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Middle East & North Africa
The Petroyuan and Renminbi Internationalization: Probing Gulf-China Relations
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Middle East & North Africa
Tunisia’s pioneering black women: The fight for emancipation amidst racial backlash
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Middle East & North Africa
The Wages of Genocide: Prospects for Israel’s War Economy
An eastward shift in the gravity of the global economy has provoked a significant restructuring of the economic relations between Gulf oil producers and China. As of 2010, China had ascended to become the subregion’s leading trade partner, one of its major foreign investors, and an irreplaceable contractor for mega infrastructure projects. More recently, China has also grown into one of the Gulf’s favored investment destinations.
Animating these developments is the confluence of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Gulf’s strategies for economic and geopolitical diversification. Concerning the former, nearly every state in West Asia (inclusive of the oil producers) officially joined the BRI; during the 2010s, twelve countries from the subregion also signed strategic partnership agreements with China. Of these agreements, it is worth noting that Saudi Arabia’s, Iran’s, Egypt’s, Yemen’s and the UAE’s were comprehensive in scope.[1] As for the diversification driver, over the past decade especially, the Gulf regimes came to recognize two things: First, diversification in and beyond the oil sector is to hinge on engagements with China. Second, that the American “security guarantee” is not as reliable as it once was.
At this stage, the Gulf-China relation runs deep enough to render each party internal to the other’s economic constitution.[2] What is more, theirs is a relation that is reshaping the global economy: Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the China-Gulf dyad became a significant pillar of China’s plans to revise the international (neo)liberal order which has governed the post-Cold War era.
This paper specifically considers how deepening trade and investment relations between China and Gulf oil producing countries underpin the former’s efforts to transcend the petrodollar regime which has hitherto served as a pillar of the international monetary system. Identifying spaces where the oil producers are not only responsive but actively involved in China’s construction of an institutional infrastructure for renminbi (RMB) internationalization, it shines a light on one of the main pivots of 21st century global affairs.
The Birth of Petroyuan and the Internationalization of RMB
China began calling for the reform of the international monetary system in earnest after the financial crisis of 2007-2009. In parallel, it criticized the global energy system as being unfair, unbalanced, highly financialized, and unreflective both of China’s normative structure and its status as an industrial superpower.[3] At the heart of both critiques was the oil dollar benchmark. In substance, the benchmark—a legacy of agreements established between the United States and Saudi Arabia in the 1970s—designated the US dollar as the exclusive currency for oil invoicing and elevated the US economy into the principal destination for oil export revenue recycling.[4] The consequence for the international monetary system was to maintain the dollar’s status as the key international currency of the post-Bretton Woods period despite the United States’ severing the direct convertibility of dollars into gold in 1971 and despite the country’s growing fiscal and external imbalances. For China, the effects of the benchmark (and of the result hegemony of the dollar) were dual: It imposed limits on the country’s price-making capacity in the oil sector and left energy policy exposed to changes in American monetary policy. The real world impact of this was felt during the financial crisis. According to a former chairman of the Export–Import Bank, in driving up prices for oil imports, the United States’ adoption of quantitative easing in 2007 precipitated financial losses equivalent to $18.4 billion for China.[5]
Mindful of the vulnerabilities which derived from the dollar-oil nexus, China worked in the intervening years to build alternative arrangements. March 2018 witnessed this effort’s first yield when an RMB-denominated oil futures contract was released on the Shanghai International Energy Exchange. The trading of the contract marked an end to oil’s exclusive pricing in US dollars and inasmuch as future contracts function as reference prices for physical commodity trading, announced a first move in China’s attempt to reduce exposure to a financialized and dollarized global commodities market.[6] The contract also demonstrated China’s capacity to furnish a meaningful alternative for players in the oil market. Indeed, the futures contract broke new grounds in a number of ways: First, by way of its relation to an RMB-denominated gold futures contract traded in Hong Kong since 2017, the oil futures contract in question is fully convertible to gold.[7] Second, in being based on the medium-sour crude that is produced (mainly) in the Gulf region and exported primarily to Asia— deliverable crude oil grades come from the UAE, Oman, Qatar, Yemen, Iraq, and China’s Shengli oil field, with Iraq being the major source—this futures contract also aligns better with the realities of Gulf-Asia trade than does equivalent futures priced in Brent or Texas crude.[8] Third, the futures contract’s dependability is enhanced by the fact that China’s state-owned oil companies have an extensive upstream presence in the oil sector of the Gulf.[9] Fourth, finally, the contract helps fill the lack of a regional oil benchmark in the Asia-Pacific region and, as a result, has stood to lower the premium at which Asian oil has traded in international markets.[10]
Given the value presented, the RMB-denominated oil futures contract received swift market acceptance, including by two of the biggest commodities traders (Glencore PLC and the Trafigura Group) in the world. Within a year, in fact, it was the third most actively traded crude oil future in the world and its trading volume, equivalent to 14% of the global market, reached roughly half that of the futures contracts for Brent Crude, a remarkable ascent to say the least.[11] To attract more foreign participation, the Shanghai International Energy Exchange since started delivering oil for oversea clients—principally, to South Korea, India, Singapore, Malaysia, and Japan[12]—and launched a crude oil options contract for deepening risk management options. By 2021, this helped attract sixty-eight overseas brokerages from twenty-three countries to the exchange. Those currently trading derivatives contracts there include western financial powerhouses like JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas, and Société Générale.[13] Motivated in the final instance to increase monetary autonomy over real economic activities, moreover, China has not stopped with energy derivatives alone.[14]
Beyond oil, the Shanghai exchange now offers twenty-three varieties of RMB-denominated futures and options trades. Cross-border RMB settlement for major commodities hit RMB 1.5 trillion during the first nine months of 2023, a fifty percent jump compared to the whole of 2022.[15] Clearly, there is momentum for China’s efforts to assert price making power over essential commodities.
Limits of the Petroyuan?
Be that as it all may, there are many who argue that the prospects of either the petroyuan in particular or dedollarized commodities markets more generally remain limited by China’s regulated capital account and shallow financial markets. As this school of thinking goes, oil producers will avoid invoicing oil in RMBs at scale because China’s non-liberalized capital account and underdeveloped financial markets leave them without sufficient investment opportunities for recycling revenues into China.[16] Implicit in the argument, then, is the assumption that there it is the American way or the highway: The only path to the internationalization of a currency is to put in place a financial market with the same characteristics as the neoliberal model of the United States.
