Israel: A Bad Brand in World Markets

CrossFireArabia
Analyses, Opinion
August 27, 2025

By Ramzy Baroud

In an important step toward the economic isolation of Israel due to its genocide in Gaza, Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global has decided to divest from yet more Israeli companies.

Norway’s sovereign wealth fund is the world’s largest, with total investments in Israel once estimated at $1.9 billion. The decision to divest was taken gradually but is consistent with the Norwegian government’s growing solidarity with Palestine and rising criticism of Israel.

Taking a leading role along with Spain, Ireland, and Slovenia, Norway has been a vocal European critic of the Israeli genocide and man-made famine in Gaza, actively contributing to the International Court of Justice’s investigation into the genocide, and formally recognizing the state of Palestine in May 2024. This diplomatic and legal stance, coupled with its financial divestment, represents a coherent and escalating effort to hold Israel accountable for the ongoing extermination of Palestinians.

The Israeli economy was already in a state of free-fall even before the genocide. The initial collapse was related to the deep political instability in the country, a result of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist government’s attempt to co-opt the judicial system, thus compromising any semblance of “democracy” remaining in that country. This resulted in a significant lowering of investor confidence.

The war and genocide, beginning on October 7, 2023, only accelerated the crisis, pushing an already fragile economy to the brink. According to reports from the Israel Ministry of Finance, foreign direct investments in Israel fell by an estimated 28 per cent in the first half of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023.

Any supposed recovery in foreign investments, however, was deceptive. It was not the outcome of a global rallying to save Israel, but rather a consequence of a torrent of US funds pouring in to help Israel sustain both its economy and the genocide in Gaza, along with its other war fronts.

Israel’s Gross Domestic Product was estimated by the World Bank to be around $540 billion by the end of 2024. The war on Gaza has already taken a considerable bite out of Israel’s entire GDP. Estimates from Israel itself are complex, but all data points to the fact that the Israeli economy is suffering and will continue to suffer in the foreseeable future. Citing reports from the Bank of Israel and the Ministry of Finance, the Israeli business newspaper Calcalist reported in January 2025 that the cost of the Israeli war on Gaza had already reached more than $67.5 billion. That figure represented the costs of the war up to the end of 2024.

Keeping in mind that the ongoing war costs continue to rise exponentially, and with other consequences of the war, including divestments from the Israeli market by Norway and other countries, future projections for the Israeli economy look very grim. The Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics reported that the Israeli economy, already in a constant state of contraction, shrunk by another 3.5 per cent in the period between April and June 2025.

This collapse is projected to continue, even with the unprecedented US financial backing of Tel Aviv. Indeed, without US help, the precarious Israeli economy would be in a much worse state. Though the US has always propped up Israel, with nearly $4 billion in aid annually, the US help for Israel in the last two years was the most generous and critical yet.

Israel is the recipient of $3.8 billion of US taxpayer money per year, according to the latest 10-year Memorandum of Understanding signed in 2016. Equally, if not more valuable than this large sum are the loan guarantees, which allow Israel to borrow money at a much lower interest rate on the global market. The backing of the US has, therefore, enabled investors to view the Israeli market as a safe haven for their funds, often guaranteeing high returns. This applies to the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund as it did to numerous other entities and companies.

Now that Israel has become a bad brand, affiliated with unethical investments due to the genocide in Gaza and growing illegal settlement expansion in the West Bank, the US, as Israel’s main benefactor, has stepped in to fill the gaps.

The US emergency supplemental appropriations act of April 2024 allocated a total of $26.4 billion for Israel. While much of the money was earmarked for defense expenditures, in reality, most of it will percolate into the Israeli economy. This amount, in addition to the annual military aid, allows the Israeli government to minimize spending on defense and allocate more money to keep the economy from shrinking at an even faster rate.

Additionally, it will free the Israeli military industry to continue producing new, sophisticated military technology that will ensure Israel’s continued competitiveness in the arms market. The military-industrial complex, a significant part of the Israeli economy, is thus not only sustained but given a fresh impetus by American aid, ensuring the war machine continues to function with minimal financial disruption.

All of this should not diminish the importance of divestment from the Israeli financial system. On the contrary, it means that divestment efforts must increase significantly to balance out the US push to keep the Israeli economy from imploding.

