Introduction
There was a chilling element of truth to U.S. President Donald Trump’s claim in his October 13, 2025 speech to the Israeli Knesset, three days after the U.S.-brokered ceasefire went into effect, that the deal would put an end to “an age of terror and death” and herald “the historic dawn of a new Middle East.”[1] To get at the kernel of truth in Trump’s bombast we need only combine the two claims: the genocide does marks a new age in the Middle East defined by macabre methods of “terror and death” that are sweeping the world as global capitalism descends into unprecedented crisis.
The Israeli genocide may be a story of 75-plus years of Zionist settler colonialism, occupation, and apartheid. But to get at the big picture we must move beyond the narrative put forth by the media, pundits, and Middle East scholars that frame it in terms of an Arab-Israeli conflict, old-fashioned settler colonialism, or Western imperialist exploits. It is the epochal crisis of global capitalism that exposes the perverse logic behind the genocide and its U.S. sponsorship. Gaza is a global space through which all of the contradictions of a global capitalism in crisis reached the breaking point and exploded into absolute barbarism.
The killing fields of Palestine, in all their debauchery, breathe new life into the prospects for capitalist expansion in the Middle East even as it offers the Palestinians and the poor majorities in the region and beyond nothing but endless accumulation of bloodshed, grief and misery. Indeed, in the depraved logic of global capitalism in crisis this accumulation of butchery is but the counterpart to the accumulation of capital. To get at this new “age of terror and death” we have to step back and place the Middle East, including the Israeli genocide, in the context of the radical political and economic transformations brought about by global capitalist crisis.
The Epochal Crisis of Global Capitalism
The crisis of global capitalism is multidimensional. It is a structural crisis of overaccumulation and chronic stagnation, which in turn generates political crises of state legitimacy, capitalist hegemony, and geopolitical confrontation as the post-WWII order cracks up and states compete with one another to secure an inflow of resources and raw materials. It is as well a crisis of worldwide social reproduction as social disintegration spreads—and an ecological crisis of catastrophic proportions to boot.
The problem of surplus capital is endemic to capitalism but over the past couple of decades it has reached extraordinary levels. The total cash held in reserves by the world’s 2,000 biggest non-financial corporates sharply increased, from $6.6 trillion in 2010 to $14.2 trillion in 2020 as the global economy stagnated and as companies retained rather than reinvested their profits.[2] Since 1980 uninvested corporate cash holdings have ballooned to 10 percent of GDP in the United States, 22 percent in Western Europe, 34 percent in South Korea, and 47 percent in Japan.[3]
Idle capital is capital that is not accumulating and an indicator of the crisis of overaccumulation. A sign of capitalist breakdown is precisely a decrease in the rate of profit simultaneous to an increase in the mass of profit. The extreme and ever-rising levels of global inequality that has been widely documented aggravate the crisis of overaccumulation. As mass markets shrink and consumer-driven growth stagnates, global markets cannot absorb the output of the global economy. Just one percent of humanity owned over half of the world’s wealth in 2018 and the top 20 percent owned 94.5 of that wealth, while the remaining 80 percent had to make do with just 5.5 percent.[4] Markets are saturated, industrial overcapacity is mounting, the rate of profit continues to decline, and speculative bubbles, especially in AI, are close to bursting.
Chronic stagnation and a declining rate of profit can only be overcome by violently cracking open new spaces for accumulation and by transferring the cost of the crisis onto the working and popular classes. Led by the giant tech companies, the global financial conglomerates, and the military-industrial-security complex that are now at the heart of the global economy, the transnational capitalist class, backed by capitalist states, are engaged in a new round of predatory expansion around the world. Through financialized and digitally-driven extractivist seizure of resources, war, displacement and repression, and above all, through the degradation of the working and popular classes, the capitalist state assumes authoritarian and fascist forms.
Earlier episodes of structural crisis in the world capitalist system involved the breakdown of state legitimacy, escalating class and social struggles, and military conflicts through which the system expanded outward, conquering more territories and bringing more peoples into its vortex. Now, however, the entire world is integrated into a single global economy. Expansion can only take place through blood and fire—“the gales of creative destruction,” to borrow the term coined by the great twentieth century economist Joseph Schumpeter.