This argument comes up short on two fronts. In the first instance, empirically speaking, China has, as a point of fact, experimentally adopted targeted liberalization of financial markets and implemented an innovative management to the monetary trilemma [17]: As a result, its capital markets evince variegated levels of openness and grant different levels of access based on the nature of the actor (domestic vs. foreign; speculator vs. long-term investor) and the location of the capital flow (onshore vs. offshore sectors).[18] At the time of writing, there are five schemes in place—two for the onshore sector, three for the offshore—allowing overseas holders of RMBs access to Chinese financial centers and opportunities to invest in the mainland. Due to the flows of foreign investment facilitated, these schemes are partially responsible for Chinese financial markets now being the largest in Asia and second largest in the world.
In the second instance, those dubious on the petroyuan’s prospects unduly discount China’s weight in the real global economy and the effects this will inevitably have for currency internationalization. China is presently generating 29% of global manufacturing output and is a top tier contractor in global infrastructure projects. Additionally, the country is also a major source of, and destination for, global investment. With so much economic activity now running through China, Beijing and its many economic partners alike retain an interest in increasing the use of the RMB, at least to the extent that it covers their cross-border transactions. Nowhere is the mutuality of this interest more easily observed than in the Gulf.
Material foundations for oil trade in RMB in China-West Asia relations
Table.1 China-West Asia oil producing countries economic relations | |||||||
Trade relations 2021 | |||||||
KSA | Iran | Iraq | UAE | Kuwait | Qatar | Oman | |
Imports (share of total) | 18,9 | 28,8 | 20,3 | 17,3 | 14,8 | 13,6 | 9,22 |
Rank | 1 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 |
Exports (share of total) | 19 | 42,4 | 28,7 | 7 | 27,4 | 12,7 | 42 |
Rank | 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
Chinese Investment and construction contract 2005-2023, Stock $billion | |||||||
Investment | 13,22 | 4,72 | 13,7 | 8,16 | 0,65 | 0,86 | 2,2 |
Construction contracts | 43 | 21,84 | 19,22 | 32,65 | 12,31 | 8,51 | 5,7 |
Source : Observatory of Economic Complexity, and China Global Investment Tracker. |
As Table (1) makes plain, the scale of China’s trade and investment relations with each of the Gulf’s major economies is rather staggering. They have certainly matured to the extent of constituting material grounds for pricing oil in RMB.
Indeed, taken in a regional comparative context, it is West Asia, the Gulf included, which has seen its economic orientation tilt most to the east following the rise of China in the 1990s.[19] Over the past three decades, regional exports to the USA and the European Union have more than halved in relative terms, whereas the share of China went from 1% to 13%.[20] By consequence, for the past fifteen years, China has stood as the single largest trade partner for West Asia as a whole—and for each and every one of the major oil exporters. As was mentioned earlier, China is also today a massive investor in the Gulf as well as the country from which the Gulf sources the contractors for many of its biggest infrastructure projects. For a sense of scale, consider that Saudi Arabia and the UAE are presently the second and third largest destinations for overseas contract for Chinese firms. Even in Iraq, Chinese companies managed to win infrastructure-related contracts worth a total of $21.2 billion between 2018 and 2022, which amounts to 59% of the total sum awarded by the Iraqi state during those years. (In 2022, data suggests Chinese firms won 87% of the contracts awarded[21]).
Flipside of the same coin, the Gulf’s presence in the Chinese economy has grown by leaps and bounds over the past twenty years.[22] Between 2003 and 2015, total Gulf foreign direct investment (FDI) in mainland China tipped $27 billion, which is more than the GCC countries’ aggregate stock of FDI in the United States.[23] For Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, China has been the biggest recipient of FDI for nearly a decade running, and the trend is accelerating.[24] In the late 2010s, Sinopec and the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation established a joint venture now presiding over the Zhanjiang Integrated Refinery and Petrochemical Complex, China’s largest petrochemical port. As part of its own joint ventures, meanwhile, Saudi Arabia invested in three important petrochemical complexes in China between 2023 and the first quarter of 2024 alone. At this stage, mainland China is also the country where Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC)—the third largest petrochemical firm in the world—generates the most of its revenues.[25]
These deepening sinews of trade, investment and finance pertain to RMB internationalization inasmuch as the Gulf now clearly has an interest in being able to invoice a significant portion of its oil exports in RMB. After all, the subregion has regular bills for Chinese imports coming due, regular contracts with Chinese construction firms to pay, and growing investment interests in China. In this context, the reductions in transaction costs and associated currency exchange-related risk that would come from selling more oil in RMB are substantial.
China, for its part, is certainly willing to go further down this road. For a few years now, it has asked the Gulf’s oil producers to consider using RMB in conducting their bilateral energy trade, most recently at the China-Arab states summit of 2022. Iraq and Saudi Arabia have expressed an intent for setting up the appropriate processes, while Iran, sanctioned by the US Treasury, has reportedly been trading oil in RMB for some time.[26] Of note as well, UAE recently delivered the first LNG deals settled in RMB, a transaction made between China CNOOC and Total Energy. Set in global terms, these developments do appear to signal and instantiate a broader historical trend of oil market de-dollarization: In 2023, non-dollar denominated oil transaction broke the all-time record, representing an estimated 20% of all transactions.[27]
When it comes to the Gulf and China, steps are also being taken toward laying down the broader infrastructure for a non-dollar based economic relation. Some of these steps were planned out in China’s Arab 2016 Policy Paper, which detailed an agenda premised upon ‘monetary cooperation between central banks’, ‘the expansion of cross-border currency clearing and currency swap arrangements’, an ‘increase [in] financing insurance support’, and ‘improvements and reform [to] the international financial system.’[28] Eight years later, the major oil producers countries are actively participating in the RMB internationalization’s experimental institutional workarounds: For instance, they are participating in China’s Qualified Institutional Investors (QFIs) program and in its Bond Connect and Bond Direct schemas. They are settling trade in RMBs and arranging local currency swap agreements. They have established RMB clearing centers.[29] They have issued of RMB-denominated debt[30], and developed a multi-arrangement cross-border payment system based on central banks’ digital currencies. The Dubai Exchange has even released an RMB-denominated gold futures contract.
Table.2 China-Gulf states Swaps Lines, 2023 | |||
Country | Saudi Arabia | UAE | Qatar |
Amount (RMB Billion | 50 | 35 | 35 |
Years | 2023 | 2012-15-23 | 2014-17-21 |
Source : PBC (2023) and Media reports |
All in all, more and more Gulf-China transacting is being done in RMB, as can be gleaned from a review of SWIFT data. Nearly a decade ago, it was already the case that more than 80% of the direct payments made between the UAE and China/Hong Kong were in RMB[31], while Qatar’s use of RMB was amounting to 60% of all its payments to China and Hong Kong.[32] SWIFT payments between Iran, Oman, Saudi Arabia and China likewise record sizable RMB flows[33], and the Iraqi Central Bank has announced that bilateral trade will soon be conducted in the yuan.[34] Taken as whole, the biggest regional increase in the number of financial institutions using RMB for payments took place in the Middle East and Africa between 2013 and 2019.[35] Through the aforementioned Qualified Institutional Investors (QFI) program, Gulf oil exporters have become significant RMB investors in Chinese financial markets, too. Before China lifted quota regimes for QFI, the UAE and Qatar had been allocated 4.1% and 2.5% of quotas granted to Qualified Foreign Institutional Investors in China, respectively. With RMB 5 billion, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority topped the list of investment quotas (only the Monetary Authority of Macao had an equal quota).[36]
Where do we go from here?
