Caterpillar Inc. and the Building Blocks of Israeli Apartheid

The unbounded bloodthirst of American industry is on display everywhere in occupied Palestine. Nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the deadly exchange between Caterpillar and the Israeli Occupation Forces. Caterpillar Inc. lauds itself as “the world’s leading manufacturer of construction and mining equipment” with “sustainable” motives and, coincidentally, $67.1 billion in profits last year. You have almost certainly seen their yellow and black trucks and excavators at a local construction site. “CAT” is without a doubt a corporation with wide reach — so much so that it has huge contracts with the Israeli military. Caterpillar has profited and continues to profit off decades of settler colonialism, apartheid, and the forced displacement of Palestinians. It supplies the material tools Israel uses to build and maintain the apartheid state.

Since the Sinai War in the 1950s, Caterpillar has cultivated a close relationship with Israel, which has frequently financed its purchases with U.S. foreign aid. The IOF’s D9 armored bulldozer, a fortified version of Caterpillar’s standard D9, is especially instrumental in Israel’s project of ethnic cleansing in Palestine. Nicknamed “Teddy Bear,” this machine has been used by the IOF since the 1980s to construct illegal Israeli settlements and border walls around Gaza and the West Bank. Throughout occupied Palestine, Israeli D9s have destroyed countless homes, hospitals, mosques, schools, courthouses, farms, tents, roads, olive groves, irrigation systems, solar panels, and electricity networks. In Rafah in 2003, the American activist Rachel Corrie was run over and killed by a D9 while protesting the demolition of Palestinian homes. In March of this year, Cat’s D9 bulldozers played a key role in the second destruction of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. In this two-week siege, the Israeli army murdered hundreds of Palestinians, who were injured or otherwise sheltering against attacks, some of whose bodies have been found in two mass graves outside the hospital.

Last October, during the first days of the invasion of Gaza, the extensive deployment of the unmanned, remote-controlled D9 bulldozer brought Israel’s cowardice to new heights. The unprecedented move dispatched driverless war machines to destroy homes and attack civilians with remote-controlled weapons — and it was all made possible by Caterpillar’s technologies. Their new model, nicknamed “Panda,” costs upwards of $1 million before the addition of modifications, which can include a mounted machine gun and grenade launcher. The machine is an apt representation of the fascist colonial state of which it is a product: both are massive, U.S.-funded, bulletproof apparatuses, which protect no one.

Any American need only visit the nearest construction site (or playground sandbox) to get a glimpse of Caterpillar Yellow, the corporation’s trademarked shade. Caterpillar’s ubiquitous branding in everyday American life only further demonstrates the causal links between our American capitalism and Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians. With the additional massive purchases of Caterpillar bulldozers by the Israeli Ministry of Defense in November 2023 and another in January 2024, Israel has demonstrated its intent to level and annex the Gaza Strip using American machines. That the same machines that build our bridges and roads in the United States destroy homes and hospitals in Palestine should alert us all of the murderous technologies birthed from here, the heart of the empire.