The political economy of genocide in our time is marked by this crisis. For global capitalism the Israeli genocide is one big gale of creative destruction. Gaza holds up a mirror to the possible future of global society. It sounds an alarm bell that the ruling classes, if allowed to get their way in Palestine, will take advantage of the crisis to mold interminable political chaos and financial instability into a new a more deadly phase of global capitalism.
Surplus Capital’s Alter-Ego: Surplus Labor
Global capitalist restructuring over the past half century has involved a vast new round of expulsions around the world. Hundreds of millions of people displaced from the countryside of the former Third World and by deindustrialization in the former First World must be controlled through nightmarish strategies of containment and even extermination.[5] Today, new digital technologies based on automation and AI combine with displacement generated by conflict, economic collapse, and climate change to exponentially increase the ranks of surplus humanity.[6] The ruling classes face a dual challenge: how to open new spaces for unloading surplus accumulated capital while containing the rebellion of the global working classes and surplus humanity.
Palestine offers them an experimental field for responding to this dual challenge. The 1948 Nakba that established the Jewish state involved the violent expulsion of the Palestinians and the expropriation of their land but also the subordinate incorporation of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian laborers to work on Israeli farms, construction sites, industries, caregiving and other service jobs. But globalization and the displacements it involves has made it possible for dominant groups around the world to reorganize labor markets and recruit transient labor forces that are disenfranchised and easy to control. In Israel, the opportunity was very much seized. Starting in the 1990s the Israeli economy began to draw on transnational migrant labor from Africa, Asia, and elsewhere as the Jewish state set about to resolve the historic tension between the drive to ethnically cleans the Jewish state and the need it had for cheap, ethnically demarcated labor. Transnational migrant workers in Israel need not be subjected to the apartheid system imposed on Palestinians because their temporary migrant status achieves their social control and disenfranchisement more effectively, and of course because they are not demanding the return of occupied lands and do not have a political claim to a state.
By the 2010s, hundreds of thousands of migrant workers – by some estimates up to 600,000 – from Thailand, China, Nepal, Sri Lanka, India, Eastern Europe, the Philippines, Kenya and elsewhere came to form the predominant labor force in Israeli agribusiness, and increasingly in other sectors of the economy, under the same precarious conditions of super-exploitation and discrimination that migrant workers face around the world. In the wake of the 2023 Hamas attack Israel deported the remaining 10,000 Gazan Palestinian workers back to Gaza and also suspended the work permits for 120,000 West Bank Palestinians.[7] In early 2024, even in the midst of war, thousands of Indian and other foreign workers were pouring into Israel to replace them.[8]
With Palestinian labor no longer needed, the Palestinian proletariat came to serve no purpose for Israeli and transnational capital yet their mere presence blocks access to land and other resources and stood in the way of a new round of expansion. The siege of Gaza and the West Bank thus becomes a form of primitive accumulation. The United Nations confirmed in 2019 that the occupied Palestinian territories hold significant oil and natural gas reserves. Estimates show up to $524 billion in fossil fuel deposits across Israel, the occupied territories, and Egyptian shores near the Sinai. In August 2023 Egypt and Israel signed an agreement to develop the Leviathan field off of Gaza’s Mediterranean coast (the Palestinians were not even consulted), followed by Netanyahu’s announcement a month later at the United Nations General Assembly of the construction of a gas pipeline that would come from India, pass through Saudi Arabia, and end up in Europe via Cyprus, hinging on a Saudi-Israeli peace agreement (see below).[9]
Then came the Hamas attack that put the Saudi-Israeli normalization on hold. Notwithstanding, the Israeli government, with the complicity of Egypt, turned to granting licenses in 2024 to transnational energy companies for gas and oil exploration off Gaza’s coast.[10] Israeli real estate companies advertised for the construction of luxury homes in bombed out Gaza neighborhoods, while others spoke of resuscitating the Ben Gurion Canal Project that has been dormant since it was originally proposed in the 1960s. The only thing delaying these plans was the presence of Palestinians in Gaza.[11]
When Trump declared just two weeks into his second presidency, on February 4, 2025, in a joint press conference with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that the United States will “take over” the Gaza Strip and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East,”[12] he was simply giving voice to these pretensions. Beyond the more immediate aims of the Zionist project, the genocide in Gaza is a mechanism to unblock a new round of capitalist expansion and globalization in the Middle East, an instrument that brings home all of the contradictions of a global capitalism that can only reproduce itself through the “terror and death” that Trump referred in the Israeli Knesset. This terror and death constitute the depraved midwife of an “historic dawn” for the region.
