US & UK Arming Israel’s Genocidal Destruction of Gaza – Stop the War
Lindsey German, Stop the war, on the astonishing figures that reveal the extent of the US funding of the Gaza genocide.
The economist Michael Roberts has some astonishing figures on his blog about how the US is bankrolling Israel’s merciless assault on the Palestinians. He writes that, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project, published in October 2024, Washington has shouldered 70 per cent of Israel’s military costs since 7 October 2023.
US spending on Israel’s military operations and related US operations in the region totalled, then, at least $22.76 billion – even before the US expanded its presence in the region in late September/early October 2024. This included $17.9 billion in direct aid, $20.3b in deferred arms deals, $4.86b (and climbing) in Pentagon regional operations, $2.1b in trade losses and billions more in shipping losses, stockpile transfers and corporate handouts.
That’s a cool $124m a day spent on Israel’s military operations in the 12 months since October 2023 alone funnelled, as Roberts says, from American households (who are in desperate need of decent jobs and support at home) to a foreign military and a handful of weapons conglomerates that treat the US Treasury like an “open vein”.
But of course it should come as no surprise. According to another Brown University report on the top beneficiaries of Pentagon spending between 2020 and 2024, private firms received $2.4 trillion in contracts from the Pentagon, approximately 54 percent of the department’s discretionary spending of $4.4 trillion over that period.
During these five years, the report reveals, the US government invested over twice as much money in five weapons companies as in diplomacy and international assistance. Between 2020 and 2024, $771 billion in Pentagon contracts went to just five firms: Lockheed Martin ($313 billion), RTX (formerly Raytheon, $145 billion), Boeing ($115 billion), General Dynamics ($116 billion), and Northrop Grumman ($81 billion).
That’s $2.4 trillion in taxpayer dollars handed to weapons companies. They call it “defence spending”, but, as the Quincy Institute, which collaborated with the Costs of War project put it, it’s one of the biggest corporate welfare programmes in history.
By comparison, the total diplomacy, development, and humanitarian aid budget, excluding military aid, was $356 billion.
So much for President Trump’s February directive to the Pentagon to cut military spending by eight percent. US defence spending had already risen from $531b in 2000 to $899 in 2025 and legislation approved in July added $156b to this, taking the total annual spend to over $1 trillion. The demands of the weapons contractors will, it is clear, always out.
Which brings us to the UK, which supplies millions of pounds worth of arms to Israel. Not on the US scale maybe, but significant and devastating nonetheless. It includes spare parts for the F-35 jets that regularly drop bombs on women and children in Gaza and which the High Court ruled recently it was legal to continue to do so.
The UK is also significantly increasing its investment in defence and weapons companies, both through domestic spending and arms exports. The recent strategic defence review included £1.5bn for an ‘always on’ pipeline for munitions and building at least six new energetics and munitions factories. There’s also the procurement of up to 7,000 UK-built long-range weapons, £4 billion for autonomous systems and nearly £1 billion for directed energy weapons.
As Stop the War said at the time, these pledges are grotesque enough, but even more so given the eye-watering record profits being made by the arms manufacturers and their shareholders as a result of the endless conflicts which are only perpetuated by these levels of increased military spending justified by the talked up picture of the most heightened military and security threat since the end of the cold war, and paid for with our tax pounds and by slashing the welfare budget.
The Ministry of Defence may claim it’s generating over 1,000 jobs and boosting export potential, but these new factories aren’t going to somehow be built by the state or some sort of nationally-owned company. It’s the shareholders of the private sector firms who will be paid vast sums, which could instead build houses, hospitals and schools, who will be the winners.
As the Alternative Defence Review explains, military spending generates a smaller economic multiplier than any other public investments, meaning it generates less overall economic activity and fewer secondary benefits than spending on essential services and infrastructure.
Anyone who has ever left a national Palestine demonstration at Whitehall, calls for the UK to stop arming Israel still ringing in their ears, cannot have missed the giant BAE Systems advertisement over the escalators down to the Jubilee Line. That Transport for London continues to take money from defence companies involved in arming a genocide is a disgrace, especially since it has refused to accept adverts from anti-arms organisations such as CND and, just last week banned the Irish rap band Kneecap’s ad for its September concert at Wembley Arena.
It is quite right that the Palestine movement continues with its key demand that states stop arming Israel, especially so with every new revelation of how the Trump government is doing the exact opposite – as Biden did before him – and the British government is eagerly ensuring it remains in on the action. They are all complicit in the war crimes and ethnic cleansing carried out every day – and a growing part of our campaigning must be to hold our own governments, as well as Israel, to account.
