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Middle East & North Africa
Capital and Genocide in the 21st Century
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Middle East & North Africa
The Palestinian Authority, a plausible post-Gaza solution?
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Mexico & Central America
‘Sembrando Vida’, Illicit Crop Cultivation and Rural Violence in Mexico
With each day, Israel’s genocide adds a new horror to a pile that long since breached the heavens. The pace of atrocities only quickened with the siege on north Gaza: Since October, the suffering afflicted has been wholly unrelenting.
Beyond demanding moral inquisition, the scale of depravities visited upon Palestine begs questions as to the how of it all: From whence comes the tinder for turning a place into “hell on earth”, as Philippe Lazzarini of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) has taken to calling Gaza? The most direct answer is, of course, Washington. Guided by the ideological priors of a sunsetting executive and the duncery of the Blinken-McGurk-Sullivan triad, the Biden administration has co-authored Gaza’s decimation from the very start. But it would be misguided to think the White House (and Congress) alone furnish the kindling keeping Gaza aflame. The arms, energy, and financial flows which sustain Israel’s campaign are in fact gathered from a diversity of sources. In certain instances, the parties involved show themselves motivated by opportunism, in others by the perverse apoliticism of capital. Notions of ethnic or even civilizational solidarity weigh in occasion, too. In surveying the economy of Israel’s genocide, however, what sticks out most is the ubiquity of finance capital. This stems in part from northern financial institutions’ contributions to Israel’s debt financing. (By way of Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners, the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia is vested in Israel’s debt market, too). It is equally a function, though, of a world-spanning integration of money and industrial capital. By dint of the latter, Wall Street’s grand financial houses in particular have acquired commanding stakes in all the inputs from which Israel metabolizes violence.
Arms, Energy and Logistics
Concerning war materiel first, finance capital’s presence is observable not only in Israel’s armaments themselves but in the means through which they are transported and powered.
The weapons raining down upon Palestine and Lebanon are predominantly sourced in the United States, their transfer tirelessly facilitated by the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs.[i] Orders of equipment and articles/services valued at less than $14 and $50 million, respectively—of which there have been at least one hundred—spare the White House from needing report to Congress, making the determination of a final tally difficult. William Hartung has nevertheless put forth a conservative estimate[ii]: In addition to restocking Israel’s missile defense system, between October 7th of 2023 and the end of September 2024, Washington sustained the country’ s offensive capacity to the tune of 57,000 artillery shells; 36,000 rounds of cannon ammunition; 20,000 M4A1 rifles; 13,981 anti-tank missiles; 3,000 Joint Direct Attack Munitions (guided bombs, or JDAM for short, with another 6,500 on the way); 3,000 laser-guided Hellfire missiles; 1,800 M141 bunker-buster munitions; 2,600 250-meter small diameter bombs; 8,700 MK82 500 pound bombs; and hundreds of drones. The usual lot of American defense contractors produce the munitions in question: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Honeywell International, and RTX, principally. The same firms have also produced the missiles for the Iron Dome and David’s Sling and hawked the upmarket wares ordered by Israel post-October 7th. The latter include fifty F-15s (cleared for sale by the State Department in August[iii]), twenty-five F-35’s (that deal inked in June), and twelve Apache helicopters expected to be acquired in the weeks ahead. Note that manufacturing and maintenance of advanced systems like the F-35 does involve a vast and transnational value chain. As such, a range of hardware and software companies in the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, and Canada are responsible for making them go.[iv] Providing some of the data and computing services Israel relies on in deploying the weapons just listed, meanwhile, are American firms such as Peter Thiel and Alex Karp’s Palantir[v] and, potentially, Google and Amazon.[vi]
Due to the (re)integration of money and industrial capital observed over the past forty-odd years, ownership of America’s leading defense contractors is predominantly shared by one configuration or another of the country’s leading financial institutions. Here, we speak of the major asset managers and financial services companies (Blackrock, State Street Corp, Vanguard, Wellington Management Group, Capital Group Companies, Charles Schwab, Longview Asset Management, Geode Capital Management); leading investment banks (Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo); and hedgefunds like Newport Trust Company. The same shareholding picture is observed within the American tech sector as well, and amongst the particular tech firms named above. As for the smaller firms participating in the American arms ecosystem, they are increasingly owned by the private equity industry. This all being the case, it can be seen that the ultimate proprietors of America’s instruments of death—by which more than nine hundred families in Gaza have been killed in their entirety by the Israeli state[vii]—are the very entities that cohere contemporary finance capitalism.
