Aesthetic geographies of the arms trade in Israel’s war on Gaza

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Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza relies upon a global network of supply and demand in terms of knowledge, hardware, labour, and support. However, this network remains curiously understudied in work on Israel’s militarism in Palestine. This paper intervenes in this gap to explore the role of private arms producers (so-called defence firms) in sustaining Israel’s war machine and to consider how we as geographers might be able to respond to such violence. For the Israeli weapons industry, the war on Gaza has been particularly lucrative with an increase in production, sales, and marketing. Weapons companies are themselves entities whose geographical reach extends far beyond the borders of the nation-state. Israel provides a further useful entry point to such a study due to the proximity the private defence sector has to the state, establishing the country’s reputation as a capital of security ‘expertise’, further collapsing the boundaries between state/non-state, public/private.
Nevertheless, little attention has been paid to how this sector operates as a political actor, how it shapes and is in turn shaped by global geopolitics. Of particular interest here is the way(s) these firms produce knowledge on and about spaces of violence, including Palestine. Thus, with a focus on global arms manufacturers Elbit Systems and the smaller firm SmartShooter, both Israel-based, this paper explores the aesthetics involved in these firms’ advertising and marketing of lethal weaponry, and how spaces of war are imagined, brought into being as spaces that require a particular course of action.