Israel is embarking on a ‘war on terror’ that will benefit its military industrial complex, but will have devastating consequences.
It is easy to get distracted by US officials pledging to rally support for a “humanitarian pause” and reducing the number of civilian casualties in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.
But what matters is the actions of the Biden administration, not empty platitudes. In early November, the US State Department approved a $320m sale of guided bomb kits, reportedly assisting Israel to more precisely hit targets in Gaza. According to The New York Times, “Modern militaries generally add the guidance systems on their bombs with the goal of minimizing civilian casualties, although the damage can still be devastating, especially in urban areas.”
The United Nations and every major human rights group in the world have routinely condemned Israeli actions in Gaza, along with the Hamas barbarism on October 7, and accused the Israeli army of potentially committing war crimes. Human Rights Watch has rightly called for a suspension of all weapons transfers to Israel and Hamas.
The spectre of 9/11 and the catastrophic response by the US after that fateful September day 22 years ago hangs over Israeli actions in the last month.
US President Joe Biden, in remarks in Israel on October 18, said, “After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. And while we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”
Calling some US actions after 9/11 “mistakes” is the height of imperial arrogance. During the Bush administration and beyond, inarguably the most destructive US presidency in the 21st century, there was a worldwide torture campaign, the creation and expansion of the detention centre in Guantanamo Bay, the illegal invasion of Iraq, the use of black sites for extraordinary rendition and the death of nearly five million people, according to Brown University’s Cost of War Project.
Today, Israel is also filled with anger and vengeance and does not care one iota about the death of Palestinian civilians. Many in the Netanyahu-led government have expressed genocidal intent towards the entire Palestinian population. Most in the Israeli military and public are celebrating the physical abuse of Palestinians. Amid an atmosphere that is remarkably similar to the US after 9/11, the Israeli “war on terror” is taking shape.
With resounding approval from the general public, the Israeli army has undertaken systematic carpet bombing of the Gaza Strip, dropping in a month more than 25,000 tonnes of explosives, the equivalent of two nuclear bombs. The bombardment of the small enclave mirrors the US air campaigns that used an extraordinary amount of ordnance on Iraq and Afghanistan over two decades, leaving behind immense devastation.
There are already reports that Israel is also stepping up the use of torture against detainees. Since October 7, its forces have rounded up thousands of Palestinians, including children, in the occupied West Bank. Many allege serious physical abuse and arbitrary detention. Palestinians from Gaza, who had worked in Israel, were also arrested and tortured before being released back to Gaza.
Violence by Israeli settlers and soldiers has also surged in the occupied West Bank. More than 200 Palestinians have been murdered, many by live ammunition, as far-right Israeli settlers are taking the opportunity to terrorise the Palestinian population while the world’s attention is fixed on Gaza.
The Israeli government has handed out thousands of weapons to settlers, with more potentially on the way, leaving Palestinians even more exposed than before to deadly violence, with no legitimate authority able to protect them.
In the months and years ahead, Israel will likely launch a global assassination drive to track, target and kill Hamas leaders and key backers, reminiscent of the US’s own campaign of so-called targeted killings after 9/11. Israel’s former intelligence head, Amos Yadlin, has confirmed this inevitable plan of worldwide vengeance.
But Israel’s “war on terror” will not be only about revenge, just as the US’s was not.
The Israeli arms industry has been thriving in recent years, with a record $12.5bn in sales in 2022, double the figure from one decade ago. In the last year, 24 percent of arms went to Arab states, including Bahrain, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates. According to the Israeli Defence Ministry’s own figures, the number of countries buying Israeli drones has jumped 40 percent in the last three years, munitions have grown by 45 percent and spyware and related cyber-equipment soared from 67 to 83 countries in 2022.
Israel has used both the endless occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, along with the siege on Gaza, to “battle-test” ever-evolving new forms of repression and surveillance. These offensive tools are then marketed and sold to the majority of nations on the planet.
In this context, the current war on Gaza will certainly be good for business. The Israeli army’s social media team is already proudly promoting the first time in battle use of the Elbit-made Iron Sling, a mortar designed to hit Hamas rocket launching sites. Iron Sling is said to have the ability to penetrate double-reinforced concrete, making it an ideal weapon for urban warfare.
Rafael Advanced Defense Systems has teamed up with American firm Raytheon to set up a new facility in Arkansas in the US to produce the Tamir missile for the Iron Dome Weapon System and its US variant, SkyHunter.
This is a war for a local and global public audience as well as potential foreign buyers looking to build up their arsenal.
Israel is also likely hoping to expand the sale of its high-tech military and intelligence tools. Even Israeli spyware company, NSO Group, mired in scandals for years, is looking to get in on the action, pitching themselves to Washington as an essential part of this new “war on terror”.
In its assault on Gaza, the Israeli army has boasted about using artificial intelligence (AI) in combat to “produce reliable targets quickly and accurately”. For years, Israel has claimed that it is a pioneer in AI-enabled warfare but there is no evidence that it has reduced civilian casualties while using it. The current death toll of more than 12,000 people in Gaza – the vast majority of them civilians – certainly does not lend credence to this claim.
(Unless the targeting of civilians has been deliberate, of course.)
In the occupied West Bank, AI is used to deepen the complete monitoring and control of Palestinians. It is not a liberating technology in Palestine. It is the complete opposite.
Israel’s pursuit of an ethno-nationalist agenda endangers both Palestinians and critical Jews within the country and across the world. Israel remains an inspiration for huge swaths of the global right and far right, from India to Hungary, in building a lose global coalition of nations opposed to immigration, multiculturalism and abiding by human rights norms.
