Early on the morning of July 31, a group of about 70 people arrived at the anodyne office of the cargo company Atlas Air, in White Plains, New York.
They were members of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ)—an activist group that focuses on equity issues in New York City—there to stage a fake “press conference” to highlight the Department of Defense’s contracts with Atlas Air.
A man in a gray pinstripe suit played the CEO of the company, which is the single largest operator of 747 freighter jets in the world. “Atlas Air is so proud to do its part to support the US military,” the actor enthused. “I am especially proud that, through our DoD contracts, Atlas Air has made multiple deliveries to Israel in the last 10 months.” He added with gusto: “As the bombs keep raining on Gaza, the dividends keep raining on our shareholders!”
Those behind him, dressed as pilots complete with sewn-on epaulets, cheered as he held up a graph with a line going up—“more bombs equals higher profits!”
In the following hours, JFREJ launched a spoof website for Atlas, and sent out press releases claiming Atlas “is proud to have been responsible for transporting millions of dollars worth of material to the Israeli military as it bombs Gaza” to trade outlets like AirlineGeeks, Cargo Connect, Transport and Logistics Middle East, and American Military News.
The action is part of a broader push. Protest groups are turning toward a new strategy: beyond focusing on the government, they are targeting the companies that profit off Israel’s war in Gaza.
“We’ve called out, we’ve called in, I mean, we’ve done all that work to reach the decision-makers,” said Audrey Sasson, executive director of JFREJ. “We’ve talked about our Jewish community’s complicity in Israel’s genocide, and we’ve taken action to protest the US government’s culpability, but we haven’t heard enough about the war profiteers—the private companies profiting off of these atrocities.”
As first reported by Haaretz, records show that more than 30 chartered cargo flights were operated by the US Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM) to Nevatim Airbase in Beersheba between October 31, 2023, and March 31, 2024. At least three of those were cargo flights on planes owned by Atlas and leased by the USTRANSCOM, according to a Mother Jones analysis of publicly available flight data. The 747-400 heavy cargo planes flew to the Israeli air base from Cyprus and Germany. An Atlas Air representative said, “I have no information,” when asked if the company supplies weapons to fuel Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.
Without private cargo airlines and private companies, the United States Department of Defense would not be able to send Israel weapons at the rate it currently does. The DoD has sent more than 100 shipments to its ally over the past 10 months, containing weapons such as 2,000 pound bombs, Hellfire missiles, and 500-pound bombs.
Bradley Martin, a researcher at RAND and a former Navy captain, said the airplanes likely carried supplies or weapon parts for the Israel Defense Forces. But it is unlikely that Atlas Air would transport the bombs that get the most publicity. “Preferably, sensitive munitions are not going not going to be moved by commercial air,” he said. “They put them on a military flight because it takes special handling.”
Still, private companies, Martin said, play a key role. “The amount of material that’s required to sustain the force fighting this war is huge,” he said. “The military needs a [shipping] provider more than a provider needs the military.”
A report by the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies, titled “How to Ensure Israel has the Weapons it Needs,” points out why the US government needs these contracts: “According to one senior Pentagon official, the quantity of weapons sent [to Israel] was so significant that the Department of Defense sometimes [has] struggled to find sufficient cargo aircraft to deliver the systems.”
Though relatively unknown, Atlas Air is the third-largest cargo airline in the United States by fleet size. The company received an “indefinite delivery contract” from the military in April 2023 for $20 million. It also received nearly $19 million from New York state in subsidies and property tax abatements, plus more than $600 million in federal loans and guarantees.
JFREJ is not the only activist group setting their sights on Defense Department contractors. Last month, the Palestinian Youth Movement launched a campaign targeting the Danish shipping multinational Maersk, which sends weapons components as a subcontractor to manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin and also contracts directly with USTRANSCOM. A PYM representative said she’s seen enthusiasm for the campaign: “I think people really are hungry to have a set target and something that they can fuel their energy into.”
Maersk, she said, has a robust shipping portfolio outside of military shipments—after all, it’s the second-largest container shipping company in the world. “Economically, they can still sustain themselves if they don’t maintain these contracts,” the PYM organizer added.
Martin said that companies like Maersk and Atlas could “absolutely” remain economically viable without military contracts: They could “survive, and thrive,” he said. That, however, is not true the other way around. The governments need private aid to help with massive war efforts.
Janet Abou-Elias, co-founder of Women for Weapons Trade Transparency, said that the military has strong economic reasons to rely on companies like Atlas. “Outsourcing certain functions to private contractors can be more economical than maintaining large in-house capabilities.” Martin, of RAND, said that this trend goes back to the end of the Cold War. “It really started happening about 1990,” he explained. “DOD cut back on commitments, cut back on infrastructure—and for transportation [it] has started to look more and more to commercial types of sources.”
Maersk and Atlas aren’t the only companies catching heat: Protesters in the US and Australia have demonstrated outside ports by the Israeli shipping company ZIM, which has been sued by a group of Belgian NGOs for violating Belgian arms transport law. Last month, protesters brought the St. Louis Missouri pride parade to a standstill because it was sponsored by the airliner Boeing, which was the top manufacturer of missiles delivered to Israel in 2023, according to an analysis of arms transfer data conducted by NPR station KUOW. This past spring, students at protest encampments across the country demanded that their universities sever ties with Boeing. At least one university, Portland State, agreed to temporarily stop accepting Boeing money.
Atlas has contracted with the DoD, among other government entities, for decades. In the earliest years of the 21st century, Atlas Air’s name was listed among the airlines leasing planes for transit to and from CIA black sites; their aircrafts have flown to and from Guantanamo Bay as recently as 2022.
It is also owned by the private equity firm Apollo Global Management. (Per National Defense Magazine, private equity–owned companies accounted for 47 percent of defense transactions in 2022.) Apollo’s CEO, Marc Rowan, was so vehemently against antiwar campus protesters that he pushed for the removal of the University of Pennsylvania’s president for allowing a festival of Palestinian literature on her campus, which he described as “hate-filled.” He has railed against antiwar protesters, declaring them “anti-American” and “violent.”
“I think those executives going into their office jobs daily can pretend to sort of turn a blind eye to what’s happening in Gaza,” said Sasson of JFREJ. “We will not stand for them making money, millions of dollars off of this genocide.”