Francesca Albanese’s report for the United Nations Human Rights Council, titled From economy of occupation to economy of genocide, makes for stark and dark reading.
Authored by the relentless Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, it proves an unflinching assessment and warning to companies doing business with Israel.
Albanese’s useful investigation examines the corporate world and its links to the settler-colonial program of removing and displacing a pre-existing population.
State conquest involves not only civilian bureaucracies and high-ranking military commanders, but the corporate sector, eager to make a profit.
“Colonial endeavours and associated genocides,” writes Albanese, “have historically been driven and enabled by the corporate sector. Commercial interests have contributed to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of their lands — a mode of domination known as ‘colonial racial capitalism’.”
She scrutinises eight private sectors: arms manufacturers; tech firms; building and construction entities; those industries concerned with extraction and services; banks; pension funds; insurers; universities; and charities.
“These entities enable the denial of self-determination and other structural violations in the occupied Palestinian territory, including occupation, annexation and crimes of apartheid and genocide, as well as a long list of ancillary crimes and human rights violations, from discrimination, wanton destruction, forced displacement and pillage to extrajudicial killing and starvation,” Albanese writes.
Central to the multifaceted economy of genocide, the report charges, is the military-industrial complex that forms “the economic backbone of the State”. Albanese cites the F-35 fighter jet, developed by US-based Lockheed Martin, in collaboration with hundreds of other companies, “including Italian manufacturer Leonardo S.p.A, and eight States”.
Israel’s colonisation and displacement, aided by the private sector, since October 2023, has a new urgency. Last year, US$200 million was advanced for “colony construction”. Between November 2023 and October last year, 57 new colonies and outposts were established “with Israeli and international companies supplying machinery, raw materials and logistical support”.
Examples include the maintenance and expansion of the Jerusalem Light Rail Red Line, the construction of the new Green Line, encompassing 27 kilometres of new tracks and 50 stations in the West Bank. This infrastructure has proven to be invaluable in linking the colonial project to West Jerusalem.
Despite some companies withdrawing from the project “owing to international pressure”, an entity such as the Spanish/Basque Construcciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles has been a keen participant, along with suppliers of excavating machinery (South Korea’s Doosan and Sweden’s Volvo Group) and providers of materials for the light-rail bridge (Germany’s Heidelberg Materials AG).
Beyond the structural and physical program of construction and displacement, all designed to extinguish any semblance of self-determination on the part of the Palestinians, come other features of the colonial project.
A prominent feature of this, Albanese notes, is that of “surveillance and carcerality”. Repressing Palestinians has become a “progressively automated” affair, with tech companies feeding Israel’s voracious security appetite with “unparalleled developments in carceral and surveillance devices”, some of which include closed-circuit television networks, biometric surveillance, advanced tech checkpoint networks, drone surveillance and cloud computing.
Palantir Technologies, a specialist in software platforms, comes in for a special mention. “There are reasonable grounds to believe Palantir has provided automatic predictive policing technology, core defence infrastructure for rapid and scale-up construction and deployment of military software, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which allows real-time battlefield data integration for automated decision making.”
The dance of dissimulation began after the report was released.
Lockheed Martin told Middle East Eye that foreign military sales were not its preserve. Such sales took place between governments, it said, meaning that the United States government would be best placed to answer questions.
In a more direct fashion, Israel and the US have continued their “Hate Albanese” campaign, reiterating old accusations while adopting novel interpretations of international law. Given Israeli officials and their US backers’ loathing of international human rights conventions, it is hypocritical in the extreme given the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) Advisory Opinion of July last year, and the International Criminal Court arrest warrants for Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. These figure prominently in Albanese’s assessment.
According to the ICJ, all states are under an obligation to “cooperate with the United Nations” on ensuring “an end to Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Territory and the full realization of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination”.
Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories was illegal. “It is a wrongful act of a continuing character, which has been brought about by Israel’s violations, through its policies and practices, of the prohibition on the acquisition of territory by force and the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people.”
The Israeli government viewed the report as “legally groundless, defamatory and a flagrant abuse of [Albanese’s] office”.
A June 20 letter from the Trump administration to UN Secretary-General António Guterres, obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, took issue with Albanese’s supposed “virulent antisemitism and support for terrorism”, while taking a swipe at her legal qualifications.
US ambassador Dorothy Shea, acting representative to the UN, says little about international law in her missive, other than her dismissal of UN General Assembly resolutions and advisory opinions by the ICJ as lacking any binding force “on either States or private actors”. Shea also claims Albanese “misrepresented her qualifications for the role”.
She said accusations against more than 20 US corporate entities were “riddled with inflammatory rhetoric and false accusations”, and the claims of “gross human rights violations”, “apartheid” and “genocide” constituted “an unacceptable campaign of political and economic warfare against the American and worldwide economy”.
It comes as little surprise that the security rationale — that says nothing of the Palestinian right to self-determination, let alone rights to life and necessaries — marks the entire complaint against Albanese’s apparent lack of impartiality.
“Business activities specifically targeted by Ms. Albanese contribute to and help strengthen national security, economic prosperity, and human welfare across the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe,” Shea said.
Just don’t mention the Palestinians.
[Binoy Kampmark lectures at RMIT University.]