- Lindsey German is the National Convenor of the Stop the War Coalition. You can follow her on Twitter/X and follow Stop The War on Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky and Twitter/X.
Let’s Keep Our Focus on Palestine – Louise Regan
By Louise Regan
It is beyond comprehension that we are now well over 600 days into a genocide which has slaughtered well over 58,000 Palestinians, including more than 15,000 children, destroying over 90% of housing, and damaging or destroying over 90% of hospitals.
Even after all this, Israel is unleashing new horrors, new levels of barbarity that still do not create a red line for our political leaders to end their support, including military co-operation. Having starved the population of Gaza for 3 months during which no food, water or medical aid was allowed in, Israel has now set up a fake humanitarian agency with none of the relevant expertise to deliver meagre amounts of aid.
In the last two months, over 770 Palestinians have been slaughtered and nearly 5,000 wounded by Israeli fire queuing for food for their starving families and in the last week, another horror that has still not been condemned by our government, Israel slaughtered 15 Palestinians including 10 young children queuing at a clinic for nutritional supplements.
And now openly without shame, Israel unveils plans to corral all of the Palestinians in Gaza into what, it is not possible to describe in any other way than a concentration camp built on the ruins of destroyed Rafah, making clear that this is a holding zone before a planned forced expulsion. The response of our Government – David Lammy described it as a sticking point – building a 21st-century mass concentration camp is a sticking point, planning mass ethnic cleansing on a historically unparalleled scale is a sticking point.
From the beginning of our protests we have always been clear, our demands are for an immediate and permanent ceasefire and for our government to stop arming Israel. Throughout the last 18 months the government has done all it can to silence our movement, calling us hate marches, attempting to disrupt national demonstrations and stop us marching, arresting and attempting to intimidate those leading our movement.
And now they are threatening all of our freedoms and democratic rights. The government has chosen to redefine the meaning of terrorism in a way that serves to criminalise dissent.
Throughout history, every solidarity movement and struggle against colonialism has used a diversity of tactics. Unable to politically defeat the movement against Britain’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the government is turning to repression. Journalists, academics, and artists have been targeted, MPs and an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor have been hauled in for questioning, and PSC Director, Ben Jamal and Vice-chair of Stop the War, Chris Nineham facing charges simply for organising an entirely peaceful protest. And now CND General Secretary, Sophie Bolt and Stop the War Chair, Alex Kenny are also facing charges. These are the actions of a government that has thoroughly lost the moral argument.
Every struggle against racism and colonialism has faced attempts to demonise, divide and suppress it. There are few causes where this is more acute than the struggle for the rights of the Palestinian people. We know, and must not forget, that it is Palestinians who are at the sharpest end of oppression. They are the people who, on a daily basis, are subject to Israel’s genocidal violence and apartheid, aided and assisted by Western governments, including Britain.
Our responsibility has to be to them, we have to maintain our focus on the issue – genocide in Gaza is what we must continue to speak out about. Israel’s regime of apartheid across all of historic Palestine and 77 years of an ongoing Nakba is what we must continue to speak out about. In the face of these attacks, we must not allow our movement to be silenced or divided. Nor can we allow this government to drive us off the streets. In our workplaces and trade unions, towns and cities, universities and communities, all of us must continue to resist.
We need our government to end all arms sales to Israel and to impose sanctions. Starmer has lost the country on the question of Palestine. That is the power of our collective action!
The question now is can we do more?
Our government continue to export weapons and military technology used by Israel to carry out its genocide and enforce its blockade on Gaza, including parts for Israel’s F-35 fighter jets. Recently in court, the government argued that ensuring the integrity of the F-35 supply chain was more important than stopping Israel’s genocide. Shame on them.
We will never forget the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed women, children, doctors, teachers, journalists and those trying to get aid for their starving families. The destruction of the entire infrastructure of Gaza. The increased attacks and killings across the occupied West Bank, the escalation of land grab, the restriction of movement and rights and the destruction of refugee camps.
And we will never forgive those in power who have remained silent, who have stood by and allowed this to happen.
We know that history did not begin on October 7th, Palestinians have suffered decades of oppression and dispossession. This genocide is built on the foundations of more than 77 years of colonisation, military occupation and apartheid.
Our solidarity is needed now more than ever, not just in our words but in our actions too. We cannot allow our movement to be silenced. We must continue to march, to protest, to boycott and to raise our voices until all Palestinians from the river to the sea are finally free.
- Louise Regan is the National Chair of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and an executive member of the National Education Union (NEU). You can follow her on Twitter/X; and follow the Palestine Solidarity Campaign on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
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