An economy of occupation just turned into an economy of genocide. The Tel Aviv stock exchange has increased its value 179%—70 billion—in the last month alone. Why? Arms manufacturers and securities/surveillance systems have been profiteering a lot through the customization of weaponry and how Israel has perfected certain techniques of surveillance or hitting, killing Palestinians throughout this genocidal war.
Palestine has always been a laboratory for Israel, and Israel must be understood as a military state. In order to preserve itself as an ethno-state, it has had to rely significantly on the use of force, on military force. And the Palestinians have provided an endless pool of resources on which to test surveillance techniques, technology, and other kinds of weapons with zero accountability, zero scrutiny, and a lot of return. One people enriched and another erased. Israel’s economy is a business of erasure, of elimination.
60,000 people have been killed. Over 100,000 have been maimed. One-third of the killed ones are children. The harm that has been done to the Palestinians is enormous and can hardly be met by justice. However, there is something absolutely abominable in the way this genocide has been committed. This is a genocide that has been enforced through weaponry, technology, and surveillance systems of the 21st century.
If I look back right now after three years of this mandate as a special rapporteur, I see a continuum in various pieces of work that I’ve done. Israel has violated the right of self-determination of the Palestinian, like the right to exist on the little land that remains to them politically, culturally, economically. It has strangled the possibility for them to have an economy by controlling their resources—land, water, fuel, gas—and diverting them and the profits that others could make out of them toward itself.
And this is why I insist today we need to stop feeding this illusion that there is a good Israel and a bad Israel, a good Israel with whom it’s okay to do business, while if you cross the green line and you get into the colonies, then it becomes problematic. No, it’s Israel which commits violations of the right of self-determination, which maintains an unlawful occupation, which advances annexation. And therefore, it’s Israel which today must face sanctions, divestment, and based on what civil society is increasingly and successfully doing, boycott.
The report exposes an economy of occupation which has turned into an economy of genocide. For decades, Israel has advanced its settler colonial project enabled, facilitated, supported by a network of private entities which range from the arms sector—Elbit Systems, Lockheed Martin—surveillance sector, Palantir, whose tools, techniques and equipment have been used to forcibly displace the Palestinians from their lands, to destroy their lands and livelihoods, their homes, and then to segregate and surveil them with walls, fences, CCTV cameras, etc. And then they have been replaced. So they’ve been displaced and replaced, and in a way in which the private sector has proven instrumental in creating a new habitat, a new ecosystem made of homes, services, infrastructures where Israeli Jews and others and their partners, their associates have replaced the Palestinians.
Think of the construction of the colonies, roads, water and electricity infrastructure, extracting Palestinian natural resources, and then producing goods and services and circulating them, connecting to domestic, regional, and international sets of markets. If Palestine was a crime scene, it would have the fingerprints of all of us. So, for example, Airbnb and Booking.com advertised properties on land that settlers and the state of Israel have stolen from the Palestinians. We continue to normalize the occupation through a click.
And this is not even the end of the story because there has been a network, a web of enablers made of banks like BNP or Barclays, financial entities like BlackRock and Vanguard, and even universities which have lended legitimacy and financial means, funds, endowments to the system to thrive so that Israel could continue business as usual. It is displacement and replacement of the Palestinians in a vicious circle.
Now I could have written this report decades ago, and still what has happened now is that instead of disengaging from this economy of occupation, which is unlawful—and we need to understand the legal framework there because it implies responsibility and possibly liability of companies and their executives—is that instead of disengaging, these companies have maintained their entwinement with this economy and have even profited more.
Hyundai has been providing machinery that has been used to demolish Palestinian infrastructure in the West Bank, and now that machinery is being used to pulverize Gaza. Same with Volvo. Volvo has been providing buses used to connect colonies and the colonies to Israel. Or think of the weaponry that has been enhanced and rendered more sophisticated through the support of artificial intelligence and other technologies in order to become more lethal at a reduced cost of life for the Israelis, like unmanned technologies, quadcopters, killing drones.
So all this has generated an incredible economy, very high profits. But also think of the water industry or the dairy industry that should have complained for losing the market that Gaza represented, right? No, they’ve not made a peep because ideologically they support what the state of Israel is doing. And universities have not disentangled from partnership with the Israeli universities or with the Israeli defense sector and other forms of research in the name of neutrality. But there is nothing neutral, nothing innocent in engaging with a state which commits and is accused of committing war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
So this is the red line that companies have continued to cross with knowledge, intent and purpose. And so this is why I say these people have no realization, no sense of what has been going on in Gaza. I mean the harm that has been done in Gaza. Or if they do, they support it. And this is why I say they must be held accountable.
