DURING a Times Radio interview last week, the newspaper’s defence editor Larisa Brown confirmed that the British state had hired US contractors to carry out surveillance flights over the Gaza Strip.

The revelation came as the mainstream media at last deigned it appropriate to question the participation of the British military in Israel’s genocide. For well over 180,000 Palestinians — and the one in three people in Gaza who today go days on end without eating anything at all — the attention of the Guardian, the Daily Mail and others came 22 months too late.

Brown’s comments, however, indicated something more than the failings of Britain’s so-called fourth estate: our government has privatised its role in Israel’s war crimes. US mercenaries are not just shooting starving Palestinians queuing for aid, they’re carrying out surveillance from the skies on Keir Starmer’s orders.

The British state, of course, is not just complicit in the genocide. It is a willing participant, having flown daily reconnaissance flights over Gaza since October 2023. In seeking to obscure this contribution to the erasure of the Palestinian people, it is hardly surprising that the British government should look to private contractors, who enjoy an even greater level of impunity than the military itself.

In September 2007, a Blackwater convoy of four armed vehicles opened fire on passing civilians in Nisour Square, Baghdad. The city’s “Bloody Sunday” left 17 people dead and more than 20 seriously injured. The Iraqi government called the attack an act of “deliberate murder.” Blackwater, with the support of the US State Department, insisted that its mercenaries acted in self-defence.

By the time of the massacre, Blackwater — then the world’s most powerful private army — had won more than $1 billion worth of State Department contracts to prop up Washington’s illegal occupation of Iraq.

More than half of these contracts were awarded without competition or tender. Weeks later, when Blackwater’s CEO Erik Prince testified before Congress, he was not asked a single question about Nisour Square.

Under the auspices of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the barbarism that Blackwater once sought to practise in private has been afforded the explicit support of the Western world. “It’s a killing field,” said one soldier of the aid distribution site at which they were stationed.

At least 550 starving Palestinians were killed by US mercenaries in June, according to former EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell — hardly a man likely to overstate casualties given his decades-long commitment to policing the borders of the European “garden.”

The British government insists that a “shortage of British aircraft” motivated its decision to outsource surveillance flights. However, when Labour ministers are told by Conservative backbenchers that they could soon “end up in The Hague” — as David Lammy was last month — self-interest takes over.

While Britain’s subjugation to the United States dictates that, for as long as Washington’s weapons flow to Tel Aviv, British surveillance flights must continue, Lammy and his colleagues now seek to distance themselves, however they can. To do so, they have enlisted a subsidiary of one of the world’s largest military contractors, the Sierra Nevada Corporation (SRC).

A central component of the global war machine, the SRC struck a strategic collaboration agreement with Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) to manufacture specialist drones for the US military market in 2018. What’s more, only last year, the SRC won a $13bn contract from the Department of the Air Force to construct the “doomsday planes” that would fly during a nuclear war.

Now, that same company has been paid with public money to support a genocide which the overwhelming majority of the British public — and now even the Daily Express — oppose.

It is perhaps appropriate that the corporation building “doomsday planes” — for the moment humanity faces imminent extinction — should today scan the skies above hell on Earth, where 100 per cent of the population faces starvation.

The explicit privatisation of the Gaza genocide reaffirms what the Palestinians have long known to be true. For global capital, their erasure is an experiment. As Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah noted in May 2024, Gaza is “the laboratory in which imperialism is looking at the management of surplus populations.”

In the past decade alone, US and EU-imposed economic sanctions — a weapon Woodrow Wilson described as “more tremendous than war” — have killed approximately 560,000 people globally every year.

As imperialism looks to escalate this structural violence amidst worsening scarcity, Israel’s genocide proves instructive.

If, in the era of mass communication, when thousands of humanitarian aid trucks sit idle at the Rafah Crossing, one corporation can be allowed to massacre more than 500 Gazans in 30 days while another simultaneously polices the skies overhead, what hope can there be for humanity elsewhere in the world?

This is why the question of Palestinian liberation is central to the broader struggle against imperialism.

The profits of companies like Blackwater — now rebranded and whitewashed as Constellis Holdings — and the Sierra Nevada Corporation are sustained, more than anything else, by state subsidy.

Indeed, 40 per cent of the UK’s £37.6bn military equipment budget was funnelled to just 10 multinational companies in 2023/2024.

This figure will only grow as Keir Starmer looks to increase defence spending at the expense of Britain’s social wage.

As the mass starvation of the Palestinian people forces even the most subservient members of Britain’s political and media class to exhibit some empathy, the question of corporate participation in Israel’s crimes must not be forgotten. As Francesca Albanese has said, “if Gaza were a crime scene, it would have the fingerprints of all of us.”

Keir Starmer and David Lammy think, like Tony Blair before them, that by deferring to arms-length corporations, they can escape accountability. The task of all those who believe in human dignity is to ensure that does not happen.