In a July 3 address to the 59th Session of the UN’s Human Rights Council in Geneva, Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territories occupied since 1967, presented the scathing new report she authored, entitled “From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide.” Published on June 30, the report charges that Israel’s occupation of Palestine is a “colonial project” responsible for “one of the cruelest genocides in modern history,” causing an “apocalyptic” situation and “suffering beyond imagination.” The Israeli-U.S.-run Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, she said, is a “death trap engineered to kill or force the flight of a starved, bombarded, emaciated population.”
But the centerpiece of the 24-page report, and what has provoked uncontrolled rage and hysteria among the Anglo-American architects and supporters of Israel’s war on Palestine (see separate slug), is her identification of more than 60 “corporate actors” accused of collaborating with and bolstering Israel’s military industrial complex, making them complicit in imposing an “economy of genocide.” And this, she warned, is “only the tip of the iceberg.” In her public presentation, she named 48 of these entities, including arms manufacturers, banks, tech companies, energy giants, academic institutions, etc., which she says have profited from and contributed to the genocide and apartheid by “sustaining the Israeli state’s actions.”
Arms companies, she charged, have reaped huge profits by supplying Israel with “cutting-edge weaponry to unleash 85,000 tons of explosives—six times the power of Hiroshima.” With its new weapons, customized surveillance, lethal drones and radar systems, Israel has made Palestine into “an ideal laboratory for the Israeli military-industrial complex.” She reported she contacted each company she investigated and shared with them “the facts I found that were in violation of international law,” but heard back only from 18, a small number of which “engaged with me in good faith.”
Albanese zeroed in on Big Tech companies and the role of AI systems that she said the Israeli military developed to process and generate targets in Gaza, also expressing the belief that the Palantir company had played a particularly nefarious role. Its Artificial Intelligence Platform “allows real-time battlefield data integration for automated decision-making.”
