{"id":307111,"date":"2025-11-17T12:00:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-17T12:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=307111"},"modified":"2025-11-08T07:28:14","modified_gmt":"2025-11-08T07:28:14","slug":"global-gaza-the-political-economy-of-genocide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/11\/global-gaza-the-political-economy-of-genocide\/","title":{"rendered":"Global Gaza: The Political Economy of Genocide"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo Credit: Kashfi Halford, \u201cNo man\u2019s land Gaza to Israel\u201d (2008).<\/p><\/div>\n

Introduction<\/h3>\n

4 Nov 2025 – <\/em>There was a chilling element of truth to U.S. President Donald Trump\u2019s claim in his 13 Oct 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 \u201can age of terror and death\u201d and herald \u201cthe historic dawn of a new Middle East.\u201d[1]<\/a> To get at the kernel of truth in Trump\u2019s bombast we need only combine the two claims: the genocide does<\/em> marks a new age in the Middle East defined by macabre methods of \u201cterror and death\u201d that are sweeping the world as global capitalism descends into unprecedented crisis.<\/p>\n

The Israeli genocide may be a story of 75-plus years of Zionist settler colonialism, occupation, and apartheid.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Indeed, in the depraved logic of global capitalism in crisis this accumulation of butchery is but the counterpart to the accumulation of capital.\u00a0 To get at this new \u201cage of terror and death\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

The Epochal Crisis of Global Capitalism<\/h2>\n

The crisis of global capitalism is multidimensional.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It is as well a crisis of worldwide social reproduction as social disintegration spreads\u2014and an ecological crisis of catastrophic proportions to boot.<\/p>\n

The problem of surplus capital is endemic to capitalism but over the past couple of decades it has reached extraordinary levels. \u00a0The total cash held in reserves by the world\u2019s 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]<\/a> 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]<\/a><\/p>\n

Idle capital is capital that is not accumulating and an indicator of the crisis of overaccumulation.\u00a0 A sign of capitalist breakdown is precisely a decrease in the rate of profit simultaneous to an increase in the mass of profit.\u00a0 The extreme and ever-rising levels of global inequality that has been widely documented aggravate the crisis of overaccumulation.\u00a0 As mass markets shrink and consumer-driven growth stagnates, global markets cannot absorb the output of the global economy.\u00a0 Just one percent of humanity owned over half of the world\u2019s 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]<\/a> Markets are saturated, industrial overcapacity is mounting, the rate of profit continues to decline, and speculative bubbles, especially in AI, are close to bursting.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Now, however, the entire world is integrated into a single global economy.\u00a0 Expansion can only take place through blood and fire\u2014\u201cthe gales of creative destruction,\u201d to borrow the term coined by the great twentieth century economist Joseph Schumpeter.<\/p>\n

The political economy of genocide in our time is marked by this crisis. \u00a0For global capitalism the Israeli genocide is one big gale of creative destruction.\u00a0 Gaza holds up a mirror to the possible future of global society.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Surplus Capital\u2019s Alter-Ego: Surplus Labor<\/h2>\n

Global capitalist restructuring over the past half century has involved a vast new round of expulsions around the world.\u00a0 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]<\/a> 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]<\/a>\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

By the 2010s, hundreds of thousands of migrant workers \u2013 by some estimates up to 600,000 \u2013 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.\u00a0 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]<\/a> \u00a0In early 2024, even in the midst of war, thousands of Indian and other foreign workers were pouring into Israel to replace them.[8]<\/a><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 The siege of Gaza and the West Bank thus becomes a form of primitive accumulation.\u00a0 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\u2019s Mediterranean coast (the Palestinians were not even consulted), followed by Netanyahu\u2019s 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]<\/a><\/p>\n

Then came the Hamas attack that put the Saudi-Israeli normalization on hold.\u00a0 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\u2019s coast.[10]<\/a> 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]<\/a><\/p>\n

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 \u201ctake over\u201d the Gaza Strip and turn it into the \u201cRiviera of the Middle East,\u201d[12]<\/a> he was simply giving voice to these pretensions.\u00a0 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 \u201cterror and death\u201d that Trump referred in the Israeli Knesset.\u00a0 This terror and death constitute the depraved midwife of an \u201chistoric dawn\u201d for the region.<\/p>\n

The Globalization of the Middle East<\/h2>\n

For much of the post-WWII period the world understood the Middle East through the frame of the \u201cArab-Israeli conflict.\u201d\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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]<\/a> Nationally-oriented Arab bourgeoisies transmorphed through globalization into transnationally-oriented bourgeoisies.\u00a0 Israel, far from remaining excluded, integrated into these expanding regional and transnational capitalist networks on the heels of the Oslo \u201cpeace\u201d process.<\/p>\n