In addition, it should be emphasized that many of the same financial institutions hold major positions within the Israeli arms industry. Elbit Systems, one of Israel’s preeminent weapon manufacturers, is traded on the Nasdaq, where Vanguard, 1832 Asset Management, Invesco Ltd., Goldman Sachs, and Fidelity have each acquired substantial equity. (London’s Barclays Bank has also tripled its holdings in Elbit this year.[viii]) Through a host of channels, both Wall Street and the Silicon Valley-based fraction of American finance capital has become significantly vested in Israeli defense and security start-ups as well. JPMorgan and HSBC scaled commercial lending operations oriented toward Israeli tech firms, defense included, in 2022.[ix] Blackrock lends directly and via a fully-owned subsidiary (the recently acquired Kreos Capital, one of Israeli tech’s leading creditors) to the same spaces. Andreessen Horowitz, motivated by its founders’ devotions to libertarianism and securitized repression as much as prospects of profits, expanded its Israel activities significantly in 2024.[x] Sequoia Capital, another Silicon Valley giant, just made a major investment in an Israeli security start-up called Kela, which was launched by Palantir’s former head of local operations Hamutal Meridor. Palo Alto Networks, the massive cyber security firm in which Vanguard, Blackrock, Morgan Stanley et al retain considerable equity shares, has pumped investment into companies in Israel with relations to US intelligence over the past eighteen months, amongst other things.[xi] Chartered Group, a Singapore-based investment house, is a major backer of XTend, producer of one the drones haunting Gaza’s people nightly. The list goes on.
American finance is just as present throughout the logistical operations getting weapons to Israel. The involvement of private interests in this aspect of the war was made necessary after the volume of weapons being transferred overwhelmed the Department of Defense’s delivery capacity. Expectantly, the outsourcing of transportation operations redounded positively for ZIM Integrated Shipping Services Ltd and its American partners—All-Ways Forwarding and Atlas Airlines, amongst others.[xii] Once a state-owned entity, ZIM was the Haganah’s (and later, Israeli army’s) sole means of bringing arms in by sea during the nakba. After October 7th, company CEO Eli Glickman famously offered up ZIM’s entire fleet and operation to the Israeli army, with evidence suggesting the latter took him up on it: Per a lawsuit brought in Belgium, ZIM had, as of May, moved as much as 246 tons of weapons from the port of Antwerp to Israel.[xiii] Partially as a result, and despite facing this legal action and regular disruption from portworkers, the company has enjoyed a banner year in 2024 (+48% revenue in the second quarter). Though legally domiciled in Israel, ZIM is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Its largest shareholders count many of the investment houses already touched upon in our discussion of arms: Blackrock, Morgan Stanley, and the hedgefund D.E. Shaw & Co rank amongst ZIM’s largest shareholders.
The privately-owned JAS Freight Forwarding has also lent a sizable hand in the conveyance of weapons to Israel, as has the Copenhagen-based multinational Maersk, if indirectly in the latter case. (As one of the American arms industry’s most trusted transporters, Maersk ensures that the disparate components which go into the weapons assembled in the factories of Northrop Gruman, RTX et al get there in a timely fashion.) In addition, FedEx Express, Delta Airlines, Lufthansa, and Challenge Airlines of Belgium have all directly flown weapons to the Israeli army. The Ditch in Ireland documents the planes of these companies routinely violating Irish airspace while moving weapons from US depots in Memphis to Ben Gurion Airport. The largest equity holders for FedEx and Delta are the likes of Vanguard, State Street, and Blackrock. The largest individual shareholder in Lufthansa, meanwhile, is Germany’s richest person, Klau-Michael Kühne, who derives his inherited fortune from the looting of European Jews during the holocaust.[xiv]
Backing and profiting from the energy that powers Israel’s war machine is finance capital, too. Much of the jet fuel powering Israel’s planes and helicopters flows from the United States via a complex logistics operation that starts in Corpus Christi, in the refineries of Valero Energy.[xv] When it comes to crude oil, American multinationals Chevron and Exxon supply Israel and by extension, her army, with produce extracted out of their joint concessions in Kazakhstan.[xvi] British Petroleum’s contributions are even larger, furnishing 28% of Israel’s imported crude post-October 7th through its positions in Azeri fields and control of the Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan pipeline.[xvii] Ownership of each of the companies named thus far corresponds to those detailed in our discussions of arms manufacturing and logistics, with only Warren Buffet’s yet-to-be mentioned Berkshire Hathaway added to the mix. Zooming out to appraise all Israel’s imported petroleum products, Russian and Brazilian firms enter the picture, making up 47% the volume of shipments to Israel during the genocide.[xviii] The long arm of American finance also reaches to Brazil’s Petrobras, though, most prominently through the Fort Lauderdale-headquartered GQG Partners.
Financial Flows
Liquidity is also essential to Israel’s war effort, and in this domain too has the major financial houses of the global north played a critical support role. Of course, the federal government of the United States has made its own indispensable contribution. Since October 7th of last year, Washington has granted Israel $17.9 billion in bilateral aid, an amount equivalent to approximately 3.5% of Israel’s projected GDP for the year. Nor does that sum represent the entirety of Washington’s philanthropy. Linda Bilmes has hazarded that as of early fall, CENTCOM spent, at the behest of Israel, between $4.85-4.87 billion on operations against Ansar Allah in Yemen. In addition, the State of Israel’s latest filings with the SEC indicate that it has $3.4 billion worth of bonds backed by a US government guarantee presently outstanding. (Congress initially authorized financial guarantees for Israel worth $10 billion in 1992. Today, the figure is $8 billion. At the outset, the terms of the contract specified that the guarantee was to be reduced by amounts equivalent to what Israel spent on settlement construction. Language regarding that condition appears to have been dropped in more recent iterations, however.)
