2026 to push for suspension of the trade component. The Dutch government called itself a leading voice for accountability in Gaza. The NFIA office in Tel Aviv remained open through all of it. The pension funds held, the prosecutors did not move, and  Sjoerdsma flew to Washington.

The Sequence

After Russia invaded Ukraine, Dutch foreign direct investment (FDI) to and from Russia collapsed. The same letterbox infrastructure that had processed Russian capital became hostile to it practically overnight. When the Dutch state decides capital should stop moving, it stops.

The full sequence for the record:

November 6, 2025, Hague Court of Appeal, genocide ruling, ECLI:NL:GHDHA:2025:2290. December 12, 2025 Pax Silica founding summit, Israel a founding signatory. December 17, 2025, the Netherlands joins as partner. January 16, 2026, Helberg and Brigadier General Askal sign the Fort Foundry One MOU in southern Israel. June 23, 2026, Sjoerdsma signs the full Pax Silica declaration in Washington. Netherlands and Israel both sign the Joint Statement on AI Opportunity. European Commission signs the same declaration for all 27 EU member states. June 30, 2026,  SOMO publishes the Netherlands-Israel Investment Files.

The Pax Silica membership list is also a political map. Germany, Greece, Italy, and the Netherlands are in. France, Spain, which suspended the Rafael missile contract, Ireland, and Belgium are not. The countries that are in are mostly the countries that kept selling weapons, kept hosting shells, kept the tap open. The countries that are out are mostly the ones that at some point tried to close it.

READ MORE: The Quiet Operational Architecture Behind U.S.-Israel Integration (and Pax Silica)

Sjoerdsma was in Washington lobbying against the Maintaining American Superiority by Improving Export Control Transparency Act (MATCH Act), a US legislation that would give Washington the power to force ASML to stop maintaining machines already sold to China, on the same day he signed the document designating Israel a trusted technology partner. He flew there to argue about the terms of inclusion while signing the inclusion. Israel was never a term being negotiated. Israel was the fixed point.

IMAGE: The second Pax Silica summit, Washington, June 2026. The banner says everything they chose not to (Source: Agenzia Nova) 

The party in Tel Aviv in April 2025 was the system in public, government badges, LinkedIn photographs, the NFIA logo, a room full of Israeli investors who understood exactly what the Netherlands was offering and what it would keep offering. Bouscher ran it. Then she went to work for JVP. Then the Netherlands signed Pax Silica. Then the European Commission signed behind it. Then the Joint Statement on AI Opportunity went into the State Department record with Dutch and Israeli names on it. Then SOMO published its files. Then Helberg posted on X that without the Netherlands, there is no cutting-edge AI.

He was not wrong about that. He just did not mention what the cutting edge is for.

21st Century Wire is an alternative news agency designed to enlighten, inform and educate readers about world events which are not always covered in the mainstream media.