Looking ahead, it would be naïve to neglect the influence that politics and power will have on the Gulf-China relation—and on the movement toward invoicing more oil exports in RMB. Some project that as long as US military power remains strong in the region the Gulf will respect the oil dollar benchmark because of their dependency on the US “security umbrella.”[37]
And yet, while the Gulf’s political and security ties with Washington are certain to affect the petroyuan’s prospects, it would be equally naïve to consider these ties either permanent or impervious to shifts in the organization of the global economy. The orientation of both the world economy and the Gulf’s economies are tilting further east and with them, the balance of power. American capitalist imperialism, meanwhile, is overstretched, running into the reality of declining material capacities and all this entails for honoring traditional strategic objectives. The result of these historical processes has been to usher in an age of multipolarity, one which affords far greater autonomy to the United States’ regional partners. In West Asia, some of these partners have seized the moment by “diversifying international partnerships.”[38] As this pertains to China and the Gulf, one has witnessed within the past few years alone Beijing mediate Riyadh-Tehran normalization as well as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt and the UAE accede to the BRICS. As discussed at length in this paper, one has also witnessed the Gulf participate actively in RMB internationalization, despite the knock-on effects implied for the US dollar’s international profile.
That these structural conditions might one day yield the emergence of a petroyuan—braced by the Gulf-China relations—strikes as imminently possible Overall, the regional order is in a state of fluidity and uncertainty at the political level will govern the immediate future. Major oil producers now have deep relations with rival international powers. It remains to be seen how they will navigate this contradictory new reality and balance their respective interests.
[1] Egypt initially signed a strategic partnership with China in 1999 before upgrading the arrangement in 2014.
[2] Adam Hanieh, Money, Markets and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East (Cambridge University Press: 2018).
[3] Maha Kamel and Hongying Wang, “Petro-RMB? The oil trade and the internationalization of the renminbi”, International Affairs 95:5 (2019): 1131–1148.
[4] David E. Spiro, The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets (Cornell University Press: 1999).
[5] Li Ruogo, Reform of the International Monetary System and Internationalization of the Renminbi (World Scientific Publishing: 2016).
[6] Salam Alshareef, “The shifting geo-economy of the Gulf and China’s structural power: The decline of the petrodollar and the rise of the petroyuan?” Competition & Change 27:2 (2023): 380-401.
Johannes Petry, “Same Same, but Different: Varieties of Capital Markets, Chinese State Capitalism and the Global Financial Order”, Competition & Change 24:1 (2020).
[7] John A. Matthews and Mark Selden, “China: the emergence of the petroyuan and the challenge to US dollar hegemony”, The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 16:22 (2018): 1–12
[8] SIEE (2020) Crude Oil Futures Trading Handbook 2020. Shanghai International Energy Exchange. Available at: www.ine.cn/upload/20200415/1586917782215.pdf (accessed 10 June 2024).
[9] Salam Alshareef, “A contender state’s multiscalar mediation of transnational capital: the belt and road in the Middle East”, New Political Economy 29:1 (2024): 75-89.
[10] Tracy Liao, Edward Morse, and Anthony Yuen, “China’s New Crude Oil Benchmark: Long in the Making, but Still Imperfect” Oxford Energy Forum 113 (2018).
[11] Shen Hong, « China’s oil futures give New York and London a run for their money », Wall Street Journal (March 27, 2019).
[12] INE (2021b) SHFE Endeavors to Improve its Energy Derivatives Series. Available online (accessed 10 June 2024).
[13] INE (2021a) Three Years on, SC Promoted the Development of Oil Market. Available online (accessed 10 June 2024).
[14] Christopher A. McNally, « The political economic logic of RMB internationalization: A study in Sino-capitalism”, International Politics 52:6 (2015): 704–723
[15] PBC. 2023. “RMB Internationalization Report.” The People’s Bank of China. Available online (accessed 10 June 2024).
[16] Christopher A. McNally, “Chaotic m´elange: neo-liberalism and neo-statism in the age of Sino-capitalism”, Review of International Political Economy 27:2 (2020): 281–301.
[17] Also called the impossible trinity, the monetary trilemma holds that it is impossible to have all three of the following at the same time: a fixed foreign exchange rate, free capital movement, and an independent monetary policy.
[18] Christopher A. McNally and Julian Gruin, “A novel pathway to power? Contestation and adaptation in China’s internationalization of the RMB”, Review of International Political Economy 24:4 (2017): 599–628.
[19] Jacopo Maria Pepe, Beyond Energy Trade and Transport in a Reconnecting Eurasia (Springer: 2018)
[20] Author calculation based on International Trade Center data
[21] Wil Crisp, “Chinese win 87 per cent of Iraq energy contracts.” Middle East Business Intelligence (2022).
[22] Adam Hanieh, “World Oil: Contemporary Transformations in Ownership and Control”, Socialist Register 59 (2023): 1-24
[23] Author’s calculations are based on US Bureau of Economic Analysis. One should note that GCC countries do maintain a large stock of portfolio investments in the United States.
[24] ICAC, Investment Climate in Arab Countries. Dahman, Kuwait: The Arab Investment & Export Credit Guarantee. (2017)
[25] SABIC. 2022. SABIC Annual Report. Available online (accessed 10 June 2024).
[26] Ryosuke Hanafusa, Shuntaro Fukutomi and Yuta Koga, “Iran’s Oil Exports Reach 5-Year High, with China as Top Buyer,” Nikkei Asia (2024). Available online (accessed 10 June 2024).
[27] Anna Hirtenstein, “”The Dominant Dollar Faces a Backlash in the Oil Market”, Wall Street Journal (December 28, 2023).
[28] PRC. 2016. China’s Arab policy paper. Available online (accessed 21 June 2024).
[29] In addition, two RMB clearing centers that trade RMB for local currency without having to go through the dollar were established in Qatar in 2015 and the UAE in 2016 (PBC, 2021).
[30] The UAE and Qatar are the most active foreign issuers of offshore RMB-denominated debt, as four of their banks issued almost RMB 48.22 billion between 2019 and 2021 (Alshareef, 2023) .
