The GOAT Merchant of Death

How Israel became the largest per-capita weapons hustler the world has ever known.

Years ago, I came across a graph showing the top ten weapons exporters in the world. The Jewish colony of Israel, sat somewhere in the lower half of the list among major world powers—the United States, China, Russia, Italy, Germany, and so on. On the face of it, the graph seemed unremarkable, but it still struck me, because Israel sat in league with countries that have far bigger populations, land mass, and economies that dwarfed the so-called Jewish state. I did some digging initially to see what that list looked like when normalized per capita and per GDP, but there was only anecdotal evidence. No comprehensive study had been conducted until I did one myself in 2021, for that year’s Edward Said Memorial Lecture.

What I found was shocking, and although the recording of that lecture sat for years on YouTube, it received little attention. This article is an update of that study.

DISCLAIMER & LIMITATIONS

First, a disclaimer and note about the limitations of this study. Whereas I conducted the previous study’s calculations across large databases using a combination of Excel formulas and extensive manual adjustments for changing country names (USSR to Russia, for instance) and the emergence of new countries (especially following the fall of the Soviet Union), this update was done with the help of artificial intelligence, with manual quality-assurance review of every figure that appears below.

All weapons-transaction data were obtained from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)—the most widely cited open-source database on the global arms trade, and the same source I used in 2021. It has real limits, however. SIPRI only tracks major conventional weapons—aircraft, armor, missiles, air-defense systems, sensors, ships—and explicitly excludes small arms, ammunition, services, training, and most drone, cyber, and surveillance exports, which are leading Israeli exports. Every figure in this piece is therefore a floor, not a ceiling. Countries also differ enormously in how transparent they are about their own arms industries, and Israel is among the opaquest of any major exporter: it publishes no client list, no deal-by-deal breakdown, and no figure at all for its drone, cyber, and surveillance exports—only a single annual aggregate dollar total from the Ministry of Defense, and only recently. That means the true scale of Israel’s weapons economy is greatly understated here. A full methodology, including exactly how the per-capita and per-GDP figures were calculated and where each country’s own government reporting was used instead of or alongside SIPRI, is at the end of this article.

THE DATA

Data for 2026 is not yet available, but based on SIPRI numbers for 2025, Israel exported roughly $263 worth of weapons for every Israeli citizen (Figure 1). Since Israeli law distinguishes and privileges Jewish citizens compared to non-Jewish citizens, calculated against Israel’s Jewish population alone, the same figure works out to be a staggering $340 per Jewish citizen.

The United States, which supplies more weapons than any other country, exported about $41 per person that same year. For Russia, that number was $14 (Russia just falls outside Figure 1’s top-12 cutoff, ranking 13th that year at $13.52 per capita), and Norway, another country that regularly shows up near the top of this list, exported $74. In other words, Israeli arms exports per capita in 2025 were roughly six times greater than United States, and nineteen times greater than Russia (on a per-Jewish citizen basis, it comes to roughly eight times and twenty-five times, respectively). This is not a one-year fluke, but rather the norm, as data stretching back to 1960 confirm.

Figure 1. Arms exports per capita, top 12 exporters, 2025 (preliminary). Source: SIPRI Arms Transfers Database (Jun 2026) · World Bank SP.POP.TOTL.

The trick is in the denominator

Every year, calculations of “the world’s biggest arms exporters” include mostly the same culprits: the United States, Russia, France, China, Germany, Italy. Israel also shows up in the list, consistently but unremarkably, on that list. In SIPRI’s ranking of total arms exports from 2020 through 2025, Israel comes in seventh, behind the US, France, Russia, Germany, China, and Italy.

That ranking is true, and it is also close to meaningless, because it compares a country of 10 million people to a country of 340 million and a country of 1.4 billion as if population were irrelevant to the size of an arms industry. Divide the same six years of export data by population, and the list tells a very different story.

Figure 2. The same 2020–2025 export data, ranked two ways. Source: SIPRI Arms Transfers Database (Jun 2026) · World Bank SP.POP.TOTL.

The pattern is consistent across all years examined. Figure 2 shows the average rankings in the most recent five years. On the left, ranked by absolute values, Israel is in the lower part of the top eight, well behind the major powers. The right panel shows what the data looks like when the identical underlying data is divided by population size. The Jewish colony exports arms at roughly 2.5 times the per-person rate of Norway, the runner-up, and more than 3 times the rate of the United States.

