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 reap the vast sums which could instead build houses, hospitals and schools and go towards public sector pay increases and welfare benefits.
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.
Source: Labour Outlook