A few weeks ago, the UN Human Rights Council published the report presented by the Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese: “From economy of occupation to economy of genocide”. The report analyzes and denounces the economic network of companies and institutions that profit from and sustain the genocide in Gaza. Israeli occupation has become an ideal testing ground for both arms manufacturers and technological companies. In other words, the extermination of the Palestinian people has its own sponsors: global corporate interests. From Chevron to Ford, let us analyze the economics of genocide and the profitability of the massacre unleashed by the State of Israel in the territory.

By Ariana Del Zotto

Genocide in figures

After October 2023, Israel’s economy was supported and sustained by an international network of corporations eventhough its demand, production and consumption were falling, e.g. since Israel stepped up its attack after October 7, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange rose 213% (i.e., $225.7 billion ).

Genocides are not cheap. If Israel manages to finance its military system, despite huge budget deficits, and a brutal drop in its credit ratings, it is thanks to the help of financial giants like Barclays and Vanguard, who buy and back Israeli government bonds.

There are more than 1,600 companies like Lockheed Martin and the Italian Leonardo S.p.A., which support the global program of F-35 fighter planes, on which Israel depends to bomb Gaza. They also have suppliers such as the FANUC Corporation of Japan, which supplies machinery for arms production, and the collaboration of universities such as MIT, which develops Israeli drones’ with automated systems. The U.S. technology company IBM trains military and intelligence personnel, and manages the central database of the Israel Population, Immigration and Border Authority (PIBA) that stores Palestinians’ biometric data. When their own cloud services became overloaded, it was Google and Amazon that supplied the Israeli military with critical infrastructure to continue the genocide.

Israeli occupation is another big business, Airbnb ads increased 152% in Israeli settlements. Along with Booking.com both companies maximize their profits by promoting illegal settlements in Palestinian territory. On the other hand, Chevron also benefits from the illegal siege, as it owns the largest proprietary stake in the Tamar gas field, which supplies Israel with 70% of its energy helping consolidate Israeli occupation and colonization, which seeking to secure its control over the area.

High supply and demand, little oversight, zero accountability

There are different kinds of corporate entities complicit in genocide: arms manufacturers, technology firms, construction companies, extractive and service industries, banks, pension funds, insurance companies, universities and even charity organizations. These entities make possible the occupation, annexation, apartheid crimes and genocide in Palestine, as well as a long list of other crimes and human rights violations, from discrimination, starvation as a weapon of war, forced displacement, looting, and even executions. The report makes an extensive analysis naming each entity and its role in the Zionist project, according to seven fundamental categories: military and arms support, contribution to the occupation and colonialist expansion, exploitation and control of the common goods in Palestinian territory, access to food and its production, development of settlements for tourism purposes, production of knowledge and financing to make all this possible.

While according to Albanese the entities named in the report constitute only a fraction of a much deeper structure of corporate and profit-making involvement in the occupied Palestinian territory, the following entities play a decisive role in the continuation of the genocide in Gaza:

Military and arms support:

• Lockheed Martin: Along with 1,600 other companies, Lockheed Martin is leading the largest defense procurement program in history for the F-35 fighter jet.
• Leonardo S.p.A: Manufactures components and parts contributing to the Israeli F-35 fleet.
• Elbit Systems and IAI: Both develop and supply drones with which the Israeli army monitors Palestinians and collects evidence.
• FANUC Corporation: It provides robotic machinery for weapons production lines.
• A.P. Moller-Maerks: It transports parts, weapons and raw materials, sustaining a steady flow of U.S.-supplied military equipment after October 2023.
• NSO Group: Its Pegasus spyware, designed for covert smartphone surveillance, has been used against Palestinian activists and licensed worldwide to target leaders, journalists and human rights defenders.
• IBM: The company has operated in Israel since 1972, training military and intelligence personnel. It also operates and updates the central database of the Population, Immigration and Border Authority (PIBA).
• Hewlett Packard Enterprises (HPE): Before IBM, HPE maintained that database and its Israeli subsidiary still provides servers during the transition. Since HP-s 2015 split into HPE and HP Inc, they have further hidden the role of their seven remaining Israeli subsidiaries.
• Microsoft: Its technology is integrated in the prison service, police, universities and schools, even in colonies. In other words, it integrates its civilian systems and technology through the Israeli army.
• Alphabet Inc (Google) and Amazon.com Inc: Thanks to Project Nimbus, both companies provide basic technological infrastructure for data storage.
• Palantir Technology Inc: It provides automated preventive technology, core defense infrastructure and rapid and extended deployment of military software, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which enables real-time data integration for automated decision making.

Colonialist occupation and expansion:

• Caterpillar Inc: It provides Israel with equipment used to demolish Palestinian homes and infrastructure.
• RADA Electronic Industries: collaborates in the development of Caterpillar-s D9 bulldozer with automated central armament and remnants of the Israeli army deployed in almost all military activities since 2000, clearing incursion lines, neutralizing territory, including homes, mosques and infrastructure, assaults on hospitals and crushing Palestinians.
• Ford: It supplies armored commercial vans adapted for the Israeli army by AM General, Oshkosh and Plasan.
• Hyundai, Doosan and Volvo: Each of them supplies equipment through Israeli dealerships exclusively licensed for the destruction of Palestinian property.
• Merkavim Transport Pty Ltd: It produces armored service buses.
• Heidelberg Materials AG: It has helped plunder millions of tons of dolomite from the Nahal Raba quarry on land taken from Palestinian villages in the West Bank. It has public tender to supply materials from that quarry for settlement construction… it has since almost exhausted the quarry.
• Construcciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles, S.A.: It maintains and expands the Jerusalem light rail line and builds the new Green Line at a time when other companies had withdrawn due to international pressure.
• Keller Williams Realty LLC: Real estate companies sell properties in colonies to Israeli and international buyers. Keller Williams even conducted a real estate tour in the U.S. and Canada, co-sponsored by several companies that develop and market thousands of buildings in the colonies.