Whereas the absolute figures reveal the size of an economy, the per-capita figures tell you what kind of economy it is. A country Israel’s size having the world’s most weapons-intensive economy per capita is unprecedented. It takes decades of specific policy choices that reveal Israel not as a country like other countries, but as a colonial military construct cloaked in nationhood.

Twenty-five year aggregate of death and surveillance exports.

The five-year data above is not an exception, nor is the 2025 single year data. For every year in the past twenty-five, Israel is either the top exporter per capita in the world, usually by a large margin, or very close to it. Averaged into more five-year windows, Figure 3 shows Israel in the lead in each time period, even as other countries change in ranking. Sweden, Russia, and Switzerland show up repeatedly; Montenegro spikes into second place in the late 2000s on the strength of a tiny population and a handful of large post-independence deals; Norway only cracks the top tier in the most recent window. Whoever is in second place, Israel’s lead over them is significant, never disappears, and widens sharply in the most recent decade.

Figure 3. Israel vs. each period’s own top five rivals, five-year period averages, 2000–2025—ranked independently per period, so the field of rivals changes. Source: SIPRI Arms Transfers Database (Jun 2026) · World Bank SP.POP.TOTL.

Israel’s beginnings as the top importer.

When the Jewish colony was established in 1948, it did not start as an arms exporter, but rather, as the world’s largest arms importers per capita, absorbing French, British, and American weapons to build a military on land its founding generation of European Zionist colonizers had just conquered and taken. We have data starting in 1960, samples of which are shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4. Israel, top arms importer per capita, selected early years. Source: SIPRI Arms Transfers Database (Jun 2026) · World Bank SP.POP.TOTL.

The reversal to becoming a net exporter happened over roughly two decades in the 1980s and 1990s, visualized in Figure 5, which shows the trajectory of Israel as a militarized colony in the heart of West Asia and North Africa, moving from the world’s leading weapons importer per capita as it waged a series of wars against its neighbors from its inception, to becoming the world’s leading weapons exporter per capita.

Figure 5. Israel’s per-capita arms imports (left axis) and exports (right axis), 1960–2025. Source: SIPRI Arms Transfers Database (Jun 2026) · World Bank SP.POP.TOTL.

Imports (the blue line, left axis) dominate the first two and a half decades—spiking hardest around the 1973 war, when the United States ran an emergency airlift to resupply Israeli forces mid-conflict. Exports (the red line, right axis) were negligible until the late 1960s and then climbed steadily, overtaking imports as the structural pattern by the 1990s, and then breaking sharply upward after 2015, corresponding to so-called Operation Protective Edge, when the Jewish colony relentlessly bombed Gaza for fifty-one days, killing over 2000 people, injuring over 10,000, mostly children, and destroying vital medical, housing, water, and electricity infrastructure.

A recent database called DIMSE (the Database of Israeli Military and Security Exports) was created as a comprehensive open-source repository designed to bypass state secrecy surrounding Israeli weapons sales to show where weapons are being exported.

The moving plot in Figure 6 goes deeper, tracing Israel’s imports and exports year by year since 1960 against other countries. Imports per capita are plotted on the x-axis and exports per capita on the y-axis across sixty-five years of data. Israel’s path starts in the bottom-right corner—a leading weapons importer, absorbing far more than it sold, and it ends at the top-left, beyond any other country on the exports axis.

Figure 6. Fifteen exporters and importers, animated 1960–2025—watch Israel (glowing red) climb and hold the top of the exports axis. Source: SIPRI Arms Transfers Database (Jun 2026) · World Bank SP.POP.TOTL.

Norway is the only other country whose path rhymes with Israel as a meaningful importer and exporter at once. Norway, however, is a wealthy nation with a small population of 5.5 million that serves as a NATO hub purchasing and selling conventional weapons consistent with international law. Israel is categorically different. Its arms are a structural pillar of their society and economy. It imports to field-test, then exports for a premium what has been tested on a captive indigenous civilian population. There’s also a huge quantitative difference in arms dealings between these two countries. Figure 7 puts them side by side to clarify the extraordinary scale of Israeli arms dealings set against the only other consistent top importer and exporter of weapons.

Figure 7. Israel vs. Norway, arms imports (x-axis) against exports (y-axis) per capita, animated 1960–2025. Source: SIPRI Arms Transfers Database (Jun 2026) · World Bank SP.POP.TOTL.

Widen the lens to the full sixty-five years tracked in SIPRI data, and Israel’s lifetime average—$56 per person, per year, across every year since 1960—is still the highest of any exporting nation on record (Figure 8).