Economic integration brought new political dispensations as the Israeli and Arab bourgeoisies developed common class interests.\u00a0 Egypt normalized relations with Israel in 1980, followed by Jordan in 1994.\u00a0 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]<\/a> The clincher in this process was to be Saudi-Israeli normalization that had been scheduled for late 2023.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s 20-point \u201cpeace plan\u201d offered these regimes and their bourgeoisies a way out of this predicament. In substance, the plan involved \u201credevelopment,\u201d including \u201cmodern and efficient governance conducive to attracting investment\u201d and the establishment of a \u201cspecial economic zone\u201d \u2013 boiler plate language for opening up the Strip to transnational capitalist plunder and control.[15]<\/a> 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s son Alex and Trump\u2019s son-in-law Jared Kushner \u2013 who brokered the 2020 Abraham Accords and who handles billions of dollars in Gulf investment funds \u2013 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.\u00a0 The new cascade of investment hinged on first \u201cresolving\u201d the Gaza conflict, which was duly if tenuously done.\u00a0 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 \u201cfor broader alliances for Israel in the Middle East\u201d even as it renders second the Palestine question.[16]<\/a><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 The plan calls for a \u201cvoluntary\u201d 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.\u00a0 In essence, a massive plan for the takeover of Gaza by transnational capital, led by big tech, under the \u201ciron dome\u201d of Israeli military and transnational elite control, converting the Strip into the staging point and gateway for what it termed a \u201cNew Abrahamic Architecture.\u201d[17]<\/a><\/p>\n

The Complicity of the BRICS<\/h2>\n

Importantly, if the framework of an \u201cArab-Israeli conflict\u201d is anachronistic so too is the framework of \u201cWestern imperialism\u201d against the Middle East.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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 \u2013 and could not be \u2013 against the imperatives of global capital accumulation that undergirds its extermination impulse.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 India provided military equipment to Israel for use in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon.\u00a0 Such weapons were unloaded in Haifa at Israel\u2019s 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]<\/a> The Chinese state-owned high-tech company Hikvision supplied facial recognition technology to Israel for use in the occupied Palestinian territories.[19]<\/a> China has become the region\u2019s principal trading partner and an important investor in Israel, including in high-tech military and security.[20]<\/a> The Middle East-Asia corridor had become by the 2020s a major conduit for global capital flows.[21]<\/a><\/p>\n

Militarized Accumulation: The Global War Economy<\/h2>\n

Crucial in this panorama is the particular military and economic niche that Israel occupies in the regional and global economy.\u00a0 The Israeli economy globalized based on a high-tech-military-security-surveillance complex.[22]<\/a> 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. \u00a0Militarized accumulation and accumulation by repression offer the ruling classes a strategy for resolving capital\u2019s intractable contradiction between surplus capital and surplus humanity and have become central to the entire global economy.[23]<\/a><\/p>\n

There is a convergence between the political need to contain surplus humanity and the economic need to open new spaces for accumulation.\u00a0 Each new conflict around the world opens up fresh profit-making possibilities to counteract stagnation.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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]<\/a> Peace may not pay but in the context of a transnational capitalism in crisis, genocide does\u2014becoming profitable and politically expedient to the ruling groups.<\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>[25]<\/a> referenced 1,650 transnational corporations that partner with Israel\u2019s war and occupation machine.\u00a0 The list of 60 companies singled out in the report reads like a Who\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

In the global division of capital\u2019s labor, Israel launched a genocide and then invited the transnational capitalist class to profit off its spoils.\u00a0 Its genocide machine constitutes a prime instrument of global capital accumulation.\u00a0 Orders at many of the world\u2019s biggest arms companies were near record highs within weeks of the October 2023 Hamas attack.[26]<\/a>\u00a0 The siege of Gaza, as one Morgan Stanley executive put it, \u201cseems to fit quite nicely with [our] portfolio.\u201d[27]<\/a> 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.\u00a0 The stock market rally, noted Adam Tooze, involved \u201ca sudden and rather convulsive doubling-down on high-risk strategies of preemption and novel forms of violence.\u201d[28]<\/a> During the first two years of the genocide Israeli military spending rose by 65 percent, financed by public debt structured as a financial product \u2013 in effect, as war bonds \u2013 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]<\/a><\/p>\n

