American corporations are reaping huge profits from Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, turning the horrors of war into boardroom victories.
In his report in the American newspaper “The Nation”, writer Spencer Ackerman reviewed a list of companies that benefited from the war on Gaza to achieve their financial goals.
arms deals
Just because the war is unwinnable doesn’t mean there won’t be winners, the writer said. On May 14, days after Israel advanced on Rafah, Joe Biden informed Congress that his administration would move forward with another $1 billion in arms deliveries to Israel.
“This was part of more than $12.5 billion in military aid the United States has provided to Israel since October 7, and was a complete reversal of Biden’s previous decision to halt arms shipments to Israel, due to its imminent move in Rafah,” the writer added.
According to the writer, this step also showed the course of American foreign policy in the Middle East. Since 1945, the United States’ primary goal in the region has been to ensure access to cheap oil. More recently, American foreign policy has added regional integration to this imperative, and sought to achieve it not through peace agreements but through “arms deals.”
The writer considered these deals to be the key to Biden’s vision of the end game in Gaza, and said that whatever the discussions about the decline of American hegemony, the global arms market is where American power is increasing.
The writer explained that the United States was “responsible for 34% of all arms exports from 2014 to 2018, according to the independent Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.”
By 2023, the author says, this number will have risen to 42%, and about 38% of US arms exports during that period went to the Middle East, with Israel accounting for 3.6% of those exports, and Israel obtaining 69% of its arms imports from Washington.
Winners despite the Israeli-American failure
The writer stated that the failures of what he described as America’s painful imperial wars obscured the fact that there were winners, and the same applies to this latest US-backed attack.
These winners, the writer says, are found in the boardrooms of companies revealed by statistics compiled by the American Friends Service Committee.
The author highlights these companies not because of their role in the bloodshed, but because they are not exceptional companies, representing routine operations within the Israeli repression mechanism, and some of them are not even known primarily as weapons manufacturers.
The victories of these companies multiply, according to the writer, every day that Israel continues its genocide in Gaza.
1- Colt Company
While all eyes have been on Gaza over the past nine months, Israeli settlers have taken the opportunity to intensify their attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank, often with the help of American-made weapons.
Last November, the Israeli government ordered 24,000 semi-automatic and automatic rifles from American companies, mostly Colt.
Israel has indicated that some of these rifles will go to civilians, likely as part of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s plan to distribute rifles to settler “security” squads.
Although The New York Times reported concerns within the State Department that the weapons would be used against civilians—as part of the settlers’ exaggerated campaign to drive Palestinians off their land—the Biden administration ultimately approved the deal. On May 1, the Defense Department announced a $26.6 million contract with Colt to deliver the weapons, the author says.
2- Ford Motor Company
It may seem ironic that a company founded by America’s most notorious anti-Semite is supplying armored vehicles to the Jewish state, but the rabid ethnic nationalism that drives both Henry Ford and the current Israeli government helps put things in perspective.
Last December, the Israeli Defense Ministry announced that it had received a new shipment of military equipment, and published a photo of a Ford F-350 truck with metal mesh windows. It was one of several Ford trucks in the Israeli military’s fleet of engines.
According to the Israeli military, the Israeli military also equipped the F-350 truck with advanced sensors and cameras to function as an unmanned ground vehicle and used it to patrol the Gaza border for more than a decade.
The author notes that Ford built its first assembly plant in Israel shortly after the Six-Day War in 1967. Its decades-long operations there were crucial to the company’s attempts to erase the stain of its founder’s anti-Semitism.
3- Caterpillar Company
Caterpillar, the construction equipment giant, is not a weapons manufacturer, the writer says. But its bulldozers are busy digging a wide highway that runs from the fence on Gaza’s eastern border near Kibbutz Nahal Oz to Rashid Street, which runs along the Mediterranean coast. The highway, known as the Netzarim Corridor, is intended to ease Israeli military access across Gaza for years to come while effectively cutting the strip in two.
Meanwhile, the Israeli Defense Forces is using “bulldozers and controlled explosions,” the Wall Street Journal reported, to build a buffer zone along its unilaterally drawn border with Gaza, shrinking the territory allowed to Palestinians.
These “terrifying” bulldozers, the author adds, are not just large pieces of heavy machinery. For years, Israel has used the Caterpillar D9 bulldozer, an armored bulldozer to resist rockets and RPGs, to demolish Palestinian homes in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
During the final days of the second intifada, Human Rights Watch called on Caterpillar to stop selling D9 bulldozers to Israel, which it uses to “demolished Palestinian homes, destroy agriculture and roads in violation of the laws of war.”
4- Palantir Company
While Google, another company with close ties to the Israeli war machine, faces internal opposition over its work in Israel, artificial intelligence company Palantir proudly promotes its partnership with the occupation, the author reports.
In January, CEO Alex Karp met with Israeli President Isaac Herzog and bragged about Israel’s interest in Palantir products. Although Karp didn’t specify which ones at the time, Palantir has confirmed that Israel uses a defense technology data ecosystem called Palantir Government Web Services.
5- Google
In 2021, Google and Amazon won a $1.2 billion contract for the Israeli government’s cloud computing system known as Project Nimbus.
Although little public information is available about how Nimbus works, Sam Biddle, a reporter for The Intercept who obtained internal Google documents, described the company’s role as providing Israel with critical advances in artificial intelligence specifically, with “facial detection capabilities, automated image classification, object tracking and even sentiment analysis that claims to assess the emotional content of images, speech and writing,” the writer says.
Google employees have protested Project Nimbus from the start. In 2022, Ariel Koren resigned as chief marketing officer, claiming that the company retaliated against her for organizing against Nimbus. “Google is systematically silencing Palestinian, Jewish, Arab, and Muslim voices who are concerned about Google’s complicity in Palestinian human rights abuses,” she wrote in a letter explaining her resignation, according to a report in The Nation.
Digital rights group Access Now wrote to Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, in May asking him to clarify the role Google played in Israel’s human rights violations in Gaza.