The meaningfulness of US government support is beyond contention. According to the latest projections of the credit rating agencies and the Bank of Israel, Israel’s fiscal deficit for 2024 is likely to settle somewhere 7.2-9% GDP. Simple arithmetic gives an indication of how much larger this deficit would be in the absence of American aid (read: upwards of +50%). Given that Israeli Eurobonds have been trading at near distressed levels in secondary markets in recent times despite the gifts received from the US Treasury, it is reasonable to speculate that the country might be facing a financial crisis without American charity. And yet, debt financing has been even more important to the funding and stabilization of Israel’s war economy, as a comparison between the size of the fiscal deficit and US aid packages makes plain. Here, a wide constellation of private actors (and some public) have made the difference.
Israel issues debt externally and internally. In the case of external debt—which jumped beyond $54 billion in early 2024—the state does so through three distinct mechanisms. The first is public sovereign issues. In March of this year, Israel raised $8 billion via this mechanism. Underwriting the state’s debt issuance and serving as primary dealer for the bonds were four northern banks—Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, BNP Paribas, and Deutsche Bank—whilst the multinational law firm White & Case advised the Israeli government in structuring the debt’s terms. Due to the skilled salesmanship of the banks’ personnel, demand was drummed up in all the typical haunts—the offices of pension funds and major asset managers like those we met earlier especially[i]—to the extent that the auction wound up oversubscribed. This kept the yield on the debt instrument relatively low. (The price of the bonds would tank and the yield jump in later months, as earlier mentioned, though this did not impact the state’s repayment obligations, which were fixed in the coupon rate set at the initial bond sale). For a government running up a significant deficit and staring down an economy threatened by disinvestment, capital flight, and widespread bankruptcy, the low interest rates on the Eurobonds were of great help. Early indications suggest the Ministry of Finance will rely on the same four banks for a new Eurobond issuance in the months to come, lest market sentiment prove too negative.
The second mechanism through which Israel issues external debt is private placements. Due to the nature of these transactions, it is difficult to trace who is on the buying side. What is documented is that in the immediate aftermath of October 7th, the Ministry of Finance raised at least $6 billion through these arrangements, and that many of those who acquired the bonds—almost certainly a financial institution—accepted extremely low, sub-market coupon rates. For instance, in October and November of 2023, one or multiple buyers agreed to purchase Japanese Yen-denominated Israeli debt with coupon rates of just .625 and .63%, respectively. Those rates would have been affected by the Bank of Japan’s unorthodox monetary policies, certainly. The same cannot be said, however, of the sales of 750 million in Euro-denominated bonds between October and December of 2023. In that instance, the Israeli Ministry of Finance found buyers willing to accept coupon rates of only 1.5%. The negative premium the investors agreed to is difficult to reconcile. It would not be unreasonable to frame their decisions as acts of knowing self-harm, and ones undertaken in support of a state perpetrating crimes against humanity. This gives credence to the idea that in certain spaces, at least, finance’s engagement with Israel has been ideologically compelled.
Israel’s third mechanism for issuing external debt (and the main one prior to 2010) is on the retail level. This process is handled mostly by a US-based affiliate of the Ministry of Finance called the Development Corporation for Israel (DCFI), though separate affiliates exist in Canada and the United Kingdom. Known by a different name at its incorporation in 1950, DCFI was founded by Rudolph Sonneborn and Abraham Feinberg, who illegally ran weapons to the Haganah in the 1940s, and former US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. Since October 7th, DCFI has sold $3.5 billion worth of non-tradable debt instruments. Popularly and legally known as “Israel Bonds”, these debts have mostly been discussed in reference to DCFI’s post-October 7th scheming alongside the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)[ii]: Recruiting public treasurers, the joint effort of the two organizations raised at least $1.7 billion from state and municipal governments for Israel as of last May. Less discussed is how the bonds’ buyers, which include smaller commercial banks and Zionist (secular, Christian, and Jewish) households in addition to public treasuries, have willfully incurred financial losses on their investments. Those losses derive from the coupon rates on the Israel Bonds sold over the last thirteen months being substantially below prevailing market prices.[iii] That institutional buyers would accept them (and the weak level of investor protection attached to Israel Bonds) broaches, as did the private placement of bonds, the possibility of ideological motivation.