With Israel claiming that it is fighting a war between so-called Western values and “barbarism”, the decimation of Palestinians’ lives and livelihoods in Gaza is a sign of an increasingly erratic and wild Israeli state. And yet, as it embarks on a dark and bloody “war on terror”, the Western world is supporting it every step of the way.
When criticising the Israeli military's unstoppable onslaught in Gaza, and the US for backing it, underlying economic motives are rarely assessed in the fog of political and moral debates. But economic benefits are ingrained in the politics of greed, pushing Israel's systematic eliminationist campaigns and assaults.
The coastal strip of Gaza and Israeli Occupied Palestinian sit above sizable reservoirs of oil and natural gas, which offer an opportunity to distribute and share $524 billion among different parties in the region, according to a study by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The UNCTAD report also stated, "what could be a source of wealth and opportunities could prove disastrous if these common resources are exploited individually and exclusively, without due regard for international law and norms."
The historical context here is key to understanding how Israel economically and politically benefits from the persecution and extermination of Palestinian civilians.
In the Oslo II Accord, the 1995 Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the Palestinian Authority was given maritime jurisdiction. They signed a deal with the British Gas Group (BGG) and uncovered a large gas field, Gaza Marine. The British contractor withdrew in 2007, but interestingly, prior to Israel's invasion of Gaza in 2008, the Israeli government urgently renegotiated the deal when the military operation was in its advanced planning stage.
Since the invasion in 2008, while Palestinians were subjected to restriction of goods, living on a diet just above starvation and below the poverty line, the Israeli government established a de facto control over Gaza's offshore reserves and the British contractor continued dealing with Israel, depriving the Palestinians their fair share of revenues. The opportunity costs of Israeli occupation—with ongoing restrictions on mobility, access and trade—exclusively in the area of oil and natural gas have accumulated tens, if not hundreds, of billion dollars. UNCTAD also estimated that Palestinians, under occupation in the 2007-17 period, have lost $47.7 billion in revenues leaked to Israel.
Israel has exclusively explored drilling new oil and gas fields in the Eastern Mediterranean, from the Leviathan field, and signed billion dollar deals with Jordan and Egypt, while Arab citizens protested with their rejection of energy "stolen from occupied Palestine." In the current geopolitical context, natural gas and LNG have served as tools to deepen political relationships and economic dependence. It's at the heart of Israel's normalisation ties with Arab states, ignoring the Palestinian cause.
In Israel's current war-mongering policy, killing and expelling Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and creating a buffer zone would give Israel open access to drill the reserves of gas and recoverable oil. It also serves the long-term US-Israel energy cooperation agreement, which stipulates that the development of natural resources by Israel are in the "strategic interest" of the US. Israel's emergence as one of the biggest energy players in the Middle East aligns with the US' need to tighten its loosening grip in the region, as it locks horns with China.
The blood of innocent Palestinian civilians—the children, the infants—is in the hands of a global capitalist system that systematically profits from genocide.
A lot has also been said about the pro-Israeli lobby driving the Biden administration's moral hypocrisy in arming up Israel's powerful military. But to be more specific, a part of the problem is the Pentagon's increased reliance on the private weapons sector, which booms during war; their sales products are weapons and bombs that kill people. When war drags on, and more people are killed, it these companies in the military-industrial complex that benefits from the bloodshed.
A study by the Watson Institute in Brown University in 2021 revealed that one-third of all Pentagon contracts in recent years have gone to just five major weapons contractors: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman. Unsurprisingly, stocks of these companies also surged 7 percent since the Hamas attacks and Israel's invasion of Gaza. The outsized influence of the private sector contractors is manifested in the lion's share of Pentagon's receipts in post 9/11 US wars. As civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq were killed, these companies bagged in profits from reconstruction work in the war zones.
While people around the world watch Israel blowing whole families to bits, transcripts of an off-camera press briefing by the Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary on October 30, shows that US is not putting any limitations on how Israel uses weapons that are provided, while reiterating that Israel must uphold the law of armed conflict and humanitarian laws. One wonders how a month-long military operation that has dropped over 25,000 tonnes of explosives on civilian areas, dropped banned white phosphorous, cut off fuel, supply and medicine to civilians, could still somehow uphold any laws that exist in a civilised world order.
At the same time, big Wall Street institutions, such as TD Bank and Morgan Stanley, have approached the humanitarian disaster in Gaza with an eye towards big profits for their clients in the weapons and aerospace industrial complex, as revealed by transcripts of third-quarter earnings calls this month. An analyst in TD Cowen, blatantly asked the CFO of General Dynamics, about the incremental acceleration of demand of their products resulting from the Israel-Hamas war. The CFO responded, "we're working ahead of schedule to accelerate the production capacity up to 85,000, even as high as 100,000 rounds per month and the Israel situation is going to put upward pressure on that demand…the biggest one to highlight is on the artillery side."
It's also important to note that the continuation of the Ukraine war has benefited US-based defense contractors, whose values have surged since the beginning of the war. Take for example, Lockheed Martin whose value stood at $98 billion in 2022, and reached its highest records at the end of the year, at $127 billion, currently standing at a market capitalisation of $112.2 billion. Prolonging the conflict has raked in revenues for the weapons sector. In the maths of billions, prolonging Israel's war on Gaza, avoiding a ceasefire, will shore up profits for the military-industrial complex that enjoys the spoils of warfare—the indiscriminate killing of real human beings.
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