Moreover, this should also make US citizens, who object to their government’s role in the genocide in Gaza, more aware of the extent of Washington’s collaboration to save Israel, even at the price of exterminating the Palestinians. Indeed, the flow of funds from the US is not a passive action; it is an active collaboration that directly enables the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His forthcoming book, ‘Before the Flood,’ will be published by Seven Stories Press. His other books include ‘Our Vision for Liberation’, ‘My Father was a Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The Last Earth’. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

Jordan Times

CrossFireArabia

Dr. Marwan Asmar holds a PhD from Leeds University and is a freelance writer specializing on the Middle East. He has worked as a journalist since the early 1990s in Jordan and the Gulf countries, and been widely published, including at Albawaba, Gulf News, Al Ghad, World Press Review and others.

Opinion

A Middle East Whirlpool! View From Amman

Saleem Ayoub Quna
August 17, 2026

By Saleem Ayoub Quna

Unlike the grey terrain of the Middle East, known for its harsh aridity and barren landscapes, the region’s still-unsettled, multi-front conflicts that erupted after the 7 October, 2023 surprise Palestinian assault on Israeli settlements around Gaza Strip, almost literally, become associated in the public imagination with the colour blue: The sea, its waves, its vessels and its strategic waterways.

The Palestinians called that watershed event Al-Aqsa Flood. Israel described 7 October as a second Holocaust. If the Palestinians deliberately chose the word flood for its religious and symbolic connotations, the Israeli way of describing it, indicated how serious and tough their losses and injuries were.

What followed was a succession of milestones and unprecedented developments across the Middle East. They continue to unfold dramatically, resembling the abrupt and unpredictable movements of hurricanes and tempests on the high seas.

Yet the side-conflicts and mini-wars that followed 7 October have neither followed a single pattern nor obeyed the same rules. Instead, events have moved in different, sometimes opposing directions — unlike the orderly circular motion of an actual whirlpool. It is almost as though every confrontation has chosen a course of its own: The predictable alongside the unpredictable, the rational alongside the seemingly illogical.

It therefore takes more than intelligent guesswork or clever political analysis to determine which direction these events will ultimately take, and which may prove more dangerous — not only to the region and its inhabitants, but also to the many international powers with interests at stake.

If we were to capture the current Middle Eastern scene in a single frame, we might portray it as an extraordinary, almost unbelievable collision of man-made tides, currents and sub-currents, all moving simultaneously through one increasingly turbulent sea.

Because the first shots fired on 7^th October around Gaza strip, from a Palestinian point of view, came as a last desperate call and reminder of the injustice they are suffering, they soon found their echoes in the four corners surrounding it: In south Lebanon, Yemen to the south and Iraq and Iran to the east. Even to the west, there were international sailors who belonged to the Peace Flotilla, trying to bring medicine and food to the starving children of Gaza!

One of the most significant currents emerged on Israel’s northern front.

What initially appeared to be a relatively “controlled” confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah steadily intensified until September 2024, when Israel killed the party’s leader Hassan Nasrallah. Only a few months later came another geopolitical earthquake: The collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Damascus in December 2024.

Each development sent another powerful current through the already boiling waters of the wider Middle Eastern whirlpool.

Then came an even larger artificial wave.

In June 2025, the United States launched Operation Midnight Hammer, striking Iran’s three principal nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan while diplomatic efforts surrounding Iran’s nuclear programme were still underway.

Washington described the operation as an attempt to inflict decisive damage on Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Tehran responded with retaliatory action against American military interests in the Gulf.

But that was not the end of the storm.

On 28 February, 2026, the world witnessed another major escalation when the United States and Israel launched coordinated, large-scale attacks against Iran. The two allies acted jointly but gave their military campaigns different names: Washington called its operation Epic Fury, while Israel called its campaign Roaring Lion.

The strikes hit Iranian military infrastructure and senior leadership and inflicted substantial damage. Yet they failed to produce one of the most far-reaching political outcomes sought by US-Israeli advocates of the military campaign: The toppling of the Iranian regime.

And so the whirlpool continued.

Iran responded not simply through missiles and military retaliation, but by shifting the struggle towards one of the most strategically sensitive waterways on earth: The Strait of Hormuz.

Through restrictions on shipping, attacks on vessels and increasingly assertive claims over the waterway, Tehran transformed Hormuz into another major front in the confrontation. The strait — through which a substantial share of the world’s energy supplies traditionally passes — became yet another current dragging regional powers and the wider international community deeper into the turbulence.

Here, the metaphor of the whirlpool becomes more than literary.

Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, Iraq, the Red Sea, the Arabian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz are no longer easily separable theatres. Each produces currents that flow into the others. A military strike in one location generates political pressure somewhere else; an assassination changes the balance of power hundreds of kilometres away; a blocked shipping lane reverberates through global markets thousands of kilometres beyond the Middle East.

And all the while, new currents are being created faster than old ones can disappear.

What begins on the shores of Gaza does not remain in Gaza. What happens in Beirut, Damascus, Tehran or the Strait of Hormuz does not remain there either.

The Middle Eastern whirlpool has become too wide, too violent and too interconnected to contain its turbulence within the region itself.

And as it keeps spinning, its waves will continue to splash far beyond the shores of the Middle East — reaching, sooner or later, virtually every corner of the globe.

Conclusion: As long as the waters surrounding the Middle East remain crowded with warships, missiles, blockades, retaliatory strikes and the debris of foreign intervention, the region’s old whirlpool will continue to spin.

News Opinion

‘No Need For Your Crocodile Tears’

Heba
August 13, 2026

By Ismail Al Sharif

“I’ll say it frankly: We should have exerted more pressure on Israel to adopt a different approach in Gaza” – Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor to ex-President Joe Biden.

A striking phenomenon is recurring in American politics: Some presidents, cabinet members, and senior officials become more outspoken in their stances toward the Israeli occupation entity after leaving office, expressing regret for decisions that contributed to the injustice inflicted upon the Palestinian people.

This may be due to their liberation from diplomatic and partisan constraints, the pressures of Zionist lobbies, and the influence of tainted money, or perhaps their consciences awaken belatedly as they feel closer to death, realizing the enormity of the injustice they participated in or condoned.

Examples of this are numerous. Among the most prominent is former US President Jimmy Carter, who, after leaving office, shifted from a traditional pro-Zionist rhetoric to criticizing the Israeli occupation and its policies. Then there is Chuck Hagel, former US Secretary of Defense, who held the United States responsible for the Zionists’ continued aggression and described their practices as terrorism— but only after his retirement, of course.

Robert Gates, the former Secretary of Defense, also criticized war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, calling him ungrateful.

More recently, Jake Sullivan, former National Security Advisor, and Antony Blinken, Biden’s lackluster Secretary of State, joined the ranks of those who have expressed regret. Both men have blood on their hands from the blood of Palestinian children and played a shameful role in supporting the Israeli entity during one of the greatest acts of genocide in modern history.

This was revealed in a lengthy investigation published in The New Yorker magazine last 20th July, titled “How Biden Enabled Israel’s Aggression Against Gaza – and Iran,” with the subtitle: “Top officials from the previous Administration now express regret over their failure to rein in Netanyahu.”

However, this regret will not absolve them for they knew full well that the Zionists were committing genocide in Gaza. On 5 March, 2024, five months after the start of the genocide, Mirjana Spoljarić, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), sent a confidential letter to President Biden. The ICRC, in addition to its humanitarian mission, is obligated under the Geneva Conventions to provide states with information and advice to help them avoid committing war crimes.

In her letter, Spoljarić reminded President Biden that the organization had condemned the “horrific” massacre perpetrated by Hamas against Israelis on 7 October 2023 and that it had continued to press the movement “tirelessly” for the release of the “hostages” it was holding.

However, this time she appealed to Biden with “grave concern,” warning that Israel, which had continued to bombard Gaza with heavy munitions since that October, was ignoring the ICRC in an unprecedented manner.

In her letter, she wrote: “The way Israel conducts hostilities is inconsistent with the laws of armed conflict, particularly the obligations to protect civilians, to distinguish between military objectives on the one hand and civilians and civilian infrastructure on the other, to ensure the humane treatment of detainees and the dead, to protect medical facilities and personnel, and to provide and facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid.”

Despite these clear warnings, the United States remained a key partner in the genocide, providing weapons, money, and political and international cover to Israel. And now some of its officials come to shed crocodile tears for the children of Gaza!

I say to them: You have no right to repent now, after all these martyrs, after all these tragedies, to say: “We are sorry, we made a mistake.” You knew, and you had the power to pressure and prevent, but you chose to support, arm, and cover up. You bear the burden of what happened, and the blood of the children of Gaza will haunt you and pursue your names to the dustbin of history.

This piece by Ismail Al Sharif was originally published in the Arabic Addustour daily and reprinted in English in Crossfirearabia.com.

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Israel: A Bad Brand in World Markets

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