To make a killing is to earn a lot of money. It may also simply means to kill. Business articles rarely focus on such overlap. Samer Abdelnour‘s article published in Organization Studies illustrates that in one operating case.

Abdelnour’s article is a normative argument built largely on secondary sources, media investigations, and documentary evidence rather than original fieldwork or systematic data. His subject is what he calls a military-innovation ecosystem. It involves the network of state agencies, arms manufacturers, tech start-ups, universities, research institutes, banks, and venture funds. All sectors work hand in hand to develop, test, and sell weapons.

The article goes beyond the widespread standpoint that the defence procurement is a closed circuit between governments and contractors. Instead, Abdelnour describes how civilian research funding, dual-use technology, and commercial venture capital all feed the same pipeline.

Israel, he argues, is the clearest example of how such an ecosystem works, and how profitable it can be.

Three factors give Israel’s ecosystem its particular capacity, in Abdelnour’s idea.

The first is money and protection. US military aid runs at almost four billion dollars a year, and more than two hundred and fifty billion since 1948. That subsidy is paired with political cover that Abdelnour describes as complete impunity for crimes against humanity. Whatever one makes of the phrasing, the practical effect he identifies is real: an environment in which the costs of violence are externalised and the returns are captured domestically.

The second is conscription. Mandatory service for most Israeli citizens has blurred the line between the military and everything else. Officers from elite cyber-surveillance units move into weapons firms and start-ups. State, military, and private industry share personnel, habits, and assumptions.

The third is the occupation. Six million Palestinians live under a regime of surveillance and control that Abdelnour treats as a testing environment. Weapons and monitoring systems are deployed against a captive population, refined in use, and then marketed abroad as field tested. The phrase is not neutral. It is a sales claim, and the occupation is what generates it.

By 2021, Israeli arms exports had reached 11.2 billion dollars. A 1986 estimate in the New York Times put ten percent of the national workforce in weapons manufacturing and sales. Abdelnour suggests the figure has grown.

Abdelnour believes that Israel did not invent any of this. British violence in Ireland shaped colonial practice across three continents. Techniques refined in the genocide of the Herero, Nama, and San peoples reappeared at industrial scale in the Holocaust. Apartheid South Africa drew on Canada’s treatment of First Nations. Israel itself studied the bantustan model. The genealogy of violence has a long history, and Israel is just part of such broader continuum.

The more consequential shift may be from hardware to infrastructure. Abdelnour points to the project Nimbus, an Israeli program to embed cloud computing and artificial intelligence across state agencies, military and police included. Google and Amazon were brought in through a contract worth 1.2 billion dollars. The Intercept reports that the contract forbids Google and Amazon from checking how their technology is used. It also forbids them from stopping services, even if human rights violations occur.

The reach of that arrangement is not restricted to one country. Google has an estimated 4.3 billion regular users. Amazon reaches some 300 million customers across more than 180 countries. The infrastructure being built for Nimbus is not a niche defence product. It sits close to the plumbing of global commerce. That is what makes the ethical question sharper than a standard arms-trade debate.

Employees at both firms have organized a #NoTechForApartheid campaign against contracts of this kind.

Overall, the Abdelnour’s article doesn’t close the debate. It offers a framework for looking at how innovation is weaponized, and how it applies to a single case. Although the evidence is largely secondary and the argument is openly normative but the set of questions the author raises are urgent and consequnetial.