Who Knew Genocide Could Be So Expensive?
August 24, 2026
Genocide isn’t cheap! As a strategy, genocide of Palestinians and Lebanese citizens in southern Lebanon – Israels’s words, not mine – is more costly than you would think.
There is a price for genocide: in lives, dead and dying children and whole generations ended, the mass demolition of buildings great and small, elimination of historic sites and newly constructed apartments, the crushed landscape, water and plumbing systems below the horizon and wasted industry and unrecoverable agricultural lands above it. We’ve watched it in Gaza for nearly three years, it’s live in Lebanon now, and growing in the West Bank. Genocide is paid for in non-standard debt, non-transferrable mortgages, bringing not only moral bankruptcy, but financial as well.
The US Government – yoked to the Israeli thugacracy for 70 years – uses a different kind of appraiser; a niche service provider no American would hire, and no 21st century American would understand. Our appraisers share with us the greatest value for our homes, businesses, lands and human potential: for the US Government and Israel, the appraiser’s eye seeks only vacant rubble, poisoned land, leveled hills and artificial berms, life vaporized and skeletons ground to dust.
It should have been so easy. Instead of decades of slow starvation and economic strangulation punctuated by air and tank assaults to “mow the grass” in Gaza, Israel would “save money” by ending Gaza as a Palestinian enclave and open air concentration camp by murdering all the people in one operation. October 7th, 2023 as Charlie Kirk and a billion other people on the planet suspected at the time, was a calculated arrangement, a false flag operation, to create a pretense of Hamas viciousness so egregious that the population would back a full blown war – in this case a carefully engineered genocide of an occupied people, a land steal as permanent solution to a security problem that strangely, continues to mystify most Israelis and their Washingtonian vassals.
While the rapes and beheadings conducted on the fly by Hamas on hang gliders were Israeli fantasy, the air attacks of the IDF on their own people were unfortunately not. This operational cost, alongside that of Netanyahu’s purposeful failure to retrieve the Israeli prisoners of war, are just a small part of the war ignited on October 7th.
Israel is awakening to the budgetary and security cost of the genocide. Gaza operations alone over the past three years consumed over $136 billion, adding $130 billion to the Israel national debt. For perspective, for 55 years (between 1970 and 2025) the Israeli government spent an average of $39 billion a year. This average shockingly includes the first 18 months of Gaza genocide expenses as well as the many wars since 1970 – the Yom Kippur War (1973), war with Lebanon (1971 to 2000), first and second Intifadas (1987-1993 and 2000-2005), Israel-Hezbollah War (2006), wars on Gaza in 2008, 2012, and 2014, and bombing campaigns against Lebanon, Syria and Iran in 2024 and 2025. It includes the cost of unending settlement expansion, and general defense.
Against this backdrop of state spending, the 2025 budget was nearly four times above average, at over $150 billion. The cost of never-ending war does fall on Israelis despite massive US taxpayer gifts to Israel of $21.7 billion in military aid since October 7th, 2023, and US local governments and pensions buying nearly $2 billion in Israeli state bonds. Understandably, budget issues and the cost of genocide are topics of debate in the ongoing campaigns to control the Knesset.
Are there ways to save money and still erase the Gazans, occupy South Lebanon and destroy the West Bank? This is the big question for the Israeli government, and one they are trying hard to answer. For example, what is the cost of starving them and leaving them unsheltered and unaided for the third winter in a row? Almost 18 months ago, Dr Marc Perlmutter observed how this works: “Leaving Gaza, [Perlmutter] …saw a line of aid trucks stretching roughly 31 miles, eight abreast, with food rotting inside as Israel blocked them from entering…That is enough to surround Gaza three to five times with trucks of supplies that Israel was not letting in.”
31 miles of aid trucks, 8 trucks wide, held back from entering Gaza. Economic blockades, while acts of war, can be cost effective if the focus of the blockade is limited and geographically controllable – and no one fights back or evades. Israel’s long blockage of food and supplies into Gaza is well established, for decades, and while murderous and immoral, siege warfare, aka war of attrition, often works until it is broken, collapses, or the target of the siege gives up.
Israel has preferred wars of attrition, from a position of relative wealth, unquestioned aid from the United States and Britain, and a well-developed war footing. Preferring, however, is not the same as preparing: Israel has drained its ammunition, equipment, defensive capability and its soldiers with apparently little forethought. Netayahu’s platform of “genocide everywhere” is damaged goods. Increasingly his coalition is becoming the face of Israeli failure, and everyone, from the neighbors to the Israeli taxpayers, seems to agree.
The debt is real. The murderous destruction of Gaza, and now southern Lebanon, is real, and the costs to maintain that destruction, prevent recovery – or outlandishly, rebuild as an Israeli paradise, is unimaginable. Oxfam puts forth a rebuilding cost at $71 Billion with Gazans included, which clearly defeats the purpose of the genocide. More honestly, the Trump Gaza Riviera plan, envisioning Gazans emigrated, dead, or in concentration camps to be used for cheap labor, will cost $100 Billion, with a Nazi-esque note that each Gazan (man, woman or child) who leaves (or dies) saves the US and Israel another $23 million.
Each luxury trip to Washington by Netanyahu funded by 17 dead Gazans. How long can this math work?
$23 million per snuffed civilian may help us understand the persistent shooting and bombing of noncombatants and children by IDF soldiers and US contractors, beyond sheer psychopathy and perversion.
“Saving $23 million” per corpse is no investment plan. But it is eerily similar to the rhetoric we hear from our global overlords, regarding useless eaters. Clearly, the unsound math of mass death is of interest to certain sectors of society.
Israel’s example reveals it is not so cheap and easy to destroy life and land. Regardless of the level of scientific objectivity and mathematical calculations exercised to guarantee success, the proof is in the pudding. Israel’s security, economy and military is weaker than ever before, its dependence on America greater, and its prospects for peace massively diminished. Having gambled its future on ever-expanding genocide, and working up a lather in the language of civilizational destruction – theirs and that of their enemies – Zionist Israel is in a pickle.
The Israeli project in Palestine is failing before our eyes. Animalistic greed and panic has driven Israel into a box canyon, and there is no way out. Israelis have been contaminated spiritually and intellectually by their past choices, by generations of carefully cultivated racism and arrogance, and they are no longer able to live beside, or with, anyone in the region.
It is for this reason I expect that Israel will reformulate itself, and move on to more receptive climates in Patagonia and Peru, in Canada and the US, leaving a smaller population of financially insolvent tribalists to make their last stand in Palestine, and to eventually live as a tiny despicable minority under a Palestinian state.
The open investment in death, and the permanent intentional destruction of the land and environment by a tiny population of politically divided and deranged Israelis conveys to many observers that Israelis, 75% of whom are not Semitic, and 66% are allergic to olive trees, really don’t intend to stay. For now, they behave like dogs in mangers, because they can. Shitting where you eat is not a national security strategy, and Israel’s state weapon of genocide looks more and more like a boomerang.
