The economy of occupation has evolved into economy of genocide.

15 Jul, 2025

Corporate complicity does not hide in fine print anymore. It is encoded into contracts, cloud servers, investment portfolios, logistics chains, and R&D labs.

The new report by Francesca P. Albanese lays it out in uncompromising terms: the machinery of Israel’s occupation and destruction of Palestinian life is entangled with business as usual across industries: arms, surveillance, construction, finance, academia, and technology. The corporate ecosystem around Israel is no longer sustaining a military occupation. It is powering the infrastructure of genocide.

This is not abstract. It’s boards, subsidiaries, executives, brokers, servers, databases, drones, and bombs. It’s companies supplying bulldozers that flatten homes, insurers underwriting settlement expansion, and cloud services optimizing military operations. And it’s the normalization of this web through law firms, universities, and charitable fronts.

The report demands what international law has always made clear: where there is knowledge, contribution, or benefit from atrocity, there is responsibility. Corporate actors are NOT bystanders. They are participants, complicit, accomplices, intentional abusers.

The U.S. gov’s decision to impose sanctions on Francesca Albanese, for documenting and exposing this corporate and governmental complicity, signals something deeper. This is a political effort to isolate truth-tellers and intimidate international mechanisms meant to protect against atrocity. When govs target unpaid UN experts for carrying out their mandates, it’s not accountability they fear. Rather, it’s clarity, accountability, grit.

Top UN officials have now condemned this act as a dangerous precedent. The High Commissioner for Human Rights, the UN Human Rights Council President, and the Secretary-General’s office have all called for an immediate reversal. These sanctions don’t just punish one expert. They undermine the legitimacy of the international human rights system and embolden impunity where scrutiny is most needed.

The corporate ecosystem exposed in this report is materially violent and psychologically disfigured. Executives presiding over dispossession and death operate through mechanisms of moral disengagement: euphemizing destruction, diffusing responsibility, and rebranding atrocity as innovation. Repression is strategic. These leaders split off the psychic costs of their decisions, expelling them from consciousness to preserve a self-image of civility. But underneath, the death drive pulses. This is capital animated by the compulsion to destroy, repeating violence not in error, but in design. When domination becomes normalized, genocide becomes a logistical problem in spreadsheets, optimized through software, scaled across borders.

In Palestine, the line between commerce and complicity has collapsed. No time to make "choice" anymore.

Read:

1. UN calls for reversal of US sanctions on Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese

2. US Imposes Sanctions on UN Special Rapporteur

3. From economy of occupation to economy of genocide – (A/HRC/59/23) Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 (Advance unedited version)

4. Infographic: 643 days of genocide in Gaza (attached)

5. Flyers by Let's Talk Palestine (English flyer attached)