Razing Gaza to the ground has been wildly profitable.\u00a0 After two years of utter destruction, now comes the next phase in the bonanza: \u201creconstruction\u201d by the transnational capitalist class.\u00a0 From the vantage point of Eretz Israel\u2019s Zionist project, ethnic cleansing must continue.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Either way, war or \u201cpeace,\u201d genocide or a \u201csettlement,\u201d transnational capital will strive to mold changing circumstances into its evolving accumulation strategies.<\/p>\n

The Future of Humanity is at Stake in Palestine<\/h2>\n

If the genocide has been an economic boon for global capitalism it also became a mounting political liability.\u00a0 In his notorious February 4, 2025 joint press conference with Netanyahu\u2014during which he announced that the United States would \u201ctake over\u201d and \u201cown\u201d Gaza\u2014Trump added that Palestinians would have to permanently resettle elsewhere.[30]<\/a> 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: \u201cIsrael cannot fight the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 All this has powerfully turned world public opinion against Israel, which may retain overwhelming military might but has lost the battle for legitimacy.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Events unfold in quick succession and analyses may become outdating before ink hits paper.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In this regard, Trump\u2019s 20-point plan is but a signpost.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

It is all but impossible, nonetheless, that there will be anything approaching long-term stabilization in the Middle East.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We have entered a period of unchartered economic turbulence and political chaos in the world capitalist system.\u00a0 Another financial collapse is all but inevitable.\u00a0 It will bring more hardship for poor majorities everywhere and trigger cascading social and political upheavals.<\/p>\n

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]<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Yet the global intifada in solidarity with Palestine has sparked a world-systemic awareness of the global meaning of Gaza.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

REFERENCES:<\/strong><\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> The full text of Trump\u2019s speech was published in The Times of Israel on October 19, 2025, and can be found\u00a0 here: https:\/\/www.timesofisrael.com\/full-text-of-trumps-knesset-speech-youve-won-you-cant-beat-the-world-its-time-for-peace\/<\/a><\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> The Economist<\/em>, \u201cHanging Together,\u201d 16 May 2020, pp. 60.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Richard Dobbs, Tim Koller, Sree Ramaswamy, Jonathan Woetzel, James Manyika, Rohit Krishnan, and Nicol\u00f3 Andreula, \u201cPlaying to Win: The New Global Competition for Corporate Profits,\u201d McKinsey Global Institute, September 2015, Executive Summary, file:\/\/\/Users\/user.\/Downloads\/mgi%20global%20competition_executive%20summary_sep%202015.pdf<\/a>,\u00a0 pp. 4<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Oxfam (London), Wealth: Having it all and Wanting More<\/em>, 4 March 2018 at the Oxfam website, http:\/\/policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk\/publications\/wealth-having-it-all-and-wanting-more-338125<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> William I. Robinson, \u201cGlobal Capitalism\u2019s Extermination Impulse,\u201d The Philosophical Salon<\/em>, 19 August 2024, https:\/\/thephilosophicalsalon.com\/global-capitalisms-extermination-impulse\/<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> For discussion, see William I. Robinson, Global Civil War: Capitalism Post-Pandemic (Oakland: PM Press, 2022).<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> Isabelle Mandraud, \u201cThe Tragedy of Palestinian Construction Workers, Banned from Israel,\u201d LeMonde<\/em>, 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<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> For these details and for further discussion, see William I. Robinson, \u201cPalestine and Global Crisis: Why Genocide?\u00a0 Why Now,\u201d Journal of World-Systems Research<\/em>, 30(1), 2024,\u00a0 https:\/\/jwsr.pitt.edu\/ojs\/jwsr\/article\/view\/1264\/1651<\/a><\/p>\n

[9]<\/a> For these details, see, inter-alia: Oscar Ugarteche, \u201cThe Levianthan Field and War In Gaza,\u201d Observatorio Econ\u00f3mico Latinoamericano<\/em>, 13 October 2025; The New Arab Staff, \u201cAmid Gaza Genocide, Egypt Signs Record Gas Deal With Israel,\u201d The New Arab<\/em>, 7 August 2025, https:\/\/www.newarab.com\/news\/amid-gaza-genocide-egypt-signs-record-gas-deal-israel<\/p>\n

[10]<\/a> inter-alia: Rachel Donald, \u201cEverybody Wants Gaza\u2019s Gas.\u201d Planet: Critical. 31 October 2023, https:\/\/www.planetcritical.com\/p\/everybody-wants-gazas-gas<\/a>;\u00a0 Kate Arnoff, Kate, \u201cDon\u2019t Expect Gas Companies to Pause Business on Gaza\u2019s Behalf.\u201d The New Republic, 14 November 2023, https:\/\/newrepublic.com\/article\/176917\/fossil-fuel-companies-plowing-ahead-profit-israeli-gas<\/a>; United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD, \u201cThe Economic Costs of the Israeli Occupation for the Palestinian People: The Unrealized Oil and Natural Gas Potential,\u201d Geneva, 2019, Geneva, 2019, https:\/\/unctad.org\/system\/files\/official-document\/gdsapp2019d1_en.pdf<\/a><\/p>\n

