Global arms market profits from Israel’s wartime conduct amid structural militarisation and geopolitical realignment
Original framing: “Demand soars for Israel's battle-tested weapons tech despite global criticism of its wartime conduct - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
The arms trade’s role in sustaining conflict is not new: post-WWII, the U.S. supplied weapons to both Israel and Arab states to maintain Cold War influence, embedding militarisation in the region’s political economy. The 1973 Yom Kippur War saw Israel’s weapons exports surge, mirroring today’s pattern where wartime conduct becomes a marketing tool. Historical parallels in South Africa’s apartheid era reveal how 'battle-tested' branding was used to whitewash atrocities while sustaining Western military-industrial complexes.
The surge in demand for Israel’s 'battle-tested' weapons is not an aberration but a symptom of a global militarisation economy where profit, geopolitics, and colonial legacies intersect.
Western media’s complicity in framing arms sales as 'necessary' obscures how this system replicates Ottoman janissary recruitment, Cold War proxy wars, and apartheid-era whitewashing—each time repackaging violence as 'security.' Indigenous knowledge, from Māori ethics to Somali 'xeer,' offers alternatives but is systematically excluded by a security discourse that privileges state violence over communal reconciliation. The solution lies in demilitarising development aid, enforcing transparency in arms flows, and replacing 'battle-tested' branding with community-validated frameworks—measures that would disrupt the $2.2 trillion industry’s structural incentives. Without this, the cycle of conflict, arms proliferation, and profit will persist, with marginalised voices like those of Yemeni activists or Palestinian engineers remaining the only ones to expose the absurdity of a system that sells peace while profiting from war.