Genocide as a business: How corporations and states profit from the destruction of Gaza
A new UN report by Francesca Albanese reveals how global entities are complicit in Israel’s occupation and genocide, fuelling the unbridled violence and exploitation.
There is now a UN imprimatur on something that we have known all along: the ongoing genocide in Gaza is extremely profitable — so much so that, “after denying Palestinian self-determination for decades, Israel now threatens the very existence of the Palestinian people.” In a 39-page report titled From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, lays out how deep the tentacles of genocide as a profitable enterprise run: “arms manufacturers, tech firms, building and construction companies, extractive and service industries, banks, pension funds, insurers, universities, and charities” have all dug their teeth deep into the body of the Palestinians to extract multiple pounds of flesh.
Throughout the course of the genocide, the complicity of corporations has been extensively documented and reported on. From American, European, and Israeli weapons manufacturers supplying fighter jets, their components, and bombs, to tech giants providing state-of-the-art cloud services and AI-enabled killing tools such as Where’s Daddy?, Lavender, and Gospel — which process data and generate kill lists — to financial firms investing in these dealers of death, there is an entire ecosystem of profit-making built upon the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian corpses, some eaten by dogs, and many still rotting under the rubble of what were once homes.
The report includes a database of 1,000 corporations that collaborate with Israel and goes on to name over 60, with known business ties to the Israeli apartheid and the ongoing full-throttle genocide. The report reveals “how the forever-occupation has become the ideal testing ground for arms manufacturers and Big Tech — providing boundless supply and demand, little oversight and zero accountability — while investors and private and public institutions profit freely.” This process has accelerated since October 2023, as “entities that previously enabled and profited from Palestinian elimination and erasure within the economy of occupation, instead of disengaging are now involved in the economy of genocide.”
The report also implicates several states, which despite lofty rhetoric, have continued to supply the Israelis with materials needed to occupy and kill the Palestinians. Take Colombia. President Gustavo Petro has been very vocal in denouncing the Israeli genocide, yet, the report notes, “Coal for electricity to Israel originates primarily from Colombia (60 per cent of Israeli coal imports in 2023-24).” South Africa, the state which charged Israel with committing genocide and took it to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), is the other chief supplier of coal to the genocidal state. “Glencore was also involved in shipments from South Africa; these shipments accounted for 15 percent of Israeli coal imports in 2023 and 2024,” the report notes.
South Africa is not the only BRICS member contributing to the Palestinian genocide. China’s state-owned Bright Foods is the majority owner of Tnuva, the largest food conglomerate in Israel, which the report says, “has fuelled and benefited from land dispossession.” There are copious signs that BRICS members instead of challenging the US-centralised empire, as its proponents want us to believe, are deeply embedded in the same system.
Norway has been among the leading European states opposed to the Israeli genocide, becoming one of the first in Europe to recognise the Palestinian state, but it also appears to be dealing more in bombastic rhetoric than hurting the genocidaires financially. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the largest of its kind in the world, is knee-deep in the blood of Palestinian children. “Norwegian Government Pension Fund, claims it has the world’s most comprehensive ethical guidelines,” the report notes. “After October 2023, the Fund increased its investment in Israeli companies by 32 percent to $1.9 billion. By the end of 2024, the Fund had $121.5 billion — 6.9 percent of its total value — invested in companies named in the present report alone.”
The report notes that Christian charities have sent millions to enable Jewish supremacists — many of whom believe that spitting at Christians is an “ancient Jewish custom” — to colonise the birthplace of Jesus. Their contributions also go towards training extremist settlers: “The United States-based Christian Friends of Israeli Communities, Dutch Christians for Israel and global affiliates, sent over $12.25 million in 2023 to various projects that support colonies, including some that train extremist settlers.”
Global retailers have not just turned a blind eye to the blood-soaked goods they stock on their shelves but actively mask their bloody origins from their unsuspecting buyers. “Israeli products, including those from colonies, flood global markets through major retailers, often with no scrutiny,” the report notes. “To dodge growing backlash, companies mask origin through misleading labels, barcodes and supply-chain mixing, effectively making occupation shelf-ready.”
These are some of the corporations named in the report and how they participate in the occupation and genocide of the Palestinians:
The corporate tentacles in the genocide of the Palestinians run way deeper than this list, as the report makes clear: “The entities named in the present report constitute a fraction of a much deeper structure of corporate involvement, profiteering from and enabling violations and crimes in the occupied Palestinian territory. Had they exercised due diligence, corporate entities would have ceased involvement with Israel long ago. Today, the demand for accountability is all the more urgent: any investment sustains a system of serious international crimes.”
The report notes that the lack of scrutiny these corporations have enjoyed until now for their collaboration with Israel has ensured that the “displacement-replacement economy of occupation has turned into an economy of genocide.” “Business continues as usual, but nothing about this system, in which businesses are integral, is neutral,” the report states. “The enduring ideological, political and economic engine of racial capitalism has transformed the Israeli displacement-replacement economy of occupation into an economy of genocide. This is a ‘joint criminal enterprise,’ where the acts of one ultimately contribute to a whole economy that drives, supplies and enables this genocide.”
In closing, the Special Rapporteur calls for urgent global action to confront Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians. States must impose sanctions, an arms embargo, and suspend trade and investment ties. Corporations must end complicity, pay reparations, and face prosecution. The UN is urged to act on the ICJ’s 2024 opinion and publicly list all involved entities. Civil society and individuals are called to demand boycotts, divestment, and justice. Ending this atrocity, the report stresses, is a shared global responsibility.
As we have seen for the past 21 months, however, it is unlikely that any of Albanese’s recommendations will be followed. Despite the ICJ’s opinions and the UN Security Council’s March 2024 resolution, which demanded an immediate ceasefire, the genocide has only intensified with each passing day. The number of dead Palestinians now reaches into the hundreds of thousands by most estimates — and there is still no end in sight.
In a system where corporations and governments have no qualms about facilitating and profiting from the blood of the innocents, the onus is on us, the ordinary individuals, to throw sand in the gears of this ghastly business. The least we can do is boycott these entities, refuse to give them our money and labour, and take all legal routes to hold them accountable for their complicity in crimes against humanity. We must amplify the call for sanctions, support movements for divestment, and demand prosecution of those who enable genocide from behind boardroom tables and parliamentary benches. Silence is collusion, and passivity is a luxury that the oppressed Palestinians cannot afford.
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Which is why, as I noted recently, munitions manufactories and their shareholders must be prosecuted along with all others who facilitated this barbarity in whatever capacity that they supported it, and/or repressed opposition to it.
Not one must be permitted to escape.
Edit: https://substack.com/@gsz141/note/c-130836870
BDS to all companies who benefit from Genocide is a civil duty for everyone in this world where we, the people, are the main target (do you remember those times of the C19-Scamdemic?). Now the Palestinians (and lebanese, iranians and yemenites) are under the empire´s direct fire ... but we must remember that everyone who dare to be in the imperial path would have the same fate. These companies (and the undercover ones) are tools of the empire, arms, legs and so on, body-parts. We can contribute to the cause by cutting off their profiteering sources. Every cent less count for them. And to expose their moralless ambitions is important too.