Figure 8. Lifetime average per-capita exports, 1960–2025, top 10. Source: SIPRI Arms Transfers Database (Jun 2026) · World Bank SP.POP.TOTL.

What the GDP numbers add

Per-capita figures weigh a country’s arms trade against its population size. Arms exports as a share of GDP reveals something related but distinct—namely, how much of a country’s economy the weapons trade represents. It’s important to note here (expanded in the methodology) that GDP represents a country’s total movement of money and goods—consumption, spending, imports, exports, and so on.

Using SIPRI’s figures alone, Israel’s arms exports were about 0.25% of GDP in 2023—already the highest ratio among major exporters, more than three times France’s and more than six times the United States’ (Figure 9).

However, as stated previously (and noted also in the methodology section below), the limitations of SIPRI’s index vastly underestimate actual arms trades. So, the numbers are sufficient to compare across countries because the data collections are consistent, but not to estimate the true scale of weapon dealings. Israel’s own Ministry of Defense publishes a separate, broader figure every year covering all defense exports, including the categories SIPRI does not count (drones, cyber warfare, ammunitions, small arms). For 2023, Israel’s government reported $13.0 billion in signed export contracts (compare against SIPRI’s $1.27 billion for the same year). Measured against GDP using each country’s own official reporting (the fairest way to compare governments’ self-reported totals on an apples-to-apples “contracts signed” basis), 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 (Figure 9).

Figure 9. Arms exports as share of GDP, SIPRI vs. official national reporting, 2023. Sources: SIPRI Arms Transfers Database (Jun 2026, sipri.org/databases/armstransfers) · World Bank GDP (data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD) · Israel MoD/SIBAT · US State Dept FY2023 (state.gov) · French/German/UK/Swedish government reports 2023 (full links in Methodology, below).

Whichever of the two measures you use, the ranking doesn’t change, only the margin. A country with roughly 0.1% of the world’s population accounts for the world’s biggest arms-exporting economies by volume and by population.

The business logic

Israeli arms executives have described openly and explicit that the horrific violence they perpetrate against Palestinians are part of a business model. In the 2013 documentary The Lab (directed by Yotam Feldman), Israeli arms executives describe how each round of violence against Palestinians is marketing material for the next export cycle. Industry leaders made it clear that being “field-tested” is what gives Israeli weapons the greatest edge over their competitors. In other words, there’s great profit to be made by testing their weapons on Palestinian bodies in Gaza or the West Bank before taking them to market.

For example, the Hermes 900 drone was still in evaluation when Israel used it extensively during the 2014 attack on Gaza. Three weeks after that barbaric onslaught ended, that drone was the marquee product at Israel Unmanned Systems trade show, promoted specifically for its combat performance. Just one month after Israel launched a genocidal war on the people of Gaza, Michael Mor, CEO of the Israeli weapons startup Smartshooter, referred to the assault on Gaza, which had already killed over 10,000 and injured 22,000 people in just the first month, as “the finest hour of the defense industries.” In the years since October 2023, Israeli weapons firms have made windfall profits from hustling “combat-proven” systems tested on Palestinians in Gaza at international arms fairs and investor calls, as documented in the +972Mag article, “Gaza War Offers the Ultimate Marketing Tool for Israeli Arms Companies.”

Israel has distinguished itself from most weapons exporters, who generally test their weapons on ranges, by marketing their death machines used against captive indigenous civilian populations next door. The numbers reflect this pattern, with the volume of exports rising sharply after every major military assault against its neighbors or native Palestinians (Figure 10): 1982 “Operation Peace for Galilee,” Lebanon; 2009 “Operation Cast Lead,” Gaza); 2014 “Operation Protective Edge,” Gaza; and others also shown in Figure 9.

What makes the current period different from those earlier spikes is duration: from 2022 through the preliminary 2025 figures, exports haven’t come back down. It’s the longest sustained surge in the sixty-five-years, which began in 2022, a full year before October 7, first driven European rearmament following the Ukraine war and the Abraham Accords-era sales to Gulf countries; then propelled to unprecedented levels by the carnage Israel has been inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza and increasingly now in Lebanon and the West Bank.

Figure 10. Israel’s per-capita arms exports, 1960–2025, with the post-operation spikes labeled. Every prior surge subsided within a few years; the 2022–2025 surge has not. Source: SIPRI Arms Transfers Database (Jun 2026) · World Bank SP.POP.TOTL.