The Globalization of the Middle East
For much of the post-WWII period the world understood the Middle East through the frame of the “Arab-Israeli conflict.” But this frame corresponded to an earlier historical period, especially from 1948 to the 1967, in the context of decolonization, the spread of pan-Arab nationalism and socialism, and the development of post-colonial national bourgeoisies. With time, it proved to be an anachronism, a backward political-diplomatic dispensation out of sync with the emerging global capitalist economic structure.
Globalization in the region began in the 1980s and accelerated with the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq that followed the establishment in 1997 of the Middle East Free Trade Area (MEFTA) and a host of related bilateral and multilateral regional and extra-regional free trade agreements and structural adjustment programs. This integration unleashed a cascade of transnational corporate and financial investment in finance, energy, high-tech, construction, infrastructure, luxury consumption, tourism and other services. It brought Gulf capital, including trillions of dollars managed by sovereign wealth funds, together with capital from all around the world, involving the EU, North and Latin America, and Asia, inextricably enmeshing them all in global circuits of accumulation.[13] Nationally-oriented Arab bourgeoisies transmorphed through globalization into transnationally-oriented bourgeoisies. Israel, far from remaining excluded, integrated into these expanding regional and transnational capitalist networks on the heels of the Oslo “peace” process.
Economic integration brought new political dispensations as the Israeli and Arab bourgeoisies developed common class interests. Egypt normalized relations with Israel in 1980, followed by Jordan in 1994. In 2020 the UAE and several other Gulf countries signed the Abraham Accords that normalized relations between the Israeli state and the Arab signatories, an opening that allowed Gulf investment groups to pour hundreds of millions into the Israeli economy.[14] The clincher in this process was to be Saudi-Israeli normalization that had been scheduled for late 2023. This normalization was to be not just a matter of economic integration: it was to have cemented the region-wide oppressive political and social order. The October 2023 Hamas attack and the subsequent Israeli siege placed on hold that normalization. With the Israeli genocide, Arab regimes and bourgeoisies were left in a bind. They could not endorse the genocide or the Eretz Israel expansionism pushed by the most extreme Zionist factions because to do so would be political suicide. If Israeli, Arab and extra-regional transnational capitalists have come to share common class interests, the Gaza war placed a political wedge into the process of integration.
Trump’s 20-point “peace plan” offered these regimes and their bourgeoisies a way out of this predicament. In substance, the plan involved “redevelopment,” including “modern and efficient governance conducive to attracting investment” and the establishment of a “special economic zone” – boiler plate language for opening up the Strip to transnational capitalist plunder and control.[15] If pursued, it would be a feather in the cap for the leading Arab states. Despite their protestations and internecine rivalry, they have welcomed the radical shift in the regional geopolitical landscape since 2023. From the neutralization of Hezbollah in Lebanon to the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, the outcome appears to be a more favorable correlation of class and geopolitical forces for the project of global capitalist expansion.
While Trump and his envoy and fellow billionaire developer Steve Witkoff were negotiating with Israel and Hamas in September 2025 (with the mediation of Egypt, Qatar and Turkey), Witkoff’s son Alex and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner – who brokered the 2020 Abraham Accords and who handles billions of dollars in Gulf investment funds – were also in the Middle East to discuss with their Gulf counterparts commercial real estate projects, cryptocurrency and other investment funds, reportedly securing billions of dollars in pledges from Qatar, UAE, and Kuwait. The new cascade of investment hinged on first “resolving” the Gaza conflict, which was duly if tenuously done. This may be followed by expansion of the Abraham Accords which, in the words of U.S. vice president J.D. Vance, would pave the way “for broader alliances for Israel in the Middle East” even as it renders second the Palestine question.[16]
Moreover, the true magnitude of the global capitalist plan for Gaza was revealed not in the 20-point plan but in the Gaza Reconstruction, Economic Acceleration and Transformation (GREAT), a U.S. government proposal that was leaked to the press prior to the ceasefire agreement. The plan calls for a “voluntary” departure of Palestinians to another country, a string of AI-powered high-tech megacities, and some rump, unspecified Palestinian authority that would join the Abraham Accord. In essence, a massive plan for the takeover of Gaza by transnational capital, led by big tech, under the “iron dome” of Israeli military and transnational elite control, converting the Strip into the staging point and gateway for what it termed a “New Abrahamic Architecture.”[17]
The Complicity of the BRICS
Importantly, if the framework of an “Arab-Israeli conflict” is anachronistic so too is the framework of “Western imperialism” against the Middle East. While it is absolutely true that the Western countries, led by United States, are its principal sponsors, the genocide in Gaza cannot be separated from the global networks that enable it. Individual capitalist states and transnational elites outside of the West and the Middle East condemned the genocide and withdrew political support for Israel but they were not – and could not be – against the imperatives of global capital accumulation that undergirds its extermination impulse.