[31] According to SWIFT reports, the UAE was the fastest-growing yuan clearing center in the world in 2018 (SWIFT, 2019)
[32] SWIFT (2016a) Renminbi Tracker, January 2016. Available online (accessed 10 June 2024).
SWIFT (2016b) United Arab Emirates Shows Stellar Growth in RMB Adoption. Renminbi Tracker. Available online (accessed 10 June 2024).
[33] Hector Perez-Saiz and Longmei Zhang, “Renminbi Usage in Cross-Border Payments: Regional Patterns and the Role of Swaps Lines and Offshore Clearing Banks”, International Monetary Fund (2023).
[34] Staff Writer, «Iraq to allow trade with China in yuan – state media”, Reuters *February 22, 2023).
[35] SWIFT. 2015. “Over 1,000 Banks Across the World Use RMB for Payments with China and Hong Kong.” Available online
SWIFT. 2019. “Renminbi Internationalization: An Inside Look into London’s Quest for the Renminbi FX and Payments in the Midst of Uncertainties.” RMB Tracker, September 2018. Available online
[36] SAFE (2020) Qualified Foreign Institutional Investors (QFIIs) with Investment Quotas Granted by the SAFE. State Administration of Foreign Exchange. Available online (accessed 10 June 2024).
[37] Bassa Momani, «Gulf cooperation council oil exporters and the future of the dollar”, New Political Economy 13:3 (2008): 293–314.
[38] Jeremy Wildeman and Michael Atallah, ““Never Going to Let You Go: The Middle East, Great Power Competition, and the Rise of China” in Kari Roberts and Saira Bano (eds.) The Ascendancy of Regional Powers in Contemporary US-China Relations (Springer International Publishing: 2023): 195-214
‘, ‘post_title’ => ‘The Petroyuan and Renminbi Internationalization: Probing Gulf-China Relations’, ‘post_excerpt’ => ”, ‘post_status’ => ‘publish’, ‘comment_status’ => ‘closed’, ‘ping_status’ => ‘closed’, ‘post_password’ => ”, ‘post_name’ => ‘the-petroyuan-and-renminbi-internationalization-probing-gulf-china-relations’, ‘to_ping’ => ”, ‘pinged’ => ”, ‘post_modified’ => ‘2024-07-01 20:29:19’, ‘post_modified_gmt’ => ‘2024-07-01 18:29:19’, ‘post_content_filtered’ => ”, ‘post_parent’ => 0, ‘guid’ => ‘https://noria-research.com/mena/?p=520’, ‘menu_order’ => 0, ‘post_type’ => ‘post’, ‘post_mime_type’ => ”, ‘comment_count’ => ‘0’, ‘filter’ => ‘raw’, )In July 2004, the Pan-African, French-language monthly Jeune Afrique published a column by Affet Mosbah entitled “Being Black in Tunisia.”[1] Hailing from a family of black rights’ activists—Mosbah’s sister, Saadia, is a long-time organizer in Tunisia and her brother, Salah, is Tunisia’s most famous black singer and a strong advocate for the black community in his own right[2]—Mosbah’s article considered the taboo of anti-black racism in Tunisia, recounting the banality of discrimination that black Tunisians and black Africans, especially students, had come to know so well. Appropriately, it was published shortly after the African Development Bank (AfDB) decided to relocate its headquarters from war-torn Abidjan to Tunis, a move meant to signal Tunisia’s inseparability from Africa. The first major public intervention on what was (and is) one of Tunisian society’s dirty secrets, “Being Black in Tunisia” failed to sneak past the censors of the Ben Ali regime. It was only with the 2010-2011 revolution that it became readable online.[3]
Naturally, the revolution delivered more than access to information, the writings of Affet Mosbah included. For Black Tunisians, it also opened a new era of opportunity and risk. On risk, the deep and non-reflexive character of anti-black racism in Tunisia meant that the condition of black Tunisians and black Africans would not immediately change: local newspapers and television remained inhospitable to black voices and black issues, and a great many black people faced abuse, both physical and verbal, throughout the democratic transition. At the same time, the post-2011 political, social and legal environment did allow black activists to push their cause as never before.
The un-silencing of black Tunisian activism
Just as social media came to host an enlivened discourse on black rights in Tunisia, the post-2011 liberalization of regulations on civil society activity facilitated the emergence of a new network of non-government organizations (NGOs) focused on similar issues. After seeing her requests to register a non-profit organization rejected many times over by the overseers of the Ben Ali regime on the grounds that Tunisia did not, in the eyes of officialdom, have any problems with racism—and after being accused of stirring racial strife[4]—Saadia Mosbah, sister of the aforementioned Affet Mosbeh, launched one of the main NGOs in this network. The organization, named M’nemty, swiftly grew into a pillar of black civic life. The same could be said of a second anti-black racism organization founded by Maha Abdelhamid and a number of other black Tunisian activists called Adam.
Helmed by these two tireless women, Mnemty and Adam did more than force the issue of racial discrimination to the fore as Tunisia’s transitional democracy struggled for its footing. Supported by Tunisia’s first ever black female Member of Parliament (the late Jamila Debbech-Ksiksi), they also granted black women a level of public visibility never before enjoyed while drawing attention to the intersectionality of racism, sexism, and classism. Operationally, the organizations engaged Tunisian society through a multiplicity of means, including event and conference organizing; the lobbying of both the National Constituent Assembly and the Assembly of the Representatives of the People; and speaking and marching tours across the Tunisian south. Pertaining to the latter, Abdelhamid, organizing alongside other black Tunisian activists, mobilized a 2014 march across many of the sites once at the heart of the trans-Saharan slave trade. Gathering hundreds of black people in a joint action ultimately stretching from the island of Djerba to the cities of Zarzis, Medenine, Gabes, Gibili and Sfax, at one and the same time, the march demanded that historical injustices and their contemporary legacies be addressed. Just as importantly, across the same years in question, Mnemty and Adam also helped integrate Tunisia within international and transnational communities of black solidarity. Tunis’ hosting of the World Social Forum in 2013 and 2015 were critical in these regards. Bringing members of Tunisia’s black community face to face with human rights leaders and representatives of indigenous and black minorities from around the globe, the forums wound up yielding resilient alliances connecting Tunisians with partners from Brazil, the United States, and France.
Such efforts did not suffice to transform Tunisian society and culture overnight, of course. Outside major urban centres like Tunis and Sfax, racial discrimination still struggles to gain traction as a policy issue. The prevalence of racist attitudes in the south, where the largest populations of black Tunisians concentrate, cannot be said to have diminished much as yet, either. Saliently and despite all the energies invested, Mnemty, Adam and their allies also failed to get racial discrimination expressly outlawed within the constitution in 2014.