Adjacent to the hardware trade is a surveillance-technology sector that SIPRI’s index doesn’t measure at all. Israeli firms are estimated to control roughly a fifth of the global cyber-surveillance market. The most-documented example is NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, which was found installed on the phones of multiple heads of state, more than a hundred journalists, and dozens of human-rights defenders across at least ten countries, and which forensic investigators tied to the surveillance of contacts around journalist Jamal Khashoggi before his 2018 murder in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. When an Israeli human-rights lawyer, Itay Mack, petitioned the country’s High Court in 2016 to review NSO’s export license, the court declined, with the Chief Justice noting that “our economy as it happens rests not a little on that export.”

Atrocities on the receiving end, covered up by Israeli courts

Israeli courts have been instrumental in covering up the extent of Israel’s involvement not just in surveillance, but also in some of the worst horrors and crimes against humanity around the world. Israeli human-rights lawyer Eitay Mack and historian Yair Auron spent years petitioning Israel’s High Court for the release of arms-export records tied to some of the late twentieth century’s worst atrocities. The court’s refusals themselves are damning evidence.

• Rwanda. During the Rwandan genocide, in which roughly 800,000 people were killed over 100 days in 1994, a documented arms shipment reached the country two weeks after the killing began. One of the arms dealers involved was unrepentant, boasting“I’m actually a doctor—because the weapons I provided helped the victims die quickly.” Mack’s petition to declassify the full record was refused on national-security grounds.

• Bosnia. Israel opened an embassy in Belgrade and signed arms agreements with Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević’s government in 1992, during the Bosnian war and after the UN Security Council had already imposed an arms embargo against Serbia (UN Security Council Resolution 713, imposed in September 1991). The wartime diary of General Ratko Mladić’s recorded Israeli transfers of arms and training, which was entered into evidence at his tribunal for the Bosnian genocide in The Hague. Activists petitioned Israel’s High Court to unseal the records of the extent of Israel’s involvement in that genocide, and rejected the petition without informing the petitioners.

• Myanmar. Israeli weapons sales to Myanmar’s military continued after the US and EU had already imposed embargoes over the campaign against the Rohingya; that record, too, was sealed and the courts refused access.

• South Sudan. Retired Israeli general Israel Ziv used charitable housing company as a front to broker more than $150 million in weapons sales to South Sudan while a UN arms embargo was in place during a civil that killed an estimated 500,000 people.

• Congo. Mining overlord Dan Gertler, grandson of the founder of Israel’s [blood] diamond exchange, for years used arms and cash that fomented horrific atrocities in order to exploit Congo’s resource rich mines. Global Witness described Gertler’s actions as looting Congo “at the expense of its people.” Gertler is a major funder of illegal Jewish-only settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank.

• Blood diamonds. Billionaire diamond magnate Lev Leviev, whose companies have faced documented human-rights allegations tied to diamond sourcing in Angola, is also one of the largest funders of Israeli settlement construction on Palestinian land in the West Bank. Separately, Shmuel Schnitzer—Moshe Schnitzer’s son, Dan Gertler’s uncle, and a former president of the Israel Diamond Exchange—is likewise implicated in the trade of blood diamonds and personally blocked a 2015 World Diamond Council proposal to widen the Kimberley Process’s definition of “conflict diamond” to cover stones tied to human-rights abuses by security forces, calling the change “disastrous” for Israel.

None of these deals show up in the SIPRI database or per-capita charts prepared here, and that’s part of the overall story. The visible, SIPRI-tracked trade is the tip of the iceberg, and even that small tip positions the Jewish colony of ten million people as the leading per capita merchant of death.

The mathematical contours of genocide.

Israel is today committing a genocide in full view of the world, and they’re making big money doing it. Arriving at this point was not accidental, but by decades-long political choices that were institutionally predicated on supremacist dominance through sustained, systematic terror. The contours of these policies can be traced mathematically. The absolute numbers say Israel is a mid-sized arms exporter, unremarkable next to the giants. The per-capita numbers, checked six different ways across sixty-five years of the same public database, make it clear that no country on earth has built an arms economy this large relative to the number of people living in it, and that it has held that position for essentially the entire of its existence. And for the entirety of the twenty first century so far, it has launched wars and pummeled indigenous Palestinians to test new weapons for “filed tested” premium label, and film the devastation they wreak on civilians for product demonstrations.

Israel, Jewish colony planted in the heart of West Asia and North Africa, the so-called only democracy in the Middle East is, in fact, the greatest per-capita merchant of death the world has ever known.