Indeed, political opposition to genocide by the BRICS countries was simultaneous to the promotion of worldwide capitalist expansion, revealing a contradiction internal to the managers of global capitalism. Even in the midst of the genocide in 2024 Russia remained the number one supplier of coal to Israel and South Africa number two. India provided military equipment to Israel for use in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. Such weapons were unloaded in Haifa at Israel’s largest port, a port that had already been privatized to the Shanghai International Port Group and the India-based Adani group. Meanwhile, China-Israeli trade hit a record $20 billion in 2023.[18] The Chinese state-owned high-tech company Hikvision supplied facial recognition technology to Israel for use in the occupied Palestinian territories.[19] China has become the region’s principal trading partner and an important investor in Israel, including in high-tech military and security.[20] The Middle East-Asia corridor had become by the 2020s a major conduit for global capital flows.[21]
Militarized Accumulation: The Global War Economy
Crucial in this panorama is the particular military and economic niche that Israel occupies in the regional and global economy. The Israeli economy globalized based on a high-tech-military-security-surveillance complex.[22] Like the larger global economy of which it is a part, it had come to feed off of local, regional, and global violence, conflict, and inequalities. Militarized accumulation and accumulation by repression offer the ruling classes a strategy for resolving capital’s intractable contradiction between surplus capital and surplus humanity and have become central to the entire global economy.[23]
There is a convergence between the political need to contain surplus humanity and the economic need to open new spaces for accumulation. Each new conflict around the world opens up fresh profit-making possibilities to counteract stagnation. Endless round of destruction followed by reconstruction fuel profit-making not just for the arms industry, but for engineering, construction, and related supply firms, high-tech, energy, and numerous other sectors, all integrated with the transnational financial and investment management conglomerates at the center of the global economy.
Countries are rapidly remilitarizing as war and repression become embedded in the global economy and as the global police state applies the new digital technologies for mass surveillance, social control, and repression. World military spending reached an unprecedented $2.7 trillion in 2024, an increase of nearly 10 percent from the previous year. This was the steepest rise since the end of the Cold War, with over 100 countries raising their military budgets in 2025, many of them by double digits.[24] Peace may not pay but in the context of a transnational capitalism in crisis, genocide does—becoming profitable and politically expedient to the ruling groups.
Israel’s war machine is sustained by the transnational corporations that supply weapons and ammunition, the Silicon Valley giants that provide surveillance technologies, the multinational brands that deliver the machinery of destruction, the regional and global energy powers that fuel the operations, and the international investors and sovereign wealth funds that finance it all. To hold Israel alone accountable for this totalizing barbarism is to treat the symptom while ignoring the deeper disease, the implacable need to make profit by any means in the face of stagnation.
The July 2025 report by the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, From the Economy of Occupation to the Economy of Genocide[25] referenced 1,650 transnational corporations that partner with Israel’s war and occupation machine. The list of 60 companies singled out in the report reads like a Who’s Who of global military, industrial, high-tech and financial conglomerates, among them Lockheed Martin. Raytheon, Volvo. Palantir, Vanguard, Blackrock, IBM, Microsoft, Caterpillar, Hyundai, Chevron, BP, Netafim, Amazon, Allianz, BNP Paribas, Barclays, Hewlett Packard, Glencore, AXA, Booking.com, Airbnb, and even the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global, which increased its investment in Israeli companies by 32 percent during the first two years of the genocide.