[11]<\/a> Yvonne Ridley, \u201cAn Alternative to the Suez Canal is Central to Israel\u2019s Genocide of the Palestinians.\u201d Middle East Monitor<\/em>.\u00a0 5 November 2023, https:\/\/www.middleeastmonitor.com\/20231105-an-alternative-to-the-suez-canal-is-central-to-israels-genocide-of-the-palestinians\/<\/a>; Bret Wilkins, \u201c\u2019Cashing in on Genocide: Israeli Firm Pitches Beachfront Real Estate in Leveled Gaza.\u201d Common Dreams<\/em>.\u00a0 19 December 2023, https:\/\/www.commondreams.org\/news\/israel-settlements-gaza<\/a><\/p>\n

[12]<\/a> Aljazeera<\/em>, \u201cTrump Says US Will \u2018Take Over\u2019 and \u2018Own\u2019 Gaza in Redevelopment Plan,\u201d 5 February 2025, https:\/\/www.aljazeera.com\/news\/2025\/2\/5\/trump-says-us-will-take-over-and-own-gaza-in-redevelopment-plan<\/a><\/p>\n

[13]<\/a> Dinesh Nair, Anthony Di Paola, and Ben Bartenstein, \u201cBP-Adnoc\u2019s Landmark Israel Gas Bid in Flux as Conflict Escalates, Bloomberg<\/em>, 11 October 2023, https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/articles\/2023-10-11\/bp-adnoc-s-landmark-israel-gas-bid-in-flux-as-conflict-escalates<\/p>\n

[14]<\/a> The Economist<\/em>, \u201cCan Israeli-Emirati Business Ties Survive the Gaza War?\u201d, 2 November 2023, https:\/\/www.economist.com\/business\/2023\/11\/02\/can-israeli-emirati-business-ties-survive-the-gaza-war<\/p>\n

[15]<\/a> The BBC reproduced the 20 point plan on 9 October 2025, https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/articles\/c70155nked7o<\/a><\/p>\n

[16]<\/a> For all these details, see, inter-alia: Debra Kamin and Bradley Hope, \u201cWhere Mideast Envoy Pitched Peace, His Son Pitched Investors,\u201d The New York Times, 26 September 2025, https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/09\/26\/business\/witkoff-son-qatar-gaza.html<\/a>; Andrew Roth, \u201cThe \u2018enormous conflict of interest\u2019 at Center of Jared Kushner\u2019s Gaza Ceasefire Deal,\u201d 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<\/a>;\u00a0 Al Jazeera, \u201cTrump Expects Expansion of Abraham Accords Soon, Hopes S Arabia Will Join,\u201d 17 October 2025, https:\/\/www.aljazeera.com\/news\/2025\/10\/17\/trump-expects-expansion-of-abraham-accords-soon-hopes-s-arabia-will-join<\/a>; The Guardian, \u201cGaza Ceasefire Could Lead to More Israeli Alliances in Middle East, Vance Says at Netanyahu Meeting \u2013 as it Happened,\u201d 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<\/a><\/p>\n

[17]<\/a> The Washington Post<\/em> 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<\/a>.\u00a0 For a summary, see Peter Beaumont and Alice Speri, \u201cLeaked \u2018Gaza Riviera\u2019 Plan Dismissed as \u2018Insane\u2019 Attempt to Cover Ethnic Cleansing,\u201d The Guardian<\/em>, 1 September 2025,\u00a0 https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2025\/sep\/01\/leaked-gaza-riviera-plan-dismissed-as-insane-attempt-to-cover-ethnic-cleansing<\/p>\n

[18]<\/a> For these details, see Patrick Bond, \u201c\u2019The Blessing\u2019 for Genocide: Nearly all BRICS+ Regimes Nurture Israel, Economically,\u201d Counterpunch<\/em>, 3 October 2024, https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2024\/10\/03\/the-blessing-for-genocide-nearly-all-brics-regimes-nurture-israel-economically\/<\/a><\/p>\n