METHODOLOGY

As promised at the top of this article, here is the complete methodology behind every figure and chart above.

Primary source: SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) Arms Transfers Database, downloaded June 2026 (available at sipri.org/databases/armstransfers), covering all 134 recorded exporting states/entities and all years 1960–2025 (2025 figures are SIPRI’s preliminary release). SIPRI’s core unit is the Trend Indicator Value (TIV), a standardized index of the military capability transferred in a given deal, based on the known production cost of a reference set of weapons systems. It is explicitly not a financial or contract value; it is designed for consistent relative comparison across countries and years. TIV covers major conventional weapons (aircraft, armored vehicles, artillery, missiles, air-defense systems, sensors, ships) and explicitly excludes small arms, ammunition, services, training, and—until very recently and only partially—drones, cyber tools, and surveillance technology. TIV can reasonably be called dollar-adjacent—it is denominated in the same units used throughout this piece and moves with the real scale of a transaction—but it is not dollar-equivalent: it is built from standardized reference costs for each weapon type, not the actual price either party paid.

Population and GDP: World Bank World Development Indicators (SP.POP.TOTL and NY.GDP.MKTP.CD, current USD; SP.POP.TOTL is the World Bank’s total-population indicator code and NY.GDP.MKTP.CD is its GDP-at-market-prices-in-current-USD code), downloaded June 2026 (data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL and data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD). Per-capita figures = (SIPRI TIV in millions × 1,000,000) ÷ population for that year. GDP-share figures = (SIPRI TIV in millions × 1,000,000) ÷ GDP (current USD) × 100. For dissolved states (the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia) and years before a successor state’s population data exists, UN World Population Prospects historical estimates were used. GDP measures a country’s total economic activity—all spending, investment, consumption, and trade combined—not its government budget or military capacity. That is why any single industry, arms exports included, will always look small as a share of GDP even when it is highly consequential in absolute dollar terms or as a share of a specific sector such as manufacturing or exports.

Official government figures (used in the GDP-share comparison, Figure 9) come from each country’s own annual arms-export reporting for 2023: Israel’s Ministry of Defense/SIBAT press release; the US State Department’s FY2023 U.S. Arms Transfers and Defense Trade report (state.gov); France’s Rapport au Parlement sur les exportations d’armement (defense.gouv.fr); Germany’s Rüstungsexportbericht (bundeswirtschaftsministerium.de); the UK’s Defence Export Statistics (gov.uk/government/statistics/uk-defence-export-statistics-2023); and the Swedish government’s annual report on strategic export control, compiling Inspectorate for Strategic Products data (regeringen.se). All countries used “contracts or orders signed” as the basis, which is the most directly comparable figure across countries.

Rankings for any given year or window use every country with reported SIPRI data for that period—no fixed country list, so entries appear and disappear as the underlying trade does. The lifetime (1960–2025) per-capita ranking (Figure 8) uses a fixed 66-year denominator for every country, so short-lived or newly independent states with a handful of very large per-capita years do not distort the top of that particular list the way they can distort a shorter window. In other words, each country’s entire 1960–2025 export total is divided by the same 66 years regardless of how many of those years it actually exported anything, so a country that had one enormous year but no other arms trade ranks the way its full history warrants, rather than the way a handful of its busiest years alone would suggest. However, there is one exception this this rule: Russia is treated as a continuous entity with the Soviet Union—its seat of power was never in question—so Figure 8 splices the USSR’s own export data and population through 1991 with the Russian Federation’s own data from 1992 onward, without ever substituting Russia’s smaller post-1991 population onto the Soviet era. Ukraine, Belarus, Uzbekistan and the other former Soviet republics are not part of that merger; their histories begin only at independence. Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, by contrast, fragmented without a single continuing seat of power, so both remain in Figure 8 as their own separate entries rather than being folded into any successor state.

Further limitations. As stated previously, the gap between SIPRI’s figures and any government’s self-reported total is mostly due to the limited counting and access of SIPRI to all weapons trades. The per capita rankings establish relative economic scale of weapons dealings, which is what this piece is about. Lastly, the TIV “dollar-adjacent” values from SIPRI are not inflation-adjusted. SIPRI’s Trend Indicator Value is pegged to a fixed set of reference weapon costs from a constant base period, so every chart in this piece compares capability across years on an apples-to-apples basis, not cost-of-living—a “$100 per person” year in 1975 and a “$100 per person” year in 2025 represent the same amount of military hardware, not the same purchasing power.