In the global division of capital’s labor, Israel launched a genocide and then invited the transnational capitalist class to profit off its spoils. Its genocide machine constitutes a prime instrument of global capital accumulation. Orders at many of the world’s biggest arms companies were near record highs within weeks of the October 2023 Hamas attack.[26] The siege of Gaza, as one Morgan Stanley executive put it, “seems to fit quite nicely with [our] portfolio.”[27] The Tel Aviv stock market surged in the nearly two years of genocide, from October 2023 to July 2025, its index up 80 percent over this period. The stock market rally, noted Adam Tooze, involved “a sudden and rather convulsive doubling-down on high-risk strategies of preemption and novel forms of violence.”[28] During the first two years of the genocide Israeli military spending rose by 65 percent, financed by public debt structured as a financial product – in effect, as war bonds – that was then sold to global investors, raising some $20 billion, over $7 billion of which was snatched up by Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, City, Barclays, BNPO Paribas, Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase.[29]
Razing Gaza to the ground has been wildly profitable. After two years of utter destruction, now comes the next phase in the bonanza: “reconstruction” by the transnational capitalist class. From the vantage point of Eretz Israel’s Zionist project, ethnic cleansing must continue. But from the vantage point of transnational capital, the razing of Gaza may have already served the purpose of establishing the conditions for massive expansion in Palestine and the Middle East. Either way, war or “peace,” genocide or a “settlement,” transnational capital will strive to mold changing circumstances into its evolving accumulation strategies.
The Future of Humanity is at Stake in Palestine
If the genocide has been an economic boon for global capitalism it also became a mounting political liability. In his notorious February 4, 2025 joint press conference with Netanyahu—during which he announced that the United States would “take over” and “own” Gaza—Trump added that Palestinians would have to permanently resettle elsewhere.[30] If that was the U.S. plan, why did Washington and Middle East mediators broker a ceasefire eight months later that, at least on paper, did not call for expulsion? The answer came from Trump himself in an October 9, 2025 press interview: “Israel cannot fight the world.”
Against the backdrop of Palestinian resilience, the global intifada against the genocide and in solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle has involved mounting mass protests around the world, one freedom flotilla after another, International Court of Justice rulings, International Criminal Court arrest warrants, growing demands for boycott, divestment, and sanctions, and on the eve of the ceasefire, a general strike in Italy. All this has powerfully turned world public opinion against Israel, which may retain overwhelming military might but has lost the battle for legitimacy. Tel Aviv faced unprecedented isolation as elite consensus fissured in Western states. The turned to recognition of a Palestinian state and discussions of military and economic sanctions testify as much. To be clear, though, fissures between the West and Tel Aviv are not about Palestinian rights but over concern that the genocide undermines the prospects for the Abrahams architecture and aggravates crises of state legitimacy.
Events unfold in quick succession and analyses may become outdating before ink hits paper. The ceasefire that went into effect at the end of September 2025 may already have broken down by the time this essay is in the hands of readers. In this regard, Trump’s 20-point plan is but a signpost. After two years of sadistic carnage, it appears that outright genocide may not be the only way for transnational capital and the states that serve its interests to advance a new round of global capitalist predation in the Middle East. To the contrary, it may be that the carnage has created the conditions for the consolidation of wealth and control far beyond levels prior to the genocide.
It is all but impossible, nonetheless, that there will be anything approaching long-term stabilization in the Middle East. The Palestine question is not going away and, moreover, there can be no stabilization in the Middle East because there will be no stabilization anywhere as global capitalism descends into deeper crisis. We have entered a period of unchartered economic turbulence and political chaos in the world capitalist system. Another financial collapse is all but inevitable. It will bring more hardship for poor majorities everywhere and trigger cascading social and political upheavals.
Palestine shows us the past and the future. The present is a redux of the dark history of European colonialism that reached its zenith in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and also a horrifying glimpse into a possible future of a global capitalism whose extermination impulse is now rising to the surface.[31] The Gaza genocide is a microcosm and extreme manifestation of the fate that awaits the working classes and surplus humanity as the global order hardens into ever more virulent and violent forms of domination, symbolizing a radical new stage in ruling class modalities of control, the creation of new geographies of containment and butchery.
Yet the global intifada in solidarity with Palestine has sparked a world-systemic awareness of the global meaning of Gaza. It points to another future, one defined not by the powers-that-be but by working-class majorities around the world, for whom the struggle against genocide increasingly converges with a broader struggle against the devastation and the outrages of an out-of-control global capitalism.
This publication has been supported by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung. The positions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the views of Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.
Photo Credit: Kashfi Halford, “No man’s land Gaza to Israel” (2008).
