The billionaire companies behind Israel’s bombs

On May 10,  Secretary of State Antony Blinken addressed Congress and lied. He said: “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.”

This is despite an explosive report given to Blinken in April 2024, from the State Department’s Refugees and Migration Bureau, that Israel was intentionally blocking humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza. Plus a strongly worded 17-page memo from the United States Agency for International Development that described Israel’s interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, bombing ambulances and hospitals and routinely turning away trucks loaded with food and medicine.

Details of these warnings and Blinken’s decision to ignore them were leaked by ProPublica.org on Sept. 25 in an article noting that while Israel has its own arms industry, it relies heavily on U.S. jets, bombs and other weapons for its genocidal war in Gaza. “Since October, the U.S. has shipped more that 50,000 tons of weaponry” that Israel calls “crucial for sustaining” the Israel Occupation Forces’ “operational capabilities during the ongoing war.” (tinyurl.com/bdhas46y)

Congress and the executive branch claim to have imposed guidelines on how Israel uses money the U.S. sends, including prohibiting intentional attacks on civilian populations or blocking access to humanitarian aid. Clearly Israel has violated these limits again and again in Gaza and most recently with the dropping of U.S.-supplied 2,000-pound bunker-buster bombs on a residential block in Beirut, Lebanon, killing an estimated 700 civilians and Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah.

So why did Blinken cover up for Israel, and why do Congress and President Joe Biden continue with the charade?

As ProPublica points out the Biden administration established the National Security Memorandum in February 2024 requiring the State Department to investigate Israel’s claims it was not blocking aid. If Blinken reported that the Israelis were arbitrarily blocking civilian access to aid, by law Congress is required to halt military assistance.

Money to Israel buys U.S.-made weapons

One problem was that Israel, having already purchased and employed weapons from U.S. manufacturers, had yet to pay for them.

Of interest in the ProPublica article is that Israel uses the $3.8 billion the U.S. gives it every year and the significantly increased billions of dollars since Oct. 7, 2023, to “buy American-made bombs and equipment.” ProPublica obtained copies of an email thread between a Department of Defense official on April 17 who contacted Mira Resnick, a deputy assistant secretary of the State Department known as the “driving force behind arms sales to Israel.”

The Defense Department official was worried that any withholding of additional millions of dollars in U.S. funds to Israel would keep them from paying its bills to U.S. weapons manufacturers. Adherence to the restrictions of the National Security Memorandum would mean that the billionaire military contractors wouldn’t get their blood money. Resnick’s email to the Counselor of the State Department said: “We need to be able to move the rest of the financing so that Israel could pay off bills for past weapons purchases.”

So just which U.S. arms manufacturers are profiting off the blood of well over 42,000 Palestinians and now nearly 1,000 Lebanese people?

The U.S. company Boeing Defense, Space and Security manufactures the bunker-buster bombs and the guidance systems Israel relies on. Lockheed Martin makes the Multiple Launch Rocket System used to strengthen the IOF ground forces. Ghost Robotics produces the robotic “dogs,” complete with weapons, that Israel uses to patrol areas of northern Gaza.

Northrop Grumman sells extensive amounts of weapons and military technologies to Israel. According to The Mapping Project: “Northrop Grumman is deeply complicit in Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homeland and theft of Palestinian resources. Northrop Grumman developed manned aircraft missile systems, which the Israeli Air Force uses in attacks on Palestinians.

“In collaborative ventures with Lockheed Martin (another major U.S. weapons manufacturer), Northrop Grumman provides Israel with the Longbow System used in Israel’s fleet of Apache AH64D helicopters … and in the production of the F-35 fighter jets. … Northrop Grumman also produces parts used in F-16 fighter jets sold to Israel.” (mapliberation.org)

Israel has employed these and other weapons systems “containing Northrop Grumman component parts in its repeated attacks on densely populated areas in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as in Lebanon. In these attacks, Israel has targeted civilian homes, civilian infrastructure and refugee camps.”

While Biden and Netanyahu are well-deserving of growing global outrage, so too are the millionaires like Boeing’s President and CEO Ted Colbert, Lockheed Martin’s President and CEO Jim Taiclet and Northrop Grumman Chair, CEO and President Kathy Warden, who oversee these killing corporations.

These multibillion-dollar weapons producers have everything to gain from Blinken and Biden’s consistent refusals to put any restrictions on weapons sales to Israel.

The U.S. “money for weapons purchases” is by no means unique to its support of Israel. The billions of dollars that Biden and Congress give to Ukraine is usually in the form of weapons produced by the same U.S. companies profiting off the war in West Asia.