And of course the companies can say, “Well, but what can I do? It’s Israel making the use it wants of our goods.” Yes. But you are enabling it. You are profiting from an unlawful endeavor. The fact of being directly linked to this economy enmeshes you in an economy of occupation, and if you’re not held accountable in courts, well, you will face accountability through the choice of your consumers.
The strength of this report is in how it explains and exposes a system of entanglement and complicity of private actors with an unlawful endeavor. The International Court of Justice says that the occupation is unlawful. It should be withdrawn totally and unconditionally. And so the question is how can it ever be envisaged that the private sector can do what is prohibited to states, like recognizing the legal consequences of an unlawful act which is criminal and trading, aiding and abetting, supporting this unlawful endeavor.
This is why I say the only legal move that companies can make is unplugging, just pulling out of their entanglement with Israel. Private entities are allowed to get away with their violations of international law because this is what they’ve always done. Historically, private entities have been enablers and drivers of settler colonial enterprises, dispossession, dismemberment, and subjugation of entire nations. Indigenous peoples bear like living testament of these. Palestinians are the last to be genocided in the pursuit of profit.
However, as the post-Holocaust industrialist trials marked the end of an era of full lack of accountability, and South Africa post-apartheid has advanced the development of a normative framework to regulate the conduct of business. This is the test. Palestine is forcing us to take the opportunity to test that legal framework and to make sure that whatever businesses have done until now, meaning pursuing profits without zero accountability and zero scrutiny, changes once and for all. People who are enriching themselves out of this catastrophe have to be looked for everywhere they are and held accountable.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is a slap in the face of 80 years of multilateralism and humanitarian assistance. Whatever they are doing is not aid. It’s a shame to call it aid. How come that the state that is accused of committing acts of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity against the Palestinians, including using starvation as a weapon of war, is the state that is allowed to distribute food to the Palestinians?
All the more, whatever that thing the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is, it looks more like a joint criminal enterprise with zero accountability, zero scrutiny, but especially zero purpose because first of all, aid is a complex endeavor. It’s not just throwing bags of flour at people. There are reports that refer to the presence of what appears to be narcotics in the flour, but also the way the flour is distributed. It’s a punch in the face of the principle of dignity, humanity, no doing no harm, and it’s absolutely undignified.
The only recommendation I have and I urge member states to do that: break the blockade yourself. Every state which has ports in the Mediterranean area, European states and Arab states, must send their navy with humanitarian personnel and humanitarian supplies for the people of Gaza. Enough of them starving, being killed, tormented day and night. This nightmare must end for the Palestinians, for the Israelis, and for what remains of our humanity.
A ceasefire is not the answer, especially according to the Israeli way of observing ceasefires where “other ceases, Israel fires.” This is how ceasefires are normally implemented. This is not about ceasefire. The paradigm needs to shift from self-defense, whatever it is, to self-determination.
I’m really worried also about how member states from Arab states to Western states are discussing the reconstruction of Gaza. This is not a business. We need to recover a population which is surviving genocide and we need to heal them. We will also need to take care and heal the Israelis who have committed this genocide because this is a society that when it will realize what it has done will face a moral collapse, but they will also have to face accountability for what they have done.
Look, there is no other way to stop the genocide than stopping it. The genocide and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from what remains of Palestine will not stop by inertia. It must be stopped, and international law has in itself the road map to end it. End the genocide now. End the occupation by September this year. Because this is what the General Assembly upon the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice has decided, and then end the apartheid.
Whatever political solutions Palestinians and Israelis will decide, it cannot be anything else than full rights and freedoms for anyone regardless of their religious or political, cultural identity between the river and the sea. Meanwhile, private and public actors from government officials to CEOs of companies have to be held accountable.
The role that civil society, lawyers, private sectors, and anyone as a consumer or as part of a public or private institution can play is enormous. Use your role to bring accountability forward. We do build change at every step and this is the moment to prove it. May this be the last genocide in human history and may this be the last crime that is committed against the Palestinians.
Look, I have one regret: not to have investigated media as the first corporate entity which should be held accountable. But it’s coming. So, thank you independent media to do what corporate media has not been able to do. Telling the truth.
Double Down News, July 17, 2025