[1] The full text of Trump’s speech was published in The Times of Israel on October 19, 2025, and can be found here: https://www.timesofisrael.com/full-text-of-trumps-knesset-speech-youve-won-you-cant-beat-the-world-its-time-for-peace/
[2] The Economist, “Hanging Together,” 16 May 2020, pp. 60.
[3] Richard Dobbs, Tim Koller, Sree Ramaswamy, Jonathan Woetzel, James Manyika, Rohit Krishnan, and Nicoló Andreula, “Playing to Win: The New Global Competition for Corporate Profits,” McKinsey Global Institute, September 2015, Executive Summary, file:///Users/user./Downloads/mgi%20global%20competition_executive%20summary_sep%202015.pdf, pp. 4
[4] Oxfam (London), Wealth: Having it all and Wanting More, 4 March 2018 at the Oxfam website, http://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/publications/wealth-having-it-all-and-wanting-more-338125.
[5] William I. Robinson, “Global Capitalism’s Extermination Impulse,” The Philosophical Salon, 19 August 2024, https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/global-capitalisms-extermination-impulse/
[6] For discussion, see William I. Robinson, Global Civil War: Capitalism Post-Pandemic (Oakland: PM Press, 2022).
[7] Isabelle Mandraud, “The Tragedy of Palestinian Construction Workers, Banned from Israel,” LeMonde, 25 October 2025, https://www.lemonde.fr/en/middle-east-crisis/article/2025/10/24/the-tragedy-of-palestinian-construction-workers-banned-from-israel_6746729_368.html
[8] For these details and for further discussion, see William I. Robinson, “Palestine and Global Crisis: Why Genocide? Why Now,” Journal of World-Systems Research, 30(1), 2024, https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1264/1651
[9] For these details, see, inter-alia: Oscar Ugarteche, “The Levianthan Field and War In Gaza,” Observatorio Económico Latinoamericano, 13 October 2025; The New Arab Staff, “Amid Gaza Genocide, Egypt Signs Record Gas Deal With Israel,” The New Arab, 7 August 2025, https://www.newarab.com/news/amid-gaza-genocide-egypt-signs-record-gas-deal-israel
[10] inter-alia: Rachel Donald, “Everybody Wants Gaza’s Gas.” Planet: Critical. 31 October 2023, https://www.planetcritical.com/p/everybody-wants-gazas-gas; Kate Arnoff, Kate, “Don’t Expect Gas Companies to Pause Business on Gaza’s Behalf.” The New Republic, 14 November 2023, https://newrepublic.com/article/176917/fossil-fuel-companies-plowing-ahead-profit-israeli-gas; United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD, “The Economic Costs of the Israeli Occupation for the Palestinian People: The Unrealized Oil and Natural Gas Potential,” Geneva, 2019, Geneva, 2019, https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/gdsapp2019d1_en.pdf
[11] Yvonne Ridley, “An Alternative to the Suez Canal is Central to Israel’s Genocide of the Palestinians.” Middle East Monitor. 5 November 2023, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231105-an-alternative-to-the-suez-canal-is-central-to-israels-genocide-of-the-palestinians/; Bret Wilkins, “’Cashing in on Genocide: Israeli Firm Pitches Beachfront Real Estate in Leveled Gaza.” Common Dreams. 19 December 2023, https://www.commondreams.org/news/israel-settlements-gaza
[12] Aljazeera, “Trump Says US Will ‘Take Over’ and ‘Own’ Gaza in Redevelopment Plan,” 5 February 2025, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/2/5/trump-says-us-will-take-over-and-own-gaza-in-redevelopment-plan
[13] Dinesh Nair, Anthony Di Paola, and Ben Bartenstein, “BP-Adnoc’s Landmark Israel Gas Bid in Flux as Conflict Escalates, Bloomberg, 11 October 2023, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-11/bp-adnoc-s-landmark-israel-gas-bid-in-flux-as-conflict-escalates
[14] The Economist, “Can Israeli-Emirati Business Ties Survive the Gaza War?”, 2 November 2023, https://www.economist.com/business/2023/11/02/can-israeli-emirati-business-ties-survive-the-gaza-war
[15] The BBC reproduced the 20 point plan on 9 October 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c70155nked7o
