Leaked Documents Show Cisco Systems’ Deep Relationship with Israeli Security State
“Never Let a Good Crisis Go To Waste”: Internal documents show Cisco’s growing collaboration with the Israeli military over the course of the genocide in Gaza.
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Cisco Systems is one of the most consequential—yet least visible—corporations in Silicon Valley. The San Jose-based networking giant, with a market capitalization in excess of $270 billion and annual revenue of $56.7 billion in 2025, manufactures the routers, switches, firewalls, and communications platforms that run the internet’s infrastructure, as well as many of its worldwide corporate, government, and military networks.
Cisco makes a point of publicly highlighting its commitment to corporate social responsibility, and building “an inclusive future for all” in the dozens of countries around the world in which it operates. Yet the company’s aggressive pursuit of contracts with the Israeli government and military—a small yet growing part of its global business—has led to accusations that behind this sunny facade the networking giant is profiting from genocide.
A new set of leaked documents—provided to Drop Site by whistleblowers disturbed by the company’s operations in Israel—shows Cisco’s deep and growing collaboration with the Israeli military and intelligence establishment in its regional wars and the genocide in Gaza.
In 2025, an Israeli Air Force officer publicly discussed using Cisco-powered infrastructure to support operations. The anonymous officer, identified as the head of the Israeli Air Force’s operational branch, told a tech conference in Israel that the Air Force had conducted “tens of thousands of attacks” in the past year, and described how IT systems had been vital to enabling this combat activity. The officer referenced Cisco infrastructure being used by air force intelligence personnel for communications and managing high volumes of operational data—including the use of networking tools by drone operators and ground forces to store and analyze videos and share coordinates for strikes.
Cisco’s work with the Israeli government and military has been documented in public news reports and new business announcements in the country. But the internal documents—including presentations, purchase and revenue records, and schedules—shed light on the rapidly expanding list of services that Cisco has been providing directly to the Israeli Ministry of Defense and other branches of the security state over the past several years.
Cisco did not respond to a request for comment.
The expanding data and network needs of the Israeli defense sector since October 7 and subsequent wars in the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Iran, Syria, and Yemen were seen as a promising business opportunity inside Cisco, the documents show, driving increases in revenue as the Israeli government drew more heavily upon networking and data services for its operations.
One internal presentation, outlining increases in revenue and service offerings by Cisco Israel, the company’s Israeli branch, shows that Cisco’s business interests in the country have been driven overwhelmingly by the needs of the Israeli military. A slide deck comparing revenue results between 2023 and 2025 shows that total Israeli revenue from Cisco operations in the first half of each year rose from $109 million to $150 million between 2023 and 2024.
These results were heavily weighted toward the Israeli Ministry of Defense: $52 million and $98 million of those figures each year were driven by services provided to the Israeli MOD. In the first half of 2025, total revenue declined to $115M, of which $42 million was attributable to MOD work. (The presentation was delivered before full year 2025 results were available and compared first half results over the three years.)
Longer term results showed the significant growth of Cisco’s business in Israel, rising from $122 million in total revenue in fiscal year 2015 to $283 million by 2024. In a breakdown of revenue from 2024, $111 million is attributed to “conflict impact.” The presentation highlights the importance of “capturing defense opportunities” in Israel, with one slide headlined with a quote misattributed to Winston Churchill: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”
In a slide focused on how to service the needs of the Israeli MOD, the presentation highlights an opportunity for Cisco: providing support for integrating artificial intelligence in Israeli military operations, along with support for the military’s cybersecurity and networking infrastructure.
Cisco’s plans for continuing the lucrative collaboration were clearly laid out in the presentation. A segment on strategic projects and “Big Bets” includes specific mention of two projects for the Israeli Ministry of Defense (MOD), including an AI computing agreement worth $50 million and a routed optical network agreement valued at $15 million.
“Aircrafts, tanks and any other essential military tools.”
Cisco has long made a point of publicly championing ethical business practices, issuing regular reports highlighting its commitment to community-building, sustainability, education, and other positive endeavors all placed under the banner of “social impact.”
