[News] The “Economy of Genocide” report: A reckoning beyond rhetoric

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 The “Economy of Genocide” report: A reckoning beyond rhetoric
By Ramzy Baroud <https://english.palinfo.com/?p=250012>

Friday 11-July-2025 -
https://english.palinfo.com/opinion_articles/the-economy-of-genocide-report-a-reckoning-beyond-rhetoric/

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation
of human rights in occupied Palestine, stands as a testament to the notion
of speaking truth to power. This “power” is not solely embodied by Israel
or even the United States, but by an international community whose
collective relevance has tragically failed to stem the ongoing genocide in
Gaza.

Her latest report, ‘From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide,’
submitted to the UN Human Rights Council on 3 July, marks a seismic
intervention. It unflinchingly names and implicates companies that have not
only allowed Israel to sustain its war and genocide against Palestinians,
but also confronts those who have remained silent in the face of this
unfolding horror.

Albanese’s ‘Economy of Genocide’ is far more than an academic exercise or a
mere moral statement in a world whose collective conscience is being
brutally tested in Gaza. The report is significant for multiple,
interlocking reasons. Crucially, it offers practical pathways to
accountability that transcend mere diplomatic and legal rhetoric. It also
presents a novel approach to international law, positioning it not as a
delicate political balancing act, but as a potent tool to confront
complicity in war crimes and expose the profound failures of existing
international mechanisms in Gaza.

Two vital contexts are important to understanding the significance of this
report, considered a searing indictment of direct corporate involvement,
not only in the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, but Israel’s overall
settler-colonial project.

First, in February 2020, following years of delay, the UN Human Rights
Council (UNHRC) released a database that listed 112 companies involved in
business activities within illegal Israeli settlements in occupied
Palestine. The database exposes several corporate giants – including
Airbnb, Booking.com, Motorola Solutions, JCB, and Expedia – for helping
Israel maintain its military occupation and apartheid.

This event was particularly earth-shattering, considering the United
Nations’ consistent failure at reining in Israel, or holding accountable
those who sustain its war crimes in Palestine. The database was an
important step that allowed civil societies to mobilize around a specific
set of priorities, thus pressuring corporations and individual governments
to take morally guided positions. The effectiveness of that strategy was
clearly detected through the exaggerated and angry reactions of the US and
Israel. The US said it was an attempt by “the discredited” Council “to fuel
economic retaliation,” while Israel called it a “shameful capitulation” to
pressure.

The Israeli genocide in Gaza, starting on 7 October 2023, however, served
as a stark reminder of the utter failure of all existing UN mechanisms to
achieve even the most modest expectations of feeding a starving population
during a time of genocide. Tellingly, this was the same conclusion offered
by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, who, in September 2024, stated
that the world had “failed the people of Gaza.”

This failure continued for many more months and was highlighted in the UN’s
inability to even manage the aid distribution in the Strip, entrusting the
job to the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a mercenary-run violent
apparatus that has killed and wounded thousands of Palestinians. Albanese
herself, of course, had already reached a similar conclusion when, in
November 2023, she confronted the international community for “epically
failing” to stop the war and to end the “senseless slaughtering of innocent
civilians.”

Albanese’s new report goes a step further, this time appealing to the whole
of humanity to take a moral stance and to confront those who made the
genocide possible. “Commercial endeavors enabling and profiting from the
obliteration of innocent people’s lives must cease,” the report declares,
pointedly demanding that “corporate entities must refuse to be complicit in
human rights violations and international crimes or be held to account.”

According to the report, categories of complicity in the genocide are
divided into arms manufacturers, tech firms, building and construction
companies, extractive and service industries, banks, pension funds,
insurers, universities, and charities.

These include Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Amazon, Palantir, IBM, and even
Danish shipping giant Maersk, among nearly 1,000 other firms. It was their
collective technological know-how, machinery, and data collection that
allowed Israel to kill, to date, over 57,000 and wound over 134,000 in
Gaza, let alone maintain the apartheid regime in the West Bank.

What Albanese’s report tries to do is not merely name and shame Israel’s
genocide partners but to tell us, as civil society, that we now have a
comprehensive frame of reference that would allow us to make responsible
decisions, put pressure on, and hold accountable these corporate giants.

“The ongoing genocide has been a profitable venture,” Albanese writes,
citing Israel’s massive surge in military spending, estimated at 65 percent
from 2023 to 2024 — reaching $46.5 billion.

Israel’s seemingly infinite military budget is a strange loop of money,
originally provided by the US government, then recycled back through US
corporations, thus spreading the wealth between governments, politicians,
corporations, and numerous contractors. As bank accounts swell, more
Palestinian bodies are piled up in morgues, mass graves, or are scattered
in the streets of Jabaliya and Khan Yunis.

This madness needs to stop, and, since the UN is incapable of stopping it,
then individual governments, civil society organizations, and ordinary
people must do the job, because the lives of Palestinians should be of far
greater value than corporate profits and greed.

*-Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of the Palestine Chronicle.
He is the author of five books. His latest is ‘These Chains Will Be Broken:
Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons’. Baroud is
a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global
Affairs (CIGA) and also at the Afro-Middle East Center (AMEC).*
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