That all said, the labors of these activists did not pass without bearing significant legal fruit: In 2018, Tunisia became the first country in the MENA region to codify a law against race-based discrimination. This was a massive victory. Prior to the passage of Loi 50-2018 (the law in question), black Africans and black Tunisians had no legal recourse when subjected to expressly racist forms of discrimination, be it in the workplace, at school, or in a public institutions. And Loi 50-2018 did more than correct this glaring wrong: it also provided the standing required to pursue symbolic but undeniably meaningful satisfaction for past wrongs. Indeed, it was by the law’s provisions that a black Tunisian citizen from Djerba was cleared to finally exact a part of his last name that had been inherited from his family’s enslavement.[5]
A black renaissance begets an anti-black racist backlash
On May 6th of this year, Saadia Mosbah was arrested by the Saied regime. She is being investigated by the judicial authorities, rather ludicrously it should be said, for money laundering. One can only help but notice, as Bassem Trifi, President of the Tunisian League for the Defense of Human Rights did, that all this transpired after Mosbah made a number of social media posts where she detailed that racism she has experienced in her advocacy work—and after Kais Saied denounced the humanitarian organizations aiding Sub-Saharan migrants in a National Security Council meeting, asserting that they are the paid agents of foreign powers and “traitors” to Tunisia. Held for ten days while the investigation proceeded, Mosbah was brought before a judge on May 16th and is in pretrial detention at the time of writing.[6]
Mosbah was not the only individual involved in migrant and racial justice issues arrested in early May. Four other persons employed by Mnemty, the Tunisian Refugee Council, and Terre d’Asile Tunisie were also detained, and even Mosbah’s son was briefly taken in by the police. As this reveals—and as Kais Saied’s racist speechifying in February 2023 forewarned—a new and deeply troubling day has dawned for black Tunisians and black Africans. Anti-black and anti-immigrant violence is on the rise, administered both by the state and by organized civilian groups. And though Loi 50-2018 is likely to survive, it is being targeted by the Tunisian Nationalist Party, which claims the law is part of “the colonialist agenda of Sub-Saharan African migrants in Tunisia in wanting to change the demographic makeup of the Tunisian population.”
The response from a number of corners to these developments has been somewhat encouraging. Within Tunisia, a number of organizations involved in the defense of human rights—inclusive of the Committee for Justice, the Human Rights League, and Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights—denounced Mosbah’s arrest. A wider mobilization against the Saied regime’s crackdown on journalists, bloggers, and free expression—a crackdown legally facilitated under the terms of Décret-loi 54–2022, which subjects those convicted of disseminating “fake news” to a maximum of five years in prison—has also gathered momentum, most recently through a May 24th protest in downtown Tunis. Internationally, meanwhile, though the diplomatic response has been tepid, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights did go on the record condemning the Saied regime’s latest escalation. Nevertheless, on balance, the climate at the time of writing is one as hostile to the cause of black Africans and black Tunisian activists as anyone can remember. Offering a testament to how dark things have gotten since July 25th 2021 is a debate currently playing out in parliament: In one camp are two members requesting that the Speaker institute a policy allowing black African migrants to be contracted for twenty years of menial subcontracting work under terms akin to indentured servitude. Opposing them is Sfax MP Fatma Mseddi, proud advocate of Great Replacement Theory, who contends this is a backdoor means for advancing the colonization of Tunisia by black Africans.[7]
In this climate, Europe’s enduring support for Kais Saied—emanating from a desire to curtail cross-Mediterranean crossings—is especially destructive. At the center of this story remains the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Her “Mattei Plan for Africa”, announced during the Italy-Africa Summit held this past January, is expressly designed to formalize the kind of pay-for-patrol scheme which invites the abuse of black Africans: investment flows from Italy, the developmental value of which is uncertain, in exchange for beneficiaries’ dutifulness in guarding the seas. Laying bare the realities of the EU’s footprint today, Meloni’s visit to Tunis in April corresponded with the security forces’ sweeping of Sfax for irregular black migrants.
By engaging Saied as a partner of its migration strategy, Rome and Brussels have greenlit, tacitly and explicitly, Carthage’s broadening campaign against the Tunisian public. One of the rationales the President most frequently references as he withdraws civil freedoms and criminalizes dissent, after all, is the need to preserve Tunisia for Tunisians, i.e., the need to stop the same migratory waves which Europe has rendered the great scourge of our age. If it is the Tunisian judicial authorities which arrested former president of the Tunisie Terre d’Asile organization, lawyer Sonia Dahmani, TV host Borhen Bsaiess, and journalist Mourad Zeghidi over the past few weeks, then, it is Europe and the United States which sponsor or, minimally put, co-sign, these actions.
The consequence of all this is to be felt first by black Africans but by black Tunisians and the general population shortly thereafter, as the aforementioned arrests make plain. The struggle for black rights in Tunisia, elided by history despite proceeding for centuries, will need continue.
[1] Affet Mosbah, “Etre noire en Tunisie”, Jeune Afrique (July 12, 2004).
[2] See: Fatima-Ezzahra Bendami, “Black Tunisians breaking taboos”, Africa is a Country (March 2021).
[3] On the endurance of this dirty secret, see: Nada Issa, “Tunisia’s dirty secret”, Al Jazeera (March 17, 2016).
[4] Stephen King, “Democracy and progress toward racial equality in Tunisia: Interview with Zied Rouine”, Blog post: Arab Reform Initiative (March 26, 2021).
[5] Staff Writer, “Man can drop part of name denoting slave ancestry, Tunisian court rules,” Reuters (October 16, 2020).
[6] Staff, “Tunisia: Deepening Civil Society Crackdown: Authorities target refugee and migrant rights groups, activists, and journalists”, Post: Human Rights Watch (May 17, 2024).
[7] See: Facebook page of Fatma Mseddi
‘, ‘post_title’ => ‘Tunisia’s pioneering black women: The fight for emancipation amidst racial backlash’, ‘post_excerpt’ => ”, ‘post_status’ => ‘publish’, ‘comment_status’ => ‘closed’, ‘ping_status’ => ‘closed’, ‘post_password’ => ”, ‘post_name’ => ‘tunisias-pioneering-black-women-the-fight-for-emancipation-amidst-racial-backlash’, ‘to_ping’ => ”, ‘pinged’ => ”, ‘post_modified’ => ‘2024-05-29 11:31:36’, ‘post_modified_gmt’ => ‘2024-05-29 09:31:36’, ‘post_content_filtered’ => ”, ‘post_parent’ => 0, ‘guid’ => ‘https://noria-research.com/mena/?p=507’, ‘menu_order’ => 0, ‘post_type’ => ‘post’, ‘post_mime_type’ => ”, ‘comment_count’ => ‘0’, ‘filter’ => ‘raw’, )In early February, Moody’s took the unprecedented step of downgrading the credit rating of the Israeli state. In a corresponding move a few days later, the agency also dropped the deposit rating for the country’s five largest commercial banks, all of whom had seen their stock prices stumble on the back of a foreign investor sell-off.
