Merchants of death – the greatest of all times

JVL Introduction

While absolute figures of a country’s arms exports reveal much about the size of an economy, writes Susan Abulhawa, looking at the figures per head of population tells you what kind of economy it is.

Surprisingly, no-one has crunched the figures before, or not in this way.

Abulhawa’s analysis below shows the quite extraordinary size of the Israeli arms economy per citizen and the transformation of its relationship to the world as a whole over time.

From being the largest importer of arms per head in 1948 it has since the 80s and 90s, become the top exporter.

Using countries’ own reporting of their defence export contracts, “Israel’s arms exports come to about 2.5% of GDP: roughly eight and a half times the size, proportionally, of America’s arms economy, and nearly nine times France’s.

Abulhawa also touches on Israel’s connections with some of the world’s leading atrocity centres  – Rwanda, Bosnia, Myanmar, South Sudan, Congo – as well as its significant position in the global cyber-surveillance market

And its unique selling point, always, is that its weapons have been “battle-tested”.

Abulhawa concludes that “the so-called only democracy in the Middle East is, in fact, the greatest per-capita merchant of death the world has ever known”.

This article was originally published by Susan Abulhawa's Substack on Tue 25 Aug 2026. Read the original here.