When it comes to internal debts, which comprise the lion’s share of the state’s borrowing, it is local financial institutions that lead the way. That said, the weight of institutions and persons from the global north is still significant. This is most baldly revealed in non-resident holdings of tradable and non-tradable shekel-denominated treasuries. Though tracking down significantly over the last year, 8.4% and 3.3% of these debt instruments, respectively, remained in the hands of non-Israelis as of July. And those numbers underrepresent the actual presence of American money in the local debt market. Firstly, this is because many of the Israeli commercial banks and investment funds that have stepped into the breach created by the exit of foreign parties from the local bond market retain American owners. For instance, Blackrock holds 3% stakes in two of Israel’s largest banks, Bank Leumi and Bank Hapoalim. The majority shareholder of Bank Hapoalim, meanwhile, is Arison Holdings, controlled by Shari Arison, an American citizen, daughter of the Carnival Cruiseline founder, and sister to Miami Heat owner Micky Arison. Positioned across the Israeli banking sector as well is the Phoenix Group, in which two American private equity firms hold a controlling interest, in which Lazard Asset Management has a sizable stake, and in which Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners, capitalized by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and a host of other GCC backers, has recently acquired a 4.9% share which could double pending a regulatory review. In addition, the estate of Wertheim Moshe, which is one of the two largest holders in another of Israel’s largest banks, Mizrahi Tefahot, is domiciled in the United States. More consequentially perhaps, seven western financial institutions—Bank of America, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Citibank, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase—serve as primary dealers for Israel’s local treasuries market. According to the Bank of Israel’s reporting, those same institutions also rank amongst the largest purchasers of NIS-denominated treasuries in 2024. Viewed in full, the service that many of the preeminent representatives of contemporary finance capital have offered Israel in funding its genocidal campaign can be recognized as essential and irreplaceable.
Conclusion
Israel’s war-making over the past year has been wind in the sails for some of America’s largest manufacturers. Yes, the fortunes of the country’s arms industry hinge more immediately on equipping Ukraine and the Gulf, replenishing American inventories, defrauding the US government, and developing nuclear subs and sixth generation fighter jets for the Pentagon. Still, Israel’s embrace of sadism and recklessness has proven a unique boon. In and of themselves, the volume of deals with the Israeli Army have been significant enough to warrant aggressive lobbying of the State Department’s arms transfer bureau. More importantly, Israel’s genocidal turn confirmed a shift in market sentiment—one initially compelled by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Washington’s commencement of economic war on China. With the bombs pummeling Gaza, the return of “geopolitics”, an odd stand-in for big wars administered by white people, has been validated. Knock-on effects in terms of capitalization have been pronounced. Though juiced by stock buybacks, since October 7th, the share price of Lockheed Martin has jumped by more than 50%, that of RTX by over 80%, and that of General Dynamics by ~35%, far outpacing the market’s upswing.[i]
As major equity holders in the arms manufacturers and major players throughout Israel’s economy, finance capital has made a lot of money on the deaths of Palestinians. The next question is one of interpretation. It might risk overstatement to suggest that profit making has rendered this class fraction a decisive constituency for the Israeli genocide. The reality, after all, is that finance capital is today positioned in virtually every sector and corner of the global economy: It is at once a constituency for everything—and for nothing. At the same time, the blessing of the world’s largest financial institutions has been necessary for the genocide to proceed. More than that, there is evidence that some in their number have done more than acquiesce to Israel’s actions. Like the stewards of Washington, it is possible that the principals in question see a strategic utility if not an ideological imperative in the brutal subjugation of a resistance rising from the subaltern.
For the carnage wrought by Israel to ever come to an end, confrontation must be taken not only to the country’s political sponsors: The genocide economy must be deprived of its material fundaments, too. And as this analysis makes plain, this will necessitate confrontation with the financial institutions that today structure and order global capitalism.
Photo featured is credited to the UN/Shareef Sarhan
[i] Eli Clifton, “Israel’s Wars Mean ‘Massive” Returns for US Arms Company Investors”, Responsible Statecraft (October 7, 2024).
[i] Reuters and Times of Israel Staff Writer, “A Year of War Saps Israel’s Borrowing Strength, While Costs Balloon”, The Times of Israel (October 7, 2024).
[ii] Munira Lokhandwala and Molly Gott, “U.S. State and Local Treasuries Hold At Least $1.6 Billion in Israel Bonds”, LittleSis (February 5, 2024).
[iii] Michael Bradley, Irving de Lira Salvatierra, Mitu Gulati, “Diaspora Bonds: Patriotism or Investment”, Capital Markets Law Journal (February 2024).
[i] Brett Murphy, “Inside the State Department’s Weapons Pipeline to Israel”, ProPublica (October 4, 2024).
[ii] Linda J. Bilmes, William D. Hartung, and Stephen Semler, “United States Spending on Israel’s Military Operations and Related U.S. Operations in the Region, October 7, 2023-September 30, 2024”, Report: Costs of War Project, Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs (October 7, 2024).
[iii] Greg Hadley, “State Department Approves Sale of New, Updated F-15s to Israel”, Air and Space Forces Magazine (August 13, 2024).
[iv] Dania Akkad, “Legal Battles Loom Over Supply Chain Keeping Israeli F-35s Flying Over Gaza and Lebanon”, Middle East Eye (October 4, 2024).
[v] Marissa Newman, “Thiel’s Palantir, Israel Agree Strategic Partnership for Battle Tech”, Bloomberg (January 12, 2024).
[vi] Michael Kwet, “How US Big Tech Supports Israel’s AI-Powered Genocide and Apartheid”, Al Jazeera (May 12, 2024).
[vii] Mohammed Hussein, Mohammed Haddad and Konstantinos Antonopoulos, “Know Their Names: Palestinian Families Killed in Israeli Attacks on Gaza”, Al Jazeera (October 8, 2024).
[viii] Palestine Action, “Palestine Action Target Over 10 Barclays Sites Across the Country”, Press Release (September 9, 2024).