Coming just a few days before reporting revealed that the contraction of the Israeli economy post-October 7th had been double what the country’s central bank had projected—on an annualized basis, the last quarter of 2023 recorded a 21% drop in GDP—Moody’s decisions garnered considerable attention. Implications for Israel’s tech industry stood out as perhaps most pronounced. In normal times, the much-lauded sector employs one of every seven Israelis and generates roughly half of the country’s exports, a fifth of GDP, and more than a quarter of income tax revenues. Sustaining this performance, however, has always hinged on the sector’s access to foreign capital. This is so despite the robustness of Tel Aviv’s venture capital community, as these investors raise virtually all their funding (75-80%) on the capital markets of the United States.1 As such, Moody’s downgrade posed a non-insignificant problem by way of threatening to increase the cost of tech fundraising going forward. Nor had things been going especially well in the industry prior to the rating agency’s scold. In late 2022, tech investment slowed to a crawl on the back of the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes and the Netanyahu government’s judicial reform initiatives. The slump then continued across 2023 before steepening in the fall. By year’s end, tech investment wound up down 20% compared to 2022’s already weak numbers, foreign investment had slid by 29%2, and startup exits—an indicator encapsulating when a startup either sells shares on a stock exchange or is acquired by a larger firm—had dropped 56%.3 Data for 2024, meanwhile, shows investment flows at a nine year low and the number of active investment entities in-country fifty percent below the level of just three years ago.4
Israel’s growth model being tethered to tech, these developments present major troubles. The troubles are only heightened, moreover, by a spanner being thrown into the works of Netanyahu’s plans to pivot the economy away from the technologists, whose political loyalties he doubts, and toward commodity production: In March, mindful of Houthi missiles as much as political fallout, Abu Dhabi’s ADNOC and British Petroleum paused discussions concerning a planned 50% acquisition of Israel’s primary natural gas producer, NewMed Energy.5 All of which begs questions of the viability of the Israeli economy and with it, the country’s capacity to continue its criminal assault on Gaza. By dint of Netanyahu’s judicial maneuvers alone, economists at Israel’s Ministry of Finance had projected the economy was to henceforth lose between $15 and $25 billion in growth per year.6 A 2015 RAND study on the economic losses Israel stands to suffer from a localized but lengthy military campaign against Palestine, meanwhile, puts forth a figure of $400 billion spread over ten years.7 Data released by the Ministry of Finance shows Operation Iron Sword currently costing the economy $269 million a day. (A region-wide war, of course, would be far, far more costly).
Bracketing, then, whether Israeli society, conditioned to expect basic material comforts, can actually stomach a return to a war economy like that of the 1970s (when military spending represented 30% GDP), how might economic realities impinge upon the course presently being charted by Israel’s political and military leadership? What does the international political economy of Israel’s genocidal ventures look like, and can this configuration hold across more distant time horizons?
This might seem moot in light of the latest ceasefire proposals put forth by the United States. For a number of reasons, however, it isn\’t. In the first instance, lest the White House is actually prepared to cut the flow of arms, it strikes as unlikely that the Israelis will agree to the deal presented by Joe Biden at the end of May 2024. Secondly, given the current configuration of power in Israeli politics, even if a ceasefire is to be reached in the days to come, it strikes as unlikely that Israel’s war-making—in Gaza and further afield—is over. As such, the problematique being engaged here is still clarifying of both the present and future. Insofar as it also allows us to better understand what has already happened, this problematique offers service to the historical record as well.
Sources of the War Economy’s Medium-term Resilience
Despite the headwinds blowing, there is little grounds in thinking economic pressures could hasten the end of Israel’s genocide in the short to medium term. This can be attributed to the deepness of Israel’s capital markets and its war chest of foreign currency reserves, on the one hand, and the Israeli state and economy’s external relations on the other.
Deep capital markets and abundant reserves
The deepness of Israel’s capital markets pertains in that it allows the ruling coalition to fund much of its violent designs locally: For 2024, ~70% of the $60 billion that the state intends to issue in debts will be sold on domestic markets and denominated in the New Israeli Shekel (NIS). What is more, due to demand from local financial institutions being high, the coalition government is being spared having to pay big interest rates on these local debts: the interest attached to NIS treasuries are higher, though not excessively so, than those presently attached to the T-bills issued by the United States. During the first five months of this year, these conditions allowed the Israeli Ministry of Finance to sell bonds collectively worth NIS 67.5 billion ($18 billion) without incurring burdensome repayment costs. As such, though the Governor of the Bank of Israel regularly warns against undue borrowing—and though some indicators, like the price charged to insure against a state default, do signal market unease—for now at least, the evidence suggests the state can do so without inviting too much financial pain. This redounds onto the genocide because it affords the country’s leadership greater autonomy than might otherwise be the case in dealing with external parties, on whom they need not fully rely for cash.
Israel’s accumulation of foreign currency reserves over the past two decades has a similarly insulating effect. Just $27 billion as of 2005, the value of reserves held at the Bank of Israel topped $200 billion at the start of this year. These assets not only generate investment returns for the state, but allow the central bank to defend the shekel in foreign exchange markets.8 The latter helps keep inflation low, thereby buttressing the macrostability of the war economy. To one degree or another, this stability also reduces the leverage external actors can bring to bear on the war cabinet.
Of course, administering violence of genocidal proportions requires volumes of munitions far beyond what Israeli manufacturers, having pivoted their businesses toward high-end products, are presently capable of producing. Indeed, without unceasing flows of artillery shells, missiles, warheads, and the like—almost all of which originate in the United States (or from a US-owned weapons cache located in Israel itself9) and Germany—the current campaigns on Gaza and southern Lebanon would swiftly run aground. Likewise, without the cloud services provided by Google and Microsoft and alleged WhatsApp data sharing from Meta10, it can be trusted that Israel’s AI-led mass assassination project would break down in short order.11
Such examples, of which there are legion, provide a grim segue to the second and perhaps most important factor underlying the medium-term resilience of the Israeli economy: robust external relations. In furnishing supports of an extensive and diverse type—everything from financing and investment flows to trade, logistical support, and reserve labor armies (see: India’s pledge of 50-100,000 workers to replace West Bank Palestinians)—it is these relations which ultimately make Israel’s genocide possible across more distal time horizons.