Control of the commons:

• Mekorot: The Israeli company has a monopoly on water in the occupied Palestinian territory. For at least the first six months after October 2023, Mekorot reduced the capacity of Gaza’s aqueducts to 22%, leaving entire areas without water, using it as a weapon.
• Drummond Company Inc, Swiss Glencore plc and Glencore: Those are the main suppliers of coal for electricity to Israel.
• Chevron Corporation in consortium with NewMedEnergy (a subsidiary of Delek Group): They supplie more than 70% of Israel’s domestic natural gas consumption. Chevron benefits particularly from its partial ownership of the Eastern Mediterranean Gas (EMG) pipeline, which passes through the Palestinian maritime territory, and from gas export sales to Egypt and Jordan.
• British BP pcl: This company has exploration licenses that allow BP to explore Palestinian maritime extensions illegally exploited by Israel.
• Petrobras: It complements crude oil shipments to Israel and supplies fuel for military aircraft.
• Ashdod Refinery: It provides jet fuel to the Israeli Air Force operating in Gaza.

Food and agribusiness:

• China Bright Dairy & Food Co. Ltd: They help source products from these colonies and then exploit the Palestinian market. After the $43 million destruction of Gaza’s dairy industry in 2014 this conglomerate absorbed the loss of the market in Gaza.
• Netafim: The world leader in drip irrigation technology has enabled the intensive exploitation of water and land in the West Bank.

Occupancy tourism:

• Reservations Holdings Inc, Airbnb, Inc and Booking: They all allow the listing of properties and hotel rooms in Israeli settlements. They are linked to restricting Palestinian access to land and endanger nearby villages.

Financing:

• BNP Paribas and Barclays: Both intervened to boost market confidence by underwriting international and domestic treasury bonds, allowing Israel to contain the interest rate premium despite a credit downgrade.
• Asset management firms include Blackrock ($68 million), Vanguard ($546 million) and Allianz’s asset management subsidiary PIMCO ($960 million). These financial entities channel billions of dollars into treasury bonds and companies directly involved in Israel’s occupation and genocide.
• Allianz and AXA: They are global insurance companies that invest large sums in stocks and bonds involved in the occupation and genocide, partly as capital reserves for policyholder claims and regulatory requirements, but mainly to generate returns.
• Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG): It increased its investment in Israeli companies by 32% to $1.9 billion. At the end of 2024, the GPFG held $121.5 billion, 6.9% of its total value.
• The Caisse de Dépát et Placement du Québec: It has almost $6.67 billion invested in the companies named in the report. In 2023-2024, it almost tripled the investment in Lockheed Martin, quadrupled the investment in Caterpillar and increased 10 times the investment in HD Hyundai.
• Jewish National Fund (KKL-JNF) and its more than 20 affiliates finance settler expansion and military-related projects.
• Israel Gives: Platforms such as these have enabled tax-deductible crowdfunding in 32 countries for Israeli military units and settlers.
• U.S.-basedChristian Friends of Israeli Communities, Dutch Christians for Israel and global affiliates, sent more than $12.25 million in 2023 to various projects that support colonies, including some that train extremist settlers.

Knowledge production:

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT): It contributes to the development of automated weapons systems and drones capable of flying in swarm formation.
• Horizon Europe of the European Commission: It actively facilitates collaboration with Israeli institutions.
• Technical University of Munich (TUM): It receives $218 million in Horizon Europe funding, including $12.6 million for 22 collaborations with Israeli partners, military and technology companies.
• Many universities have maintained ties with Israel despite the post-October 2023 escalation. One of many British examples, is the University of Edinburgh owns nearly $31.72 million in four tech giants from Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM, central to Israel’s surveillance apparatus and the ongoing destruction of Gaza.

The tip of the iceberg

The report confirms one of the main reasons why the genocide in Gaza continues: it is profitable. It not only exposes the magnitude of the crimes committed by the State of Israel: it shows that the genocide in Gaza is a political and economic project, sustained by a network of global interests that profit from the massacre. The bombs, drones, evictions, starvation and mass surveillance could not be sustained without banks, universities, technology companies and governments that provide funds, equipment, knowledge and legitimacy. Genocide is profitable, and that is why it is perpetuated.

This humanitarian catastrophe disguised as self-defense by the Zionist state responds to the interests of U.S. imperialism to control and expand throughout the region. That is why its companies and allies finance the Israeli army and its colonial project while also taking a share of extraordinary profits at the cost of the bloody subjugation of the Palestinian people.

To defeat the gendarme of the Middle East it will not be enough to appeal to the “international community” or with campaigns of corporate ethical responsibility: it is necessary to redouble mobilization and build a revolutionary political alternative throughout the Middle East, that unites the struggle against Zionism with the struggle against the complicit Arab bourgeoisies and the imperialism that sustains them. As the special rapporteur Francesca Albanese warns in her report:

“Genocide is not only committed through bombs, but also with contracts, funds, algorithms, maps and documents. Dismantling the networks of economic and institutional complicity is key to putting an end to this machinery of death.”

While Gaza bleeds, there are those who get rich. And in the face of this injustice, the only way forward is revolutionary organization and internationalist action to liberate Palestine from the river to the sea.