Chris Hedges: The Genocide Profiteers
Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese demands that more than 1,000 corporate entities sever ties with Israel or be held accountable for complicity in war crimes.
July 3, 2025 - By Chris Hedges - Consortium News
Excerpts of Hedges full article.
War is a business. So is genocide.
The latest report submitted by Francesca Albanese, special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, lists 48 corporations and institutions, including Palantir Technologies Inc., Lockheed Martin, Alphabet Inc., Amazon, International Business Machine Corporation (IBM), Caterpillar Inc., Microsoft Corporation and Massachusetts Institue of Technology (MIT), along with banks and financial firms such as Blackrock, insurers, real estate firms and charities, which in violation of international law are making billions from the occupation and the genocide of Palestinians.
The report, which includes a database of over 1,000 corporate entities that collaborate with Israel, demands these firms and institutions sever ties with Israel or be held accountable for complicity in war crimes.
It describes Israel’s “forever-occuption” as “the ideal testing ground for arms manufacturers and Big Tech — providing significant supply and demand, little oversight, and zero accountability — while investors and private and public institutions profit freely.”
The post-Holocaust industrialists’ trials and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission laid the legal framework for recognizing the criminal responsibility of institutions and businesses that participate in international crimes.
This new report makes clear that decisions made by the International Court of Justice place an obligation on entities “to not engage and/or to withdraw totally and unconditionally from any associated dealings, and to ensure that any engagement with Palestinians enables their self-determination.”
“The genocide in Gaza has not stopped because it’s lucrative, it’s profitable for far too many,” Albanese told me.
“It’s a business. There are corporate entities, including from Palestine-friendly states, who have for decades made businesses and made profits out of the economy of the occupation. Israel has always exploited Palestinian land, resources and Palestinian life. The profits have continued and even increased as the economy of the occupation transformed into an economy of genocide.”
In addition, she said, Palestinians have provided
“boundless training fields to test the technologies, test weapons, to test surveillance techniques that now are being used against people everywhere from the Global South to the Global North.”
You can see my interview with Albanese here.
US Calls for Albanese’s Head
[The Times of Israel reported Wednesday, a day after Albanese’s report was issued, that the United States had urged the United Nations in a letter to the secretary general to sack Albanese on the absurd allegation of “virulent antisemitism and support for terrorism.”
The U.S. accused her of “an unacceptable campaign of political and economic warfare against the American and worldwide economy.” The World Jewish Congress also blasted her report, calling it a “deeply biased narrative.”
“Ms. Albanese’s report is yet another example of her repeated misuse of her mandate to advance a political agenda rather than to uphold the universal principles of human rights,” WJC Executive Vice President Maram Stern said in a statement.]
Albanese during a press briefing at U.N. headquarters in New York on Oct. 30, 2024. (UN Photo/Mark Garten)
A Captive Market
Albanese’s report lambasts corporations for “providing Israel with the weapons and machinery required to destroy homes, schools, hospitals, places of leisure and worship, livelihoods and productive assets, such as olive groves and orchards.”
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A Testing Ground
The military assault on the Palestinians has also “provided testing grounds for cutting-edge military capabilities: air defense platforms, drones, targeting tools powered by artificial intelligence and even the F-35 programme led by the United States of America. These technologies are then marketed as ‘battle proven.’”
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Surveillance Technology
At the same time, tech companies have profited from the genocide by “providing dual-use infrastructure to integrate mass data collection and surveillance, while profiting from the unique testing ground for military technology offered by the occupied Palestinian territory.”
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Heavy Machinery
“Civilian technologies have long served as dual-use tools of settler-colonial occupation,” the report reads. “Israeli military operations rely heavily on equipment from leading global manufacturers to ‘unground’ Palestinians from their land, demolishing homes, public buildings, farmland, roads and other vital infrastructure. Since October 2023, this machinery has been integral to damaging and destroying 70 per cent of structures and 81 per cent of cropland in Gaza.”
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Real Estate
Global real estate companies sell properties in colonial settlements to Israeli and international buyers. These real estate firms include Keller Williams Realty LLC, which has “had branches based in the colonies” through its Israeli franchisee KW Israel.
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Energy Companies
In the energy sector,
“Chevron Corporation, in consortium with Israeli NewMedEnergy (a subsidiary of the OHCHR database-listed Delek Group), extracts natural gas from the Leviathan and Tamar fields; it paid the government of Israel $453 million in royalties and taxes in 2023. Chevron’s consortium supplies more than 70 percent of Israeli energy consumption. Chevron also profits from its part-ownership of the East Mediterranean Gas pipeline, which passes through Palestinian maritime territory, and from gas export sales to Egypt and Jordan.”
BP and Chevron also serve as
“the largest contributors to Israeli imports of crude oil, as major owners of the strategic Azeri Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline and the Kazakh Caspian Pipeline Consortium, respectively, and of their associated oil fields. Each conglomerate effectively supplied 8 per cent of Israeli crude oil between October 2023 and July 2024, supplemented by crude oil shipments from Brazilian oil fields, in which Petrobras holds the largest stakes, and military jet fuel. Oil from these companies supplies two refineries in Israel.”
“By supplying Israel with coal, gas, oil and fuel, companies are contributing to civilian infrastructures that Israel uses to entrench permanent annexation and now weaponizes in the destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza,” the report reads. “The same infrastructure that these companies supply resources into has serviced the Israeli military and its energy-intensive tech-driven obliteration of Gaza. ”
Banks
International banks and financial firms have also sustained the genocide through the purchase of Israeli treasury bonds.
“As the main source of finance for the Israeli State budget, treasury bonds have played a critical role in funding the ongoing assault on Gaza,” the report reads.
“From 2022 to 2024, the Israeli military budget grew from 4.2 per cent to 8.3 per cent of GDP, driving the public budget into a 6.8 per cent deficit. Israel funded this ballooning budget by increasing its bond issuance, including $8 billion in March 2024 and $5 billion in February 2025, alongside issuances on its domestic new shekel market.”
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Charities
Faith-based charities have “also become key financial enablers of illegal projects, including in the occupied Palestinian territory, often receiving tax deductions abroad despite strict regulatory charitable frameworks,” the report reads.
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Universities
The report criticizes universities that partner with Israeli universities and institutions. It notes that labs at MIT “conduct weapons and surveillance research funded by the Israeli Ministry of Defense.” These projects include “drone swarm control — a distinct feature of the Israeli assault on Gaza since October 2023 — pursuit algorithms, and underwater surveillance.”
You can see my interview with the MIT students who exposed the collaboration between the university Israeli military here.
Genocide requires a vast network and billions of dollars to sustain it. Israel could not carry out its mass slaughter of the Palestinians without this ecosystem.
These entities, which profit from industrial violence against the Palestinians and mass displacement, are as guilty of genocide as the Israeli military units decimating the people in Gaza.
They too are war criminals. They too must be held accountable.
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