External Relations
When it comes to financing and investment, the discussion of external relations necessarily begins with the United States. As a brief review makes plain, a vast constellation of American public and private actors are presently financially buttressing the Israeli state, military, and economy. Concerning funding for the Israeli state, flows from the US federal government are most substantial. In relative terms, the standard annual grant sent to Israel from the US’ Foreign Military Financing program—$3.3 billion a year since the Obama administration—typically covers 15% of Israel’s defense expenditures. Expectantly, with Israel’s defense expenditures budgeted to increase by nearly $15 billion in 2024, this free credit line from the US federal government was made much higher this year. The National Security Act of 2024, signed into law in April, directed a full $13 billion into Israel’s interest-bearing account at the Federal Reserve.12 Of this sum, $5.2 billion was earmarked for replenishing the Iron Dome, Iron Beam, and David’s Sling defense systems, $4.4 billion for restocking depleted munitions stocks, and $3.5 billion for advanced weapons systems.
But it is not the US federal government alone that is injecting financing into the Israeli state’s coffers. State, county, and even municipal governments from across the United States are also opening up the checkbook for Israel in a major way. The channel through which they are providing financing is overseen by the Development Corporation for Israel, a US-registered entity that acts as the local broker and underwriter for Israel’s Ministry of Finance. The Development Corporation for Israel has, since 1951, issued what are called “Israel Bonds” within the US market. Though rarely in the public eye, these debt instruments, which are denominated in US Dollars and designated to provide general budget support, typically represent 12-15% of Israel’s total external debt. As such, they constitute a substantial source of credit and hard currency for the state.
Since October 7th, the Development Corporation of Israel has scaled the sale of Israel Bonds considerably, in part by deepening its partnerships with a rightwing organization called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).13 For the past two decades, ALEC has been one of the most influential behind-the-scenes forces in American politics: Its business is typically to author draft laws on topics from abortion to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement and then disseminate these legislative templates to allies in state houses of government, where they are passed into law. Rallying to the cause of Israel this fall, ALEC diversified its operations by mobilizing its State Financial Officers Foundation to drive the purchase of Israel Bonds by the managers of public pension funds and state and municipal treasury departments. The fruits of these labors have been rather staggering: $1.7 billion in bond purchases in just six months.14 More than presenting substantial material and symbolic value for Israel, these purchases constitute a statement of intent of grave importance from America’s wider state apparatus: Swayed by ignorance, special interests, and institutional capture, local public institutions, like the federal government, are showing themselves ready to invest meaningful sums in Israel’s genocidal ventures, now and into the future. Perhaps Joe Biden’s speech on May 31st, 2024 represents a pivot in these regards. At the time of writing, though, that seems like wishful thinking.
The same, sadly, can be said of private persons and financial institutions in the United States: these actors too have extended and/or facilitated a great deal of credit for the Israeli state since it commenced indiscriminately destroying Gaza. Some parties have done so by purchasing the Israel bonds just discussed—$1.3 billion worth as of this spring. In the immediate aftermath of the Iron Swords Operation, American banks also arranged private bond sales on the behalf of the Israeli state, the yields of which are not publicly disclosed.15 Most salient, however, were the deeds of this past March, when two American investment banks—Bank of America and Goldman Sachs—acted as underwriters for Israel’s first international bond sale post-October 7th. Working alongside Deutsche Bank and BNP Paribas, these financiers managed to corral levels of investor demand from around the world sufficient to make the bond sale the largest in Israeli history: $8 billion worth of Eurobonds ended up sold on the day.16 Though precise holdings of Israel’s Eurobonds cannot be verified, note that other American financial institutions are referenced by Israeli authorities as ranking among the chief buyers. Nor, of course, haveprivate American contributions to Israel’s war economy stopped with financing. Notwithstanding the general withdrawal of tech investment, a number of American firms continue to put significant capital into Israel amidst the state’s engagement in genocide. Across the past six months, Nvidia, the Santa Clara-based global leader in chips production and artificial intelligence computing, has plowed big money into acquisitions of Israeli firms.17 In December, blessed by a massive $3.2 billion grant and heavily reduced tax rate (7.5% instead of 23%), Intel, the largest private employer in the country, agreed to construct a new plant for semiconductors. A month later, Palantir Technologies, the oft-maligned artificial intelligence modeling firm founded by Peter Thiel and led by Alex Karp, announced a new strategic partnership with Israel’s Defense Ministry.
As intimated by Deutsche Bank and BNP Paribas’ participation in Israel’s March Eurobond issuance, Europe has played a non-insignificant role on the financial side of things, too. Apart from underwriting and purchasing Israeli sovereign debt, the largest financial supports out of Europe are presently coming from supranational entities. The Luxembourg-based European Investment Bank—jointly owned by the European Union’s twenty-seven member states—has maintained plans for puting $900 million into the Israeli economy.18 At a smaller scale, the European Investment Council recently stepped up its investments into Israel’s startup ecosystem as well.19 Since October 7th, meanwhile, the EU’s primary vehicle for financing research and innovation—the Horizon Europe Program—has authorized nearly a hundred grants to Israeli firms and institutions.20
Naturally, making a far bigger difference to the Israeli economy when it comes to Europe have been exchanges of goods and services. Still Israel’s biggest trade partner, the uninterrupted flow of exports to the European market across late 2023 were essential to the 5.1% current account surplus Israel ran in the final quarter of the year. And though there has since been talk in European capitols about reviewing the EU’s Association Agreement with Israel, early data releases for 2024 show Europe continuing to provide a steady source of demand for Israeli products: For the first three months of the year, the Bank of Israel reported more than $4.6 billion of exports to the member states of the EU, a sum roughly in line with what has been seen the past few years. In a time of uncertainty and undoubted vulnerability, Europe’s undiminishing demand for Israel’s goods and services is indeed serving as a ballast.
Israel’s (covert and overt) maintenance of external relations with non-western economies has also buttressed the viability of the war economy. If not quite at pre-October 7th volumes (and if undoubtedly reduced due to the Houthis interventions, which forced shipping lines to suspend direct trade with Israel), data reported by the Bank of Israel documents imports from China still being substantial. Inclusive of both final goods and inputs for industry, they totaled $10 billion during the first three months of 2024. This being the case, though Chinese investment in Israel remains depressed—largely as a result of pressure the United States has imposed on Tel Aviv21—Chinese products endure as one the lifebloods of Israel’s day-to-day economy. India’s contributions, which include importing large amounts of Israeli arms22 and exporting cheap workers to refill workplaces emptied of Palestinians, are hardly negligible themselves. The land bridge that Israeli media has reported on, meanwhile, may not function precisely as described.23 That said, goods are clearly being moved into Israel via the Gulf and Jordan, helping keep shelves stocked. And then there is Turkey’s ambiguous relation with Israel to consider. Though the Ministry of Trade in Ankara instituted progressively all-encompassing bans on trade with Israel starting at the beginning of April, there are grounds in thinking the measure not entirely ingenuous. In the first instance, the policy provides a three month reprieve allowing firms to fulfill existing orders via third countries. As such, it is unlikely to cause an immediate supply squeeze. In the second, the commercial ties between Turkey’s steel and aluminum producers and Israel are deep and long-standing24, and the former’s reliance on the Israeli market well known. The prospect of Turkish suppliers finding a workaround for delivering inputs critical not only to Israel’s built environment but to its arms industry—perhaps by way of transshipment in Slovenia—should therefore not be discounted.
