An economy of genocide: Israel and Francesca Albanese's report

July 9, 2025
Issue 
Israel's genocidal bombing campaign has forced the mass forcible displacement of Gazans. Photo: Jaber Jehad Badwan/Wikimedia Commons. Inset: Francesca Albanese

Francesca Albanese’s report for the United Nations Human Rights Council, titledĀ , makes for stark and dark reading.

Authored by the relentless Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, it proves an unflinching assessment and warning to companies doing business with Israel.

Albanese’s useful investigation examines the corporate world and its links to the colonial, settler program of removing and displacing a pre-existing population.

State conquest involves not only civilian bureaucracies and high-ranking military commanders, but the corporate sector, eager to make a profit.

ā€œColonial endeavours and associated genocides,ā€ writes Albanese, ā€œhave historically been driven and enabled by the corporate sector. Commercial interests have contributed to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of their lands — a mode of domination known as ā€˜colonial racial capitalism’.ā€

She scrutinises eight private sectors: arms manufacturers; tech firms; building and construction entities; those industries concerned with extraction and services; banks; pension funds; insurers; universities and charities.

ā€œThese entities enable the denial of self-determination and other structural violations in the occupied Palestinian territory, including occupation, annexation and crimes of apartheid and genocide, as well as a long list of ancillary crimes and human rights violations, from discrimination, wanton destruction, forced displacement and pillage to extrajudicial killing and starvation,ā€ Albanese writes.

Central to the multifaceted economy of genocide, the report charges, is the military-industrial complex that forms ā€œthe economic backbone of the Stateā€. Albanese cites the F-35 fighter jet, developed by US-based Lockheed Martin, in collaboration with hundreds of other companies ā€œincluding Italian manufacturer Leonardo S.p.A, and eight Statesā€.

Israel’s colonisation and displacement, aided by the private sector, since October 2023, has a new urgency. In 2024, US$200 million was advanced for ā€œcolony constructionā€. Between November 2023 and October 2024, 57 new colonies and outposts were established ā€œwith Israeli and international companies supplying machinery, raw materials and logistical supportā€.

Examples include the maintenance and expansion of the Jerusalem Light Rail Red Line, the construction of the new Green Line, encompassing 27 kilometres of new tracks and 50 stations in the West Bank. This infrastructure has proven to be invaluable in linking the colonial project to West Jerusalem.

Despite some companies withdrawing from the project ā€œowing to international pressureā€, an entity such as the Spanish/Basque Construcciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles has been a keen participant, along with suppliers of excavating machinery (South Korea’s Doosan and Sweden’s Volvo Group) and providers of materials for the light-rail bridge (Germany’s Heidelberg Materials AG).

Beyond the structural and physical program of construction and displacement, all designed to extinguish any semblance of self-determination on the part of the Palestinians, come other features of the colonial project.

A prominent feature of this, Albanese notes, is that of ā€œsurveillance and carceralityā€. Repressing Palestinians has become a ā€œprogressively automatedā€ affair, with tech companies feeding Israel’s voracious security appetite with ā€œunparalleled developments in carceral and surveillance devicesā€, some of which include closed-circuit television networks, biometric surveillance, advanced tech checkpoint networks, drone surveillance and cloud computing.

Palantir Technologies, a specialist in software platforms, comes in for a special mention. ā€œThere are reasonable grounds to believe Palantir has provided automatic predictive policing technology, core defence infrastructure for rapid and scale-up construction and deployment of military software, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which allows real-time battlefield data integration for automated decision making.ā€

The dance of dissimulation began after the report was released.

³Ł“DZō»åĢż³Ł³ó±šĢżMiddle East EyeĀ that foreign military sales were not its preserve. Such sales took place between governments, it said, meaning that the United States government would be best placed to answer questions.

In a more direct fashion, Israel and the US have continued their ā€œHate Albaneseā€ campaign, reiterating old accusations while adopting novel interpretations of international law.Ā  Given Israeli officials and their US backers’ loathing of international human rights conventions, it is hypocritical in the extreme given the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ)Ā Ā of July 2024, and the International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrants for Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (These figure prominently in Albanese’s assessment.)

According to the ICJ, all states are under an obligation to ā€œcooperate with the United Nationsā€ on ensuring ā€œan end to Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Territory and the full realization of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determinationā€.

Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories was illegal. ā€œIt is a wrongful act of a continuing character, which has been brought about by Israel’s violations, through its policies and practices, of the prohibition on the acquisition of territory by force and the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people.ā€

The Israeli governmentĀ Ā the report as ā€œlegally groundless, defamatory and a flagrant abuse of [Albanese’s] officeā€.

“”ĢżĀ from the Trump administration to UN Secretary-General António Guterres, obtained by The Washington Free Beacon, took issue with Albanese’s supposed ā€œvirulent antisemitism and support for terrorismā€, while taking a swipe at her legal qualifications.

US Ambassador Dorothy C Shea, acting representative to the UN, says little about international law in her missive, other than her dismissal of UN General Assembly resolutions and advisory opinions by the ICJ as lacking any binding force ā€œon either States or private actorsā€. Shea also claims Albanese ā€œmisrepresented her qualifications for the roleā€.

She said accusations against more than 20 US corporate entities were ā€œriddled with inflammatory rhetoric and false accusationsā€, and the claims of ā€œgross human rights violationsā€, ā€œapartheidā€ and ā€œgenocideā€ constituted ā€œan unacceptable campaign of political and economic warfare against the American and worldwide economyā€.

It comes as little surprise that the security rationale – that says nothing of the Palestinian right to self-determination, let alone rights to life and necessaries – marks the entire complaint against Albanese’s apparent lack of impartiality.

ā€œBusiness activities specifically targeted by Ms. Albanese contribute to and help strengthen national security, economic prosperity, and human welfare across the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe,ā€ Shea said.

Just don’t mention the Palestinians.

[Binoy Kampmark currently lectures at RMIT University.]

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