[19]<\/a> Amnesty International, \u201cAutomated Apartheid: How Facial Recognition Fragments, Segregates and Controls Palestinians in the OPT,\u201d 2023, pp. 9, 62, 76,\u00a0 https:\/\/banthescan.amnesty.org\/opt\/wp-assets\/Automated_Apartheid.pdf<\/a><\/p>\n

[20]<\/a> Giulia Interesse, \u201cChina-Israel Bilateral Trade and Investment Outlook, China Briefing<\/em>, 11 October 2023, https:\/\/www.china-briefing.com\/news\/china-israel-investments-trade-outlook-belt-and-road-initiative\/<\/a><\/p>\n

[21]<\/a> HSBC<\/em>, \u201cMiddle East-Asia Corridor \u2013 A New Conduit for Global Capital,\u201d 4 September 2023, https:\/\/www.gbm.hsbc.com\/en-gb\/insights\/financing\/middle-east-asia-corridor-a-new-conduit-for-global-capital<\/p>\n

[22]<\/a> Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World<\/em> (London: Verso, 2024).<\/p>\n

[23]<\/a> William I. Robinson, The Global Police State<\/em> (London: Pluto, 2020).<\/p>\n

[24]<\/a> Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, \u201cUnprecedented Rise in Global Military Expenditure as European and Middle East Spending Surges,\u201d 28 April 2025, https:\/\/www.sipri.org\/media\/press-release\/2025\/unprecedented-rise-global-military-expenditure-european-and-middle-east-spending-surges<\/a><\/p>\n

[25]<\/a> United Nations Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, \u201cA\/HRC\/59\/23: From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide \u2013 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<\/a><\/p>\n

[26]<\/a> Brett Wilkins, \u201cBusiness of War is Booming as Orders Surge at Top Global Arms Firms,\u201d Common Dreams<\/em>, 28 December 2023, https:\/\/www.commondreams.org\/news\/arms-trade-2666819054<\/a><\/p>\n

[27]<\/a> Eli Clifton, \u201d\u2019Hamas Has Created Additional Demand: Wall Street Eyes Big Profits,\u201d The Guardian<\/em>, 30 October 2023, https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2023\/oct\/30\/wall-street-morgan-stanley-td-bank-ukraine-israel-hamas-war<\/p>\n

[28]<\/a> Adam Tooze, \u201cStrangelove in the Middle East or How the Markets Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Israel\u2019s Rampage,\u201d Chartbook,<\/em> 16 July 2025, https:\/\/adamtooze.substack.com\/p\/chartbook-396-strangelove-in-the<\/a><\/p>\n

[29]<\/a> Andrea Ubrello, \u201cIsrael\u2019s Ever-Expanding War Machine is Financed Through International Bond Sales,\u201d Truthout<\/em>, 26 July 2025, \u00a0https:\/\/truthout.org\/articles\/israels-ever-expanding-war-machine-is-financed-through-international-bond-sales\/<\/a><\/p>\n

[30]<\/a> Kevin Liptak, \u201cTrump Says US Will \u2018Take Over\u201d Gaza Strip and Doesn\u2019t Rule Out Using American Troops,\u201d 4 February 2025, https:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2025\/02\/04\/politics\/netanyahu-trump-white-house-meeting<\/a><\/p>\n

[31]<\/a> William I. Robinson, \u201cGlobal Capitalism\u2019s Extermination Impulse,\u201d The Philosophical Salon,\u201c19 August 2-24, https:\/\/thephilosophicalsalon.com\/global-capitalisms-extermination-impulse\/<\/a><\/p>\n

_____________________________________________________-<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>William I. Robinson is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is also affiliated with the Latin American and Iberian Studies Program, and with the Global and International Studies Program at UCSB. His scholarly research focuses on: macro and comparative sociology, globalization and transnationalism, political economy, political sociology, development and social change, immigration, Latin America and the Third World, and Latina\/o studies.\u00a0As a scholar-activist William attempts to link his academic work to struggles in the United States, in the Americas, and around the world for social justice, popular empowerment, participatory democracy, and people-centered development.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – noria-research.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

FEATURED RESEARCH PAPER<\/em> STAYS POSTED FOR 2 WEEKS BEFORE BEING ARCHIVED<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

4 Nov 2025 – 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":307112,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[241],"tags":[239,3614,1982,87,865,88,3530,427,1983,383,70,1025],"class_list":["post-307111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-paper-of-the-week","tag-brics","tag-disaster-capitalism","tag-economic-crisis","tag-gaza","tag-genocide","tag-israel","tag-military-capitalism","tag-palestine","tag-political-economy","tag-sociology","tag-usa","tag-west-bank"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307111"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":307118,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307111\/revisions\/307118"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/307112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}