[ix] Sharon Wrobel, “JPMorgan Expands Commercial Banking Business to Israel to Cater to Tech Companies”, The Times of Israel (December 4, 2024).
[x] Meir Orbach, “Andreessen Horowitz Steps Up Israeli Investments as Local Funds Struggle to Raise Capital”, CTech by Calcalist (September 10, 2024).
[xi] Meir Orbach, “Palo Alto Networks’ Nir Zuk: ‘The Cyber Market is Maturing. Small Companies Have a Problem Selling Standalone Solutions that Big Companies Provide”, CTech by Calcalist (September 24, 2024).
[xii] Arvind Dilawar, “Activists Target Logistics Firms That Are Facilitating Israel’s Genocide in Gaza”, Truthout (August 30, 2024).
[xiii] Staff Writer, “I/OPT: NGO Coalition Takes Israeli Shipping Company ZIM to Court Over Illegal Weapon Transfer Via Antwerp Port During Ongoing War on Gaza”, Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (May 15, 2024).
[xiv] David de Jong, “The Richest Man in Germany is Worth $44 Billion. The Source of His Family Fortune: The Nazis Know”, Vanity Fair (September 12, 2024).
[xv] Elia el-Khazen and Charlotte Rose, “Routes to Disruption—Supply Chain Sabotage and Israel’s War on Gaza”, Middle East Research and Information Project (Summer 2024).
[xvi] Oil Change International and Data Desk, “Israeli Crude and Fuel Supply Chains”, Report (March 8, 2024).
[xvii] Energy Embargo for Palestine, “BP’s Oil Route to Israel”, Report: Transnational Institute (September 9, 2024)
[xviii] Oil Change International and Data Desk, “Behind the Barrel: New Insights Into the Countries and Companies Behind Israel’s Fuel Supply”, Report (August 2024).
‘, ‘post_title’ => ‘Capital and Genocide in the 21st Century’, ‘post_excerpt’ => ”, ‘post_status’ => ‘publish’, ‘comment_status’ => ‘closed’, ‘ping_status’ => ‘closed’, ‘post_password’ => ”, ‘post_name’ => ‘capital-and-genocide-in-the-21st-century’, ‘to_ping’ => ”, ‘pinged’ => ”, ‘post_modified’ => ‘2024-12-05 11:09:55’, ‘post_modified_gmt’ => ‘2024-12-05 10:09:55’, ‘post_content_filtered’ => ”, ‘post_parent’ => 0, ‘guid’ => ‘https://noria-research.com/mena/?p=601’, ‘menu_order’ => 0, ‘post_type’ => ‘post’, ‘post_mime_type’ => ”, ‘comment_count’ => ‘0’, ‘filter’ => ‘raw’, )At this point, the scale of human and material destruction in Gaza has rendered the place nearly uninhabitable. All indications, moreover, suggest Israel’s destructive campaign will continue on for some time longer. Be that as it may, members of the international community are still devoting much of their energies into planning for “the day after”. In these regards, the return of the Palestinian Authority to Gaza, a territory that has been out of its control since 2007, is not infrequently put forward as a viable option. For a number of reasons, this strikes as dubious.
Brought into existence by the Gaza-Jericho agreement (also known as Oslo I), the Palestinian Authority (PA) was established in May 1994 to serve as an interim governing body for Palestinian lands occupied by Israel since 1967. Its tenure was designated at five years, a period during which Palestinian and Israeli negotiators were notionally meant to resolve final status issues kicked down the road in Oslo: principally, the status of Jerusalem, delimitation of borders, right of return for refugees, sharing of natural resources, and the sovereign rights of a Palestinian state. Alas, when the five years in question elapsed without agreements having been reached, inertia saw to it that the PA endured as a semi-autonomous government of sorts, its powers over matters as fundamental as land, water, airspace, and security subordinated to those of Israel. This year, the Authority rang in its thirtieth birthday, as far from sovereignty as it was in 1994. The rule of its President, Mahmoud Abbas, nears twenty years since last subjected to a plebiscite.
What authority are we talking about?
Due to the failures of the process begun in Oslo, Palestinians in the Occupied Territories had been living through a succession of political crises well before October 7th introduced a rather seismic rupture: 2007’s partitioning of the occupied territories and consolidation of dueling government authorities. Elections forever delayed or canceled. Authoritarian upsurges in the West Bank and Gaza. Intensified colonization. The blockade of Gaza. And, as commemorated in the Abraham Accords, regional marginalization.
In many ways, the structure and design of the PA propelled this course of events. The truth is that the so-called “Oslo Accords” never envisaged the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state. Rather, they institutionalized an arrangement whereby the PA was enlisted as subcontractors for the Israeli military administration—and whereby Palestine’s economic dependence on Israel was quietly deepened. Premised upon security cooperation from the very start, the PA was allowed to hire tens of thousands of policemen and civil servants and to exercise a degree of control over the inhabitants of the Occupied Territories. It was obstructed, however, from opposing Israel’s pursuit of colonial ambitions in any meaningful way.
