Ebrahim Moosa | Palestine Information Network
August 2022
Another year, another military assault on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Why does Israel so recurrently do it? For with every new aggression against the Palestinian people, it can be argued, the Zionist State sets itself up for even greater international isolation; it heightens its own state of insecurity; places its settlers at increased risk and gives birth to another more fearless crop of freedom fighters in Palestine. So just what strategic value can really be found in all of this madness for Israelis?
Israeli proponents would claim the occupier is “mowing the lawn” – itself an obscene concept coined in Zionist military circles to describe how, every couple of years, Gaza is subjected to a display of firepower to keep the Palestinian resistance in check. There’s the oft-regurgitated mantra of rockets, a nation under siege from ‘terrorists’ and a beleaguered Israel striving to simply secure normalcy for its population. But then, there’s the more ominous side: a rationale not altogether absent from Israeli public discourse, but handled in altogether more hushed tones.
The newspaper Ha’aretz once dubbed it ‘The Silver Lining’: “Gaza-tested weapons are expected to sell like hot cakes” read a brazen headline on its Facebook page. Another piece on its website referred to the 2014 war on Gaza as a ‘cash cow’ for Israeli arms manufacturers. “Factories worked around the clock turning out munitions as the army tested their newest systems against a real enemy. Now, they are expecting their battle-tested products will win them new customers,” said the article’s promotional blurb.
The feature by journalist Shuki Sadeh conceded that “battle-tested” is a key selling point in the Israeli armaments industry marketing pitch.
“Combat is like the highest seal of approval when it comes to the international markets,” Barbara Opall-Rome, now former Israel bureau chief for the U.S. magazine Defense News added. “What has proven itself in battle is much easier to sell. Immediately after the operation, and perhaps even during, all kinds of delegations arrive here from countries that appreciate Israel’s technological capabilities and are interested in testing the new products.”
Considering the high cost Israel’s terror has exacted on Palestine’s civilian infrastructure and population in repeated onslaughts, it may come as a rude shock to some, that the only cost being considered by those in the Israeli establishment is that of doing business, and that too by presenting the ruins and corpses of Gaza as the macabre ‘showroom’.
But for insiders on the Israeli military-industrial complex, this has always been the real deal. Former Ha’aretz journalist Yotam Feldman did an exceptional job of piercing through this shadowy world of military wheeling and dealing in his 2013 documentary ‘The Lab’. In researching the subject, Feldman witnessed the relationship between a network of Israeli generals, politicians and private business; the use of present military operations as a promotional device for private enterprise; and the blurred lines between what is legitimate and forbidden in this line of dealings.
Hinting at why military operations often rake in such high approval ratings from the Israeli public, his research reveals just how lucrative war is to the Israeli economy.
“Everyone speaks about the Israeli miracle – growth and prosperity despite military conflicts. But maybe, it is not despite them, it is because of them. Hundreds live of it, and many others enjoy prosperity in a country that has become the fourth biggest arms exporter in the world”.
In the Israel State, the War Ministry deals not only with combat but also ensures that the Israeli military industry is successful at exporting its wares. At the end of active duty, army officers and generals are simply deployed from the battlefield to the boardrooms of arms companies. Arms and machinery ‘tested’ in Gaza are soon thereafter swaggered before military fairs in Tel Aviv or Paris. Thousands of Israeli households are directly dependent on the arms industry for their livelihoods, and the sector plays a principal role in Israeli economic policy.
Evidently, the obscenity is two-fold: Israelis are making a killing out of the killing of Palestinians; and such weaponry and tactics – first tested on the Palestinians – are then exported to fuel even more violent conflicts against the downtrodden across the world.
This Israeli military-industrial complex thus has a clear interest in maintaining Gaza and other Palestinian centres as a profitable and limitless playground for any military technology Israel wishes to develop or test.
War, hence, has ceased to be solely a burden and has instead become more of an asset that Israelis depend on much, to the extent that normal life in the Zionist State cannot be imagined without it.
Unless supporters of justice in Bayt al-Maqdis hamper this lucrativeness for Israeli warmongers, from the moment one Zionist assault on Gaza ends, “it is only a matter of time until the next one comes”.