[16] For all these details, see, inter-alia: Debra Kamin and Bradley Hope, “Where Mideast Envoy Pitched Peace, His Son Pitched Investors,” The New York Times, 26 September 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/26/business/witkoff-son-qatar-gaza.html; Andrew Roth, “The ‘enormous conflict of interest’ at Center of Jared Kushner’s Gaza Ceasefire Deal,” The Guardian, 19 October 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2025/oct/19/the-enormous-conflict-of-interest-at-centre-of-jared-kushners-gaza-ceasefire-deal; Al Jazeera, “Trump Expects Expansion of Abraham Accords Soon, Hopes S Arabia Will Join,” 17 October 2025, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10/17/trump-expects-expansion-of-abraham-accords-soon-hopes-s-arabia-will-join; The Guardian, “Gaza Ceasefire Could Lead to More Israeli Alliances in Middle East, Vance Says at Netanyahu Meeting – as it Happened,” 22 October 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/oct/22/israel-gaza-ceasefire-jd-vance-netanyahu-hamas-hostages-middle-east-latest-news-updates
[17] The Washington Post made available online the full 38-page proposal here: Gaza Reconstruction, Economic Acceleration and Transformation (GREAT) proposal here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/f86dd56a-de7f-4943-af4a-84819111b727.pdf. For a summary, see Peter Beaumont and Alice Speri, “Leaked ‘Gaza Riviera’ Plan Dismissed as ‘Insane’ Attempt to Cover Ethnic Cleansing,” The Guardian, 1 September 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/01/leaked-gaza-riviera-plan-dismissed-as-insane-attempt-to-cover-ethnic-cleansing
[18] For these details, see Patrick Bond, “’The Blessing’ for Genocide: Nearly all BRICS+ Regimes Nurture Israel, Economically,” Counterpunch, 3 October 2024, https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/10/03/the-blessing-for-genocide-nearly-all-brics-regimes-nurture-israel-economically/
[19] Amnesty International, “Automated Apartheid: How Facial Recognition Fragments, Segregates and Controls Palestinians in the OPT,” 2023, pp. 9, 62, 76, https://banthescan.amnesty.org/opt/wp-assets/Automated_Apartheid.pdf
[20] Giulia Interesse, “China-Israel Bilateral Trade and Investment Outlook, China Briefing, 11 October 2023, https://www.china-briefing.com/news/china-israel-investments-trade-outlook-belt-and-road-initiative/
[21] HSBC, “Middle East-Asia Corridor – A New Conduit for Global Capital,” 4 September 2023, https://www.gbm.hsbc.com/en-gb/insights/financing/middle-east-asia-corridor-a-new-conduit-for-global-capital
[22] Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World (London: Verso, 2024).
[23] William I. Robinson, The Global Police State (London: Pluto, 2020).
[24] Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, “Unprecedented Rise in Global Military Expenditure as European and Middle East Spending Surges,” 28 April 2025, https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2025/unprecedented-rise-global-military-expenditure-european-and-middle-east-spending-surges
[25] United Nations Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, “A/HRC/59/23: From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide – Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occuped Since 1967, 2 July 2025, https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/country-reports/ahrc5923-economy-occupation-economy-genocide-report-special-rapporteur
[26] Brett Wilkins, “Business of War is Booming as Orders Surge at Top Global Arms Firms,” Common Dreams, 28 December 2023, https://www.commondreams.org/news/arms-trade-2666819054
[27] Eli Clifton, ”’Hamas Has Created Additional Demand: Wall Street Eyes Big Profits,” The Guardian, 30 October 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/30/wall-street-morgan-stanley-td-bank-ukraine-israel-hamas-war
[28] Adam Tooze, “Strangelove in the Middle East or How the Markets Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Israel’s Rampage,” Chartbook, 16 July 2025, https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-396-strangelove-in-the
[29] Andrea Ubrello, “Israel’s Ever-Expanding War Machine is Financed Through International Bond Sales,” Truthout, 26 July 2025, https://truthout.org/articles/israels-ever-expanding-war-machine-is-financed-through-international-bond-sales/
[30] Kevin Liptak, “Trump Says US Will ‘Take Over” Gaza Strip and Doesn’t Rule Out Using American Troops,” 4 February 2025, https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/04/politics/netanyahu-trump-white-house-meeting
[31] William I. Robinson, “Global Capitalism’s Extermination Impulse,” The Philosophical Salon,“19 August 2-24, https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/global-capitalisms-extermination-impulse/