In terms of governance and advancing the Palestinian national project, the PA’s record can only be called woeful. It has consolidated a highly securitized fiefdom, its police and intelligence agents eating up one third of annual budgets and numbering 85,000 as of the late 2010s (one for every 48 Palestinians, a ratio nearly nine times larger than that of the United States). Fed by counterparts in Israel, these actors maintain a system of surveillance and control designed to prevent the mobilization of a political opposition. As they do, Israel’s construction of settlements continues apace and prospects of salvaging a two-state solution wither on the vine.
Towards a surge of protest
Excluding the 2006-07 crisis and the events which have transpired since October 7th—the former leading to the partitioning of the occupied territories between a Hamas-dominated government in the Gaza Strip and a Fatah-led government in Ramallah—2021 was the most tenuous time for the PA. At long last, legislative and presidential elections had been scheduled to take place, the first of each in almost twenty years.[1] However, Mahmoud Abbas announced their postponement in May 2021, his preferred euphemism for cancellation, prompting a wave of protest throughout the West Bank and Gaza. The PA responded to the protests with harsh repression. Many political opponents were arrested and some, like Nizar Banat, died while in the Authority’s custody. As this was happening, the Israeli government compounded the PA’s troubles by commencing a major offensive on Jerusalem. Over the course of months, state and sub-state actors in Israel attempted to evict the inhabitants of several Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem (Silwan, Sheikh Jarrah) while stepping up provocations and attacks on al-Aqsa Mosque.
In this context, Abbas’ actions prompted a radical reaction in the West Bank. Armed activism surged for the first time since the second intifada, initially in the north (Nablus, Jenin) and then throughout most of the lands presided over by the PA. As it did and as Israel’s campaigns in Jerusalem gathered speed, Hamas then launched Operation Jerusalem Sword (sayf al-quds). With its rocket attacks, Hamas could present itself as the sole legitimate protector of the Palestinian national project. Its actions drew an extremely stark contrast with the PA, which looked more interested in preserving its interests than in defending Palestinian rights.
The non-viability of PA rule in Gaza
2021’s developments—the reemergence of civil and armed protests against the PA especially—showed a popular desire to bring the fight against occupation and colonization back to the heart of Palestinian politics. And it is in view of these developments that the feasibility of deploying the Palestinian Authority into whatever remains of Gaza in the months and years ahead must be assessed.
Throughout one of the most critical junctures in the history of modern Palestine, neither Mahmoud Abbas nor the PA has been anywhere to be seen. Having not even visited Gaza since 2006, Abbas’ absence on national and international stages post-October 7th shows that the Strip has become a foreign territory for him, while the PA’s disengagement reveals just how irrelevant it has become as an institution. Yes, the President has made a few tokenist efforts meant to reassert national leadership, such as his government reshuffle in March 2024. Nonetheless, while the new coalition gave privileged place to Gazan personalities, it continued to exclude those political currents standing in opposition to Fatah. It was also stitched together without anything resembling a democratic mandate. Perhaps most saliently, the current government, like the one before it, has demonstrated no capacity to influence the course of events in Gaza: If Mohammed Moustafa and his cabinet set themselves the task of delivering a ceasefire, they have no influence over such an outcome, never mind over how the place might one day be reconstructed. Making matters worse, Moustafa’s government has also shown itself powerless in combatting the intensifying violence of settlers and the Israeli army in the West Bank. Surely, some of the ministers serving in the government have good intentions in taking up their posts. At the end of the day, though, they are viewed as participants in a Fatah plot for taking revenge on Hamas via a potential (Israel-arranged) PA return to Gaza.
Challenges for a Palestinian solution
On July 18, 2024, the Israeli parliament voted by an overwhelming majority (68 to 9) to oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state. More than reflecting the breadth of the anti-Palestine consensus in Israel, the vote clearly bodes ill for the Palestinian Authority’s prospects in Gaza.
Where once shrouded in ambiguity, Israel\’s determination to dispel any hope of a two-state solution is now clear as day. When it comes to Gaza, the Knesset vote, coupled with the recolonization campaign being advanced by certain ministers and settler movements, makes plain an intention to forcibly displace Palestinian populations and annex new territories. In and of themselves, Israel’s schemes for reestablishing a permanent presence in Gaza will greatly complicate the logistics of a PA return.
Even more problematic, however, is Israel’s de jure and de facto treatment of Gaza as a space of exception. Since the unilateral withdrawal of its settlements in 2005 (though with greater confidence from 2007 onward, after Hamas took sole control of the Strip), Israel has engaged Gaza from a purely security-oriented vision. October 7th may have confirmed the illogic of this approach, but it has done nothing to shift Israel’s strategy. Following the terms of the Generals’ Plan, presently, Israel looks ready to divide the Gaza Strip by establishing a military zone in the north covering approximately a third of Gaza’s territory. For the remaining two-thirds of Gaza’s land mass, Israel’s leadership has regularly signaled an intention to turn over security responsibilities to external parties. The name Mohammed Dahlan frequently comes up in discussions of that southern two-thirds. A former director of Preventive Security in Gaza—where he once led the PA’s relentless fight against Hamas—Dahlan was expelled from Fatah and forced into exile in 2011 following accusations of corruption. Now advisor to Mohammed bin Zayed, President of the United Arab Emirates, Dahlan maintains good relations with the security establishments of Israel, Egypt, and the United States, and as such, has been floated as an ideal new strongman for keeping Gaza quiet. His ascension in southern Gaza would betray a political naiveté, though, as it would only further aggravate intra-Palestinian divisions and engender instability as a result. Simply put, there is no fix based on security considerations alone. Should the PA or anyone go along with Israel’s plans, they will face a swift reckoning.
