The Israel Central Bank estimates the cost of the Gaza War to the Israel at $1.4 billion
From Reuters: The month-long Gaza war cost Israel's economy some $1.44 billion (855.51 million British pound), its central bank governor Karnit Flug said on Thursday, citing interim assessments. "The assessment is that it can reach up to around 0.5 percent of GDP, which is up to 5 billion shekels," Flug told Israel's Channel Ten television.
The CCTV has higher projections. They see that the costs of the war to Israel’s economy will accrue to $3 billion.
For Gaza the assessed cost has been at $ 6 billion, according to Haaretz.com
I’ll apply Murphy’s law here where “anything you try to fix will take longer and cost you more than you thought.”
Why? Because of the political economic dimension behind the war.
Of course, wars haven’t just been about damage to property or cost of armaments, the most important costs are people’s lives.
Nonetheless for Israeli politicians “costs” will likely be a less important consideration, why?
Well, because the “costs” to Israel have been financed by the US government via foreign aid.
2015 Foreign Aid has been appraised at $ 3.1 billion, which seems higher than those "cost" assessments.
As the Vox.com reports: (bold mine)
Even Egypt and Pakistan are not, in the grand scheme of things, particularly poor countries. It's just that American foreign aid mostly isn't economic assistance to needy people or needy countries. If it were, India would get more aid than Israel and Haiti would get more aid than Egypt.Instead, the bulk of the money is spent on buying American military equipment, serving as a kind of indirect subsidy to the military-industrial complex. That's part of how a country like Israel that isn't objectively hard-up for money winds up getting more assistance than anyone else. Israel does have a healthy appetite for advanced military hardware, and it's considered a geopolitically reliable nation that can be trusted with it. So American foreign policy is committed to helping Israel maintain a qualitative military advantage vis-à-vis other Middle Eastern countries. Meanwhile, part of the Carter-era Camp David Accords is a guarantee of a lot of money to the Egyptian military to keep it favorably disposed to a pro-American foreign policy and détente with Israel.
The incentive to go to war is there because of subsidies provided to the Israel government. Consequently, such subsidies enriches the highly influential US military industrial complex. Take away those phony "foreign aid" and the incentive to go to war will most likely diminish. Perhaps the warring parties will learn how to use the markets and trade in order to develop cooperation instead of destroying each other.
And you can also see, foreign aid "flows" reveal that the US hasn’t been helping the poor, but rather helping nations allied to their goals of promoting their role as de facto “global policeman” regardless of their economic conditions.
And it could even be interpreted that the Gaza war could signify a proxy-surrogate war by the US channeled through Israel.
Read more about the modern roots of Israel-Arab conflict from the dean of the Austrian school of economics Murray N. Rothbard here
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