With the full picture now in view, the consequence of the three factors identified at the outset is easily discerned. Able to draw on deep capital markets, hard currency reserves, and robust relations with external economic partners, Israel faces no immediate material limits in conducting its genocide. Unless the policy of the external partners in question should change, in the most basic sense, Israel will be free to continue the unconscionable slaughter for some time yet.
Hope in the long-term?
In the long-term—a time horizon that is relevant due to both the coalition government’s obvious unwillingness to relent the assault on Gaza, and the settler movement’s larger intentions for territorial expansion—there are variables working against Israel’s war economy. These include the disinvestment trend touched on earlier, which recent government interventions will be unlikely to reverse. They also include fiscal pressures stemming from the calling up of reserves. Perhaps more salient, though, are the social tensions that Israel’s prosecution of genocide will heighten in the months and years ahead.
Israel has long since stood as the most unequal country in the OECD. More sophisticated measures presently estimate the country’s poverty rate at 27.8%25, with a third of the country food insecure.26 For all the mythology that has surrounded the startup nation, it is furthermore the case that growth and productivity gains over the past two decades are actually relatively weak27, and that the accumulation of human capital is alternatively stagnating or declining via brain drain.28 Into this mix is to now be added austerity. Indeed, after running sizable deficits throughout the course of its campaign on Gaza, Israel will accelerate the withdrawal of its welfare state by cutting social and educational spending just as it squeezes poor households through increases to the regressive consumer taxes. Given the cleavages already open within Israeli society—between the few that have cashed in on the tech and property boom and the many who have not; between religious communities exempt from military service and those tasked with risking their lives to advance their visions of conquest; between a settler community given special dispensation by the state and all the rest forced to rely on food banks for their sustenance—higher degree of social strain are certainly coming down the line. And in one way or another, that can only but redound negatively onto the coherence of the state project—and onto the capacity of the current government to pursue its destructive plots.
For Palestine and for Palestinians in Gaza most especially, of course, urgency is the word. The time it will take for social dynamics to play their way out within Israeli society—the time it will take for Israel’s capacity for war to be corroded from within—is simply too long to wait. As such, for anyone hoping to bring this genocide to an end, a point of emphasis must be to isolate the Israeli economy in each and every domain possible. Until the country’s robust external relations are weakened if not severed, the engines of Israel’s violence will keep firing without so much as a sputter. To clog them to the point that the bombs stop falling, the existing circuitry of finance and trade must be disrupted.
1Israel Innovation Authority, “State of the High-Tech Industry in Israel 2023”, Annual Report (June 2023).
2Adrian Filut, “Economic concerns mount as Israel faces drop in foreign investment and services export,” Ctech (March 18, 2024).
3Sharon Wrobel, “Israeli tech exits slump 56% in 2023, deal flow drops to lowest level in a decade”, The Times of Israel (December 6, 2023).
4Danny Biran, Assaf Patir, and Almog Grisariu, “Israeli High-Tech in the Shadow of Six Months of War”, Report: Resilient, Innovative & Sustainable Economy (April 2024).
5Staff Writer, “BP, UAE suspend USD 2 bn gas dCeal in Israel amid Gaza war”, EnergyWorld (March 15, 2024).
6Nimrod Flaschenberg, “Israel’s economy was Netanyahu’s crown jewel. Can apartheid survive without it?” +972 Magazine (March 27, 2023).
7C. Ross Anthony et al. The Costs o the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Rand Corporation: 2015).
8Galit Alstein, “Israel’s $48 billion war leaves it at mercy of bond markets”, Bloomberg (November 22, 2023).
9Connor Echols, “Bombs, guns, treasure: What Israel wants, the US gives”, The New Arab (March 12, 2024).
10Paul Biggar, “Meta and Lavender”, Blog: blog.paulbiggar.com
11Yuval Abraham, “’Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza”, +972 Magazine (April 3, 2024).
12Congressional Research Service, “FY2024 National Security Supplemental Funding: Defense Appropriations”, Insight (April 25, 2024).
13Munira Lokhandwala and Molly Gott, “U.S. State and Local Treasuries hold at least $1.6 billion in Israel bonds”, LittleSis (February 5, 2024).
14Sharon Wrobel, “Bucking boycotts, Israel bonds sells record $3b since start of Hamas war”, The Times of Israel (April 17, 2024).
15Galit Alstein, “Israel sells record $1 billion retail-like bonds since war began”, Bloomberg (November 7, 2023).
16Steven Scheer, “Israel sells record $8 billion in bonds despite Oct 7 attacks, downgrade”, Reuters (March 6, 2024).
17Meir Orbach, “Nvidia continues Israel shopping spree with acquisition of Deci”, Ctech (April 25, 2024).
18Sharon Wrobel, “EU financial arm to invest €900m in Israel, including Western galilee desalination”,
19 Staff Writer, “EU fund joins $20 million investment in Israeli AI startup”, NoCamels (March 20, 2024).
20David Cronin, “EU signs huge number of science grants for Israel amid Gaza genocide”, Electronic Intifada (April 9, 2024).
21John Calabrese, “Israel and China: A time for choosing”, Analysis: Middle East Institute (March 20, 2024).
22Jack Dutton, “Israel’s military exports to India booming, ‘unaffected’ by war in Gaza” Al-Monitor (February 24, 2024).
23Sharon Wrobel, “Houthi bypass: Quietly, goods forge overland path to Israel via Saudi Arabia, Jordan”, The Times of Israel (February 14, 2024).
24Cihan Tugal, “Can the Turkish regime absorb the opposition to Israel’s war”, Analysis: Noria Research (March 13, 2024).
25LATET, “Alternative Poverty Report: 20th Edition”, Report (2022).
26Bar Peleg, “Israel’s poverty rate is among the highest in the developed world, new report shows”, Haaretz (December 28, 2023).
27Adam Tooze, “Chartbook 231: Israel’s national security neoliberalism at breaking point?”, Chartbook (August 6, 2023).
28Gilad Brand, “Growth in the Israeli economy” in State of the Nation Report: State, Economy and Policy (2016): 29-62. Jeremy Levin and Ron Cohen, “Israel’s new far-right government is already chilling innovation and causing brain drain”, Forward (January 31, 2023).
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