Then there is the question of financing Gaza’s reconstruction. UN estimates project a bill in the area of $100 billion. Clearly, the PA has no chance of raising these kinds of funds on its own and would therefore need to rely on external donors, the Gulf monarchies in particular. And yet, Saudi Arabia is demonstrating less willingness for handing out cash to neighbors and also claiming its engagement in Gaza will be contingent on a political process aimed at establishing an independent Palestinian state, something Israel expressly rejects. As such, it is unclear these monarchies are going to be willing to play ball. Their refusal would likewise leave a PA Gaza venture dead in the water.
Finally, there is the general legitimacy crisis that the PA or any other Palestinian political aspirant must resolve. As alluded to, the PA’s governance failures are legion and persistent, its non-democratic character imminently observable. In addition, despite recent negotiations in Beijing and Moscow, the PA and the PLO still face pronounced deficits of representativeness, with major political tendencies finding no seat at their tables (including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad). To administer an environment as unstable and volatile as Gaza in these conditions is to invite disaster. More generally, lest the PA and PLO can find a way of restoring legitimacy, initiatives like that of Azmi Bichara, who is attempting to construct a new alternative outside the umbrella of the PLO for bringing together Palestinian figures from the Occupied Territories and the diaspora, should be expected to gather speed.
Conclusions
Mahmoud Abbas, the world’s second oldest head of state (insofar as he can be called that), will soon turn 89. The succession struggle that awaits, be they for leadership of Fatah, the PLO, or the PA, renders plans for the “day after” in Gaza built upon the Palestinian Authority only more fraught.
Appointments Abbas has made in recent years—Hussein al-Sheikh as PLO Secretary General, Mahmoud al-Aloul as Fatah Vice-President—suggest he does not want his powers inherited by a single heir. If reasonable as a goal, the competition that could arise because of the uncertainty baked into Abbas’ preferred post-mortem could nevertheless weaken the Authority’s cohesiveness. And that is without other factions of Fatah, such as those organized around Marwan al-Barghouthi and Mohammed Dahlan, becoming involved in the battle for the throne.
Also hanging over the future is the thorny question of resistance. Through its actions on October 7th and before, Hamas made itself non-excludable from any discussion of the Palestinian national project going forward. Naturally, this extends to discussions of Gaza’s future. If it is difficult at the moment to imagine Hamas participating in the governing of Gaza, it is impossible to think that the party-movement can be marginalized from the process altogether. Doing so will risk civil war, at a time when the Palestinian people have already suffered so much.
The road ahead for the PA in Gaza looks threatening, to say the least. Without a major shift in Israeli policy, reestablishing a footprint in the Strip will most certainly be a drink from a poisoned chalice. Without the PA reinvigorating itself through seeking a democratic mandate, its hold on the West Bank may soon give way, too, along with the last remnants of its claim to national leadership.
[1] Since the national elections held in 2005 and 2006, Palestinians of the Occupied Territories had only been allowed vote in the municipal elections of 2012, 2017, 2019, and 2021. Each of these polls had been compromised by low turnout, fraud, and staged presentation of the results, the latter two interventions undertaken to make Fatah\’s loss of popularity in the West Bank invisible.
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Executive Summary
In February 2019, the Mexican federal government began implementing Sembrando Vida (Sowing Life). Considered one of the priority programs of the six-year term of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), this policy sought to address two problems detected in rural areas of the country: poverty and environmental degradation.
Sembrando Vida consists of the distribution of a direct monthly support of 5,000 Mexican pesos to people who comply with a series of requirements, including a commitment, signed in writing, not to engage in “illicit productive or commercial activities”.
This last requirement points to the fact that, in certain regions of Mexico, Sembrando Vida, in addition to fighting poverty and preserving the environment, follows another unspoken objective: the voluntary substitution of illicit crops – mainly poppy and marijuana for legal crops and tree planting.
By December 2021, 10% of Sembrando Vida’s beneficiaries were located in 46 municipalities with a history of illicit crops distributed among Chihuahua, Sinaloa, Durango, Nayarit, Guerrero and Oaxaca.
In Mexico, the generation of legal economic alternatives and subsidies by the federal government, with a commitment not to get involved in illicit activities, is an unprecedented undertaking. After more than a century in which state policy focused exclusively on the forced eradication of crops – through aerial spraying or manual destruction – Sembrando Vida was intended as a departure from the traditional coercive policy to reduce the supply of illegal drugs.
However, three years after the program’s launch, illicit crop destruction campaigns – also operated by the federal government – are far from over.