Yet documents show that over the same period that Cisco was allegedly impacting “one billion lives positively,” its business in Israel was disproportionately focused on military and intelligence related services. An April 2021 update report produced by employees of Cisco Israel suggests the company was already making $40-50 million a year from compute contracts with the MOD. Entitled “Cisco Israel Ministry of Defense Win,” the report highlights an agreement to provide a new list of itemized services to the Israeli MOD, including enterprise and data center networking, cybersecurity, and classified network support.
The military applications of the contracts were explicit. For the MOD, the report notes, the services in the Cisco agreement “are as important … as the focus on aircrafts, tanks and any other essential military tools.”
The MOD sees “their Digital capabilities as a critical strength in the Israeli geopolitical situation,” the report assessed, adding that Cisco serves as “the dominant ICT (Information and Communications Technology) partner to the MOD.” The analysis also makes clear the outsize importance of the Israeli military in particular to Cisco’s business in the country, and vice versa: “The Israel MOD account is a collection of 10 Classified Organizations that represents 50% of Cisco Israel’s revenue. The account’s overall budget is 30% of the government budget.”
Cisco had been gradually scaling up its relationship with the Israeli government and military in the decade prior. In 2013, the company won a $150 million contract to supply communications technology to the Israeli military. Cisco has also worked on numerous projects providing services to Israeli police while developing both tech hubs and surveillance infrastructure in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, according to the research center “Who Profits?,” which monitors corporate collaboration with the Israeli government.
In 2017, Cisco won a $250 million contract to provide servers to the MOD—a contract that was paid for by the U.S. government through its Foreign Military Sales assistance program to Israel, according to a report from the American Friends Service Committee. The company helped set up a major military data center known as “David’s Citadel” aimed at massively expanding the surveillance and data processing capacity of Israeli military and intelligence units, while providing communications infrastructure directly used in operations. Starting in 2018, Cisco also began partnering with the Israeli government to set up “digital hubs” in the country, including several based in occupied West Bank settlements.
“Humanitarian Efforts”
In the wake of the October 7 attacks, a company-wide email from Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins stressed the “humanitarian efforts” that the company was undertaking in response, providing support for affected Israeli communities and Cisco employees, while adding that “our hope is that this war comes to an end soon, and that we can strive for peace.”
Days later, during an internal company-wide meeting known as “Cisco Beat,” Robbins gave another interview where he stated that Cisco was “working day and night to ship our technology to Israel,” including unique cybersecurity capacities requested by the country. Internal documents show that the company very quickly saw the war as a means of ramping up an already lucrative stream of business.
A series of corporate security presentations produced immediately after the attacks and provided to Drop Site, titled “Israel ‘Iron Swords’ Update”—the name the Israeli military adopted for its military campaign and subsequent genocide in Gaza—outlined lists of action items for Cisco. In addition to outlining measures to support accommodation and travel for Israeli employees of the company, the presentations made it clear the company saw the attacks as an opportunity to ramp up its partnership with the government.
One “Iron Swords” presentation deck states that, “Supply of Cisco equipment to Israel will be reinforced, priority given to Cybersecurity equipment,” while assigning designated Cisco employees to “to support Israeli Sales Teams presenting our Cybersecurity solutions to officials and Private sector partners.”
In November 2023, another document labeled “Israel’s CAP Details” detailed a months-long plan to roll out a program called Security Service Edge (SSE) in Israel. SSE is a cloud-based security platform offered by Cisco that allows for protection of devices and user data regardless of their location. The rollout was described specifically as a response to the conflict, noting that, “One of the asks for Israel War relief/support is to get Umbrella and/or SSE presence working in the country.”
A spreadsheet showing Cisco sales in Israel managed through a local Israeli partner company called Bynet shows numerous recurring services sold to institutions that make up key nodes of the Israeli security establishment, including the Israeli Air Force, Israeli Navy, the Israeli Defense Forces Computing and Information Systems unit (known by its Hebrew acronym MAMRAM), the office of the Prime Minister, which includes the Mossad and Shin Bet, the Israel Prison Service (SHABAS), an elite reconnaissance unit known as Sayeret Maglan, and numerous defense companies owned by or closely tied to the government, including Elbit Systems, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, and Israel Aerospace Industries.
