Corporations gorge as Gaza starves
On 30 June, Al Jazeera reported that the death toll of Palestinians killed at aid centres had reached 583. Images of desperate, emaciated people crammed into cattle yards, and footage of soldiers shooting at pot-wielding civilians, were rightfully outraging the world.
The same day, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied territories, Francesca Albanese, handed down a report outlining how, for some, this genocide has been the business opportunity of a lifetime.
Since 7 October 2023, the Tel Aviv stock exchange has grown by a staggering 213 percent, totalling US$225.7 billion in market gains. Corporations from across the world have lined up to cash in on Israel’s genocidal offensive.
Albanese’s report outlines this chain of profiteering, concluding, “The forever-occupation has become the ideal testing ground for arms manufacturers and big tech—providing boundless supply and demand, little oversight and zero accountability—while investors and private and public institutions profit freely”. It details profiteering in a range of sectors, including weapons production, technology, finance, construction, agribusiness, retail, education, transport, tourism and insurance.
Weapons sales are a big part of it. At least 85,000 tonnes of bombs—equivalent to six times what was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—have been used in Gaza, according to the report. Every shell, tank, fighter jet and missile used against the Palestinians comes with a price tag attached. The report outlines:
“For Israeli companies such as Elbit Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries, the ongoing genocide has been a profitable venture. The 65 per cent surge in Israeli military spending from 2023 to 2024—amounting to $46.5 billion, one of the highest per capita worldwide—generated a sharp surge in their annual profits. Foreign arms companies, especially producers of munitions and ordnance, also profit.”
In August 2024, Israel spent US$20 billion in a single purchase, and US aid has contributed handsomely to its war chest, amounting to US$19 billion in the year to October 2024 alone. According to research from the American Friends Service Committee, the onset of the war in Gaza brought bullish gains on the stock market for weapons manufacturers Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing and General Dynamics. Two years on, buoyed by international military spending, they remain elevated.
But it isn’t just the arms dealers. According to the report, banks such as BNP Paribas and Barclays have stepped in to underwrite Israeli government bonds, ensuring Netanyahu’s ability to borrow more and double the genocide budget. Shipping lines profiteer from handling weapons and goods bound for use in Palestine. And so the links in the chain begin to take shape: the Israeli state borrows from banks, for a price, so that they can buy bombs, for a price, which are transported, for a price.
Construction companies are just some of these beneficiaries, the report stating: “Israeli military operations rely heavily on equipment from leading global manufacturers to ‘unground’ Palestinians from their land, demolishing homes, public buildings, farmland, roads and other vital infrastructure. Since October 2023, this machinery has been integral to damaging and destroying 70 per cent of structures and 81 per cent of cropland in Gaza”.
While Gazans line up with empty pots for meagre rations, suffering malnutrition and now contending with a deadly heatwave, a fountain of state spending cascades through the private sector. The purpose of this spending is to help shore up Western domination of the Middle East, but it has also provided critical stimulus to the Israeli economy and to many US companies.
Occupation, apartheid and militarism have long acted as an economic spur in Israel and enabled its technology sector to become highly competitive by international standards and a core part of the economy—amounting to 64 percent of Israel’s exports during the genocide. Known to the world’s investors as the “start-up nation”, Albanese points out that “Israeli tech firms often grow out of military infrastructure and strategy” such as the NSO Group and its Pegasus spyware.
Bankrolled by Israeli government spending and US aid, this has made Israel an attractive destination for tech firms like IBM, Hewlett Packard and Microsoft, which all maintain significant operations there. Genocide has turbocharged this, leading to a 143 percent growth in military technology start-ups in 2024, a key component of steeply rising stock prices for Israel’s corporate sector. In 2022, on the eve of this new boom, Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade already described it as a “flourishing tech sector” and boasted that “Australian companies are making gains” there.
In a right-wing diatribe against the Albanese report, Reason magazine’s J.D. Tuccille decries it as “a masterful mishmash of leftist gibberish” and complains of its “hostility to free markets”. Freedom, for capitalism’s apologists, is epitomised by profit-driven companies enjoying a feeding frenzy brought on by a genocide.
And nor is this profiteering going on independently from the state, as the free marketeers champion. Rather, it is emblematic of a particular era of capitalism in which the wealth of industry is backed up by seemingly endless cash injections from the state—just as insolvent banks were bailed out to the tune of trillions during the Great Recession and mining companies are subsidised by billions every year.
Many of these corporations rely on government spending, from huge military budgets to state investment in tech, construction and research. And so, the quest for profit not only destroys the lives of ordinary people through imperialist rivalry, housing crises and climate disaster, but also depends on large outlays of public money that might otherwise be used to fund essential, life-sustaining services like health, housing and education.
It is symptomatic of the deep sickness in the system, both moral and structural, that resources are allocated in this way. If you are a child in Gaza, with the misfortune to have been born on a patch of earth that the biggest empire in world history seeks to dominate, then you will be starved, dehydrated, shelled and displaced. If you are a rich company helping the imperial powers expand their domination of territory and markets, there are endless reams of cash available.
The human catastrophe in Gaza should already have been a rallying cry to tear down the capitalist system. That it is being used to gild the palaces of industrial barons should only strengthen our resolve.