Between 2019 and 2021, the armed forces report having destroyed 35,419 hectares (ha) of poppy and 6,709 of marijuana as part of their “operations to combat drug trafficking,” which involve the deployment of around 3,500 elements throughout the year. Although these areas represent approximately half of what was destroyed during the previous three years – 74,511 ha of poppy and 12,371 of marijuana between 2016 and 2018 -, it should be noted that the proportion of the area destroyed increased after spraying with Paraquat, a non-selective herbicide banned in several countries for its potential harmfulness to health – from 15% between 2016 and 2018 to 20% between 2019 and 2021.
Since the start of program implementation in these municipalities, we observed an overall reduction in the area planted with legal crops at the same time as an increase in production value.
Depending on the contexts, this trend reflects an increase in producer prices and/or an improvement in yields, but no substantial change in the types of legal crops planted is observed. On the other hand, the areas of illicit crops destroyed by the authorities decreased, as a result of a possible reduction in the areas cultivated with poppy and marijuana and/or a reduction in the efforts of the Armed Forces to destroy them. There was also a decrease in homicides in most municipalities, but an increase in the use of firearms to perpetrate them.
However, the research conducted for this report allowed us to identify information gaps that continue to hinder the understanding of the cultivation of plants declared illicit in Mexico, as well as the possible relationship of this phenomenon with the implementation of Sembrando Vida. First, the absence of open data at the municipal level on the cultivation – and not the destruction – of poppy and marijuana prevents us from monitoring the areas planted and harvested, yields or producer prices.
These are basic variables for monitoring any type of crop and are collected by SIAP in the case of legal crops in Mexico. In other countries, they are also generated for declared illicit crops from satellite images and field work. In Colombia, for example, the Ministry of Justice and Law publishes annual data at the municipal level on the areas under cocaine cultivation and even the cartographic files with which it measures crop density are detected by the “Integrated Illicit Crop Monitoring System” (SIMCI) since 1999 and with the support of UNODC (UNO- DC).
Similarly, the project “Monitoring Opium Production in Afghanistan”, also promoted by UNODC, publishes data since 1994 on poppy production at the district level in that country. In Mexico, although there is a similar program – the project “MEXK54 Monitoring System of Illicit Cultivation in the Mexican Territory” – UNODC and the Mexican government only publish an annual report with aggregate estimates by region and no open data at the local level.
Second, it should be noted that, although the Mexican federal government presents Sembrando Vida as a program that encourages voluntary substitution of illicit crops and that beneficiaries commit in writing not to engage in “illicit activities,” the truth is that, since its launch in 2019, this component is not formally mentioned in the program’s rules of operation. Its inclusion is essential for external monitoring and evaluation of Sembrando Vida against previously established objectives and goals in the matter.
Finally, our report shows that it is essential for the Mexican federal government to be more open in accessing program data, so that external monitoring and evaluation of Sembrando Vida against previously established objectives and goals can be carried out.
10 Key Ideas from the Sembrando Vida Report
1. In 2021, the Sembrando Vida program closed the year with around 449,939 beneficiaries, and by 2022, its budget amounted to 29.4 billion pesos, the fourth highest among the federal government’s 30 priority programs.
2. In certain regions of Mexico, Sembrando Vida, in addition to the fight against poverty and the preservation of the environment, follows another unspoken objective: the voluntary substitution of illicit crops for legal crops and the planting of trees.
3. Of 995 municipalities benefiting from Sembrando Vida, 46 have a history of illicit crops (our municipalities of interest), and these are located in Guerrero (15), Durango (9), Chihuahua (8), Sinaloa (6), Nayarit (4) and Oaxaca (4).
4. Since the beginning of Sembrando Vida in municipalities with a history of illi- cit crops, the average legal area planted has been reduced and the types of legal crops planted have not changed substantially. This suggests that the program does not significantly encourage the introduction of new crops and the substitution of old legal or illegal crops.
5. The Armed Forces, in turn, registered a reduction in the destruction of poppy and marijuana, although a proportionally greater use of aerial spraying since the beginning of the program in our municipalities of interest. However, this trend seems to be linked to factors unrelated to the program (fall in opium gum prices in particular).
6. The implementation of Sembrando Vida coincided with an overall reduction in homicide rates in our municipalities of interest. The annual homicide rate went from an average of 58 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants during the five years prior to the start of Sembrando Vida to 37 per 100,000 inhabitants.
7. There is a possible increase in the availability of firearms and development of incentives and capacities to use firearms, since the implementation of the program also coincides with an increase in the proportion of homicides that are committed with a firearm, which went from 75% during the five years prior to Sembrando Vida to 77%, in our municipalities of interest.
8. Unlike Colombia or Afghanistan, in Mexico, we still lack data at the local level on the production of illicit crops, which forces us to approximate the phenomenon based on destruction records.
9. It is so far impossible to monitor and evaluate the voluntary substitution of illicit crops with the program, because although the official governmental communication presents Sembrando Vida as a program of voluntary substitution of illicit crops since 2019, specific goals and objectives have not yet been contemplated.
10. It is essential for the Mexican federal government to be more open in accessing program data, so that external monitoring and evaluation of Sembrando Vida against previously established objectives and goals can be carried out.
Paul Frissard Martínez is the author of this report, and an independent consultant and fellow at Noria Research MXCA.
The author would like to thank the people interviewed in Chilpancingo, Guerrero, who made this research possible.
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