The contract list also includes Israeli ministries involved in the occupation, including the Israel Electric Company, Mekorot (the National Water Company of Israel), the municipality of Jerusalem, the Israeli Ministry of Justice, as well as major Israeli banks operating in the West Bank such as Bank Leumi, Israel Discount Bank, and Bank Hapoalim. The services provided to these institutions include cybersecurity tools and access to network management and monitoring platforms.
“These are all institutions very complicit in implementing apartheid policies, and that is in addition to specific arms of the military, Navy, Air Force, military intelligence, and Israeli police that are listed here,” said Noam Perry, strategic research coordinator at the American Friends Service Committee’s Action Center for Corporate Accountability, which has been compiling research on Cisco’s business contacts in Israel and also reviewed the client list. “Cisco is really serving the Israeli government and economy writ large. It is a large company ubiquitous in many places so it is not necessarily surprising, but there is all this need now by the Israeli military and the government for more storage, computing, and connectivity.”
Internal Dissent
Following the genocide in Gaza, Cisco was rocked by internal dissent over its ongoing collaboration with the Israeli military, leading the company to institute “guardrails” effectively proscribing debate over the topic in 2025 and terminating employees after they raised concerns.
On March 25 of that year, a Cisco executive told employees in a company-wide call that “Some topics are just simply too hard, too painful, too divisive, and they take our focus away from our ability to drive Cisco business, and one example specifically would be the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.” The executive added that, “We have made the decision that this topic cannot be discussed, cannot be debated in company or organization-wide meetings.”
The issue of Cisco’s work with Israel, and in particular the MOD, has become more fraught as the Israeli military has increasingly relied upon artificial intelligence systems for targeting and surveillance in its military operations. These data intensive operations require storage and processing of tremendous amounts of information, which many Silicon Valley companies, including Cisco, have been eager to provide. AI-powered operations conducted by the Israeli military that have automated targeting processes have been blamed for inflicting massive civilian casualties, including during an air campaign that destroyed most of the Gaza Strip.
This week, Microsoft announced that it was firing the general manager of its Israeli subsidiary and other senior staff after an internal investigation into the use of Microsoft Azure cloud services by the Israeli MOD, including for mass surveillance of Palestinians. According to a report in the Israeli publication Globes, the move came after an internal investigation into the “sales department responsible for working with Israel’s Ministry of Defense,” as well as another recent decision to terminate contacts with the IDF’s Unit 8200 intelligence unit.
Cisco, however, has continued to champion its relationship with Israel, despite growing international backlash.
“For the Israeli arm of Cisco it’s very natural that their employees are part of Israeli society, they want to support their government, and they want to leverage their position as Cisco employees to create a win-win situation. But this is really a problem for people at Cisco headquarters, who are supposed to do due diligence when there are credible accusations of genocide against a particular government, and need to see if there is an issue with these contracts,” said Perry. “If they have done that diligence, it does not show.”
Vicky Wyatt, campaign director at Ekō, an ethical investing activist group, said that companies engaging in cooperation with the Israeli government are now facing “investor revolts, legal exposure, and a wave of scrutiny,” unprecedented in the history of the tech sector.
“Cisco built its reputation as a conscious company with technology to connect and empower people,” Wyatt said. “For millions of Palestinians surviving Israel’s war crimes, the company is doing the opposite, supplying the Israeli military with the tools to dispossess and kill by providing the networking backbone of Israel’s AI-powered war machine.”
The US is nothing but corruption and greed. Formerly it was well hidden. Now it is out in the open. Truly hateful.
This is what comprehensive, meaningful journalism looks like. So grateful we have this - now more than ever. Thanks for the excellent reporting, Maz.
This part really sums up the catastrophe of our corporate-governed existence:
"On March 25 of that year, a Cisco executive told employees in a company-wide call that “Some topics are just simply too hard, too painful, too divisive, and they take our focus away from our ability to drive Cisco business, and one example specifically would be the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.” The executive added that, “We have made the decision that this topic cannot be discussed, cannot be debated in company or organization-wide meetings.”"
I'm going to de-fluff this statement by paring it down - let's see if it feels a little more on point:
"Some topics take our focus away from our ability to drive Cisco business. One example would be the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. This topic cannot be discussed in company or organization-wide meetings."
Drives a little different...