“For Elbit, Gaza is a proving ground. And a profit centre.”
That should be the headline on the earnings reports. Not the usual anodyne euphemisms, such as “strong growth,” “conflict-driven demand,” or “innovation in kinetic platforms.” We are not talking about abstract market forces. We are talking about the systematic erasure of a people, and the corporate complicity that fuels it. The UN Special Rapporteur’s report to the Human Rights Council (A/HRC/59/23) is clear: this is not simply an occupation. This is a genocide managed like a portfolio. Settler-colonialism, tax-deductible.
“The economy of genocide”: When the private sector goes to war
There are paragraphs in this report that should make you sick. Not just because of the violence they describe, but because of the language of profit they are wrapped in. Since October 2023, the Israeli assault on Gaza has been executed with the enthusiastic support of the private sector. Arms manufacturers like Elbit Systems and IAI have posted record profits. Multinational firms like Lockheed Martin and Leonardo S.p.A have continued to supply F-35s, JDAM bombs, and precision-guided munitions to a military campaign that has killed more than 60,000 Palestinians, and injured over 100,000.
“Genocide is not an aberration of capitalism. It is one of its business models.”
What is being obliterated is not just life, but the material infrastructure of Palestinian existence. Schools and Universities. Hospitals. Olive groves and agricultural land. This isn’t a war between armies. It’s a corporate-sponsored cleansing. One euphemised as “real-time weapons testing” in industry brochures and Israeli government press releases. The bombs fall, and the stock prices rise.
“Post-October 2023, corporate actors have contributed to the acceleration of the displacement-replacement process,” the report says. Let’s not mince words. That means: they are making money from ethnic cleansing.
Genocide as business model
The report uses a devastating phrase: the economy of genocide. It’s not rhetorical. It’s cold, precise, and exactly the kind of phrase Hannah Arendt might have used to describe the Nazi machinery. Bureaucratised, monetised, efficient. Genocide rendered as process.
Firms like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and IBM have embedded themselves in Israeli surveillance infrastructure, building what the report calls dual-use infrastructure. A horrible phrase. This is civilian tech that feeds the carceral apparatus. Cloud AI systems under Project Nimbus power the targeting software that selects which Gaza building gets bombed next. This is not a theoretical risk. It is active, ongoing complicity.
These aren’t neutral companies. They are integral to the machinery of violence. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud. All of these platforms now host not only data but death. Those workers who make a stand are sacked.
“The cloud runs red. AI powers apartheid. Surveillance is now a service industry.”
Let’s also be clear about what this means for international law. As the report outlines, we’re not in the territory of unfortunate associations or poor oversight. We are talking about corporate entities contributing to genocide. Not metaphorically. Not symbolically. But materially.
“Had proper human rights due diligence been undertaken,” the report notes, “corporate entities would have long ago disengaged.” But they didn’t. Because disengagement means fewer contracts. Fewer subsidies. Less leverage in global arms fairs.
Colonialism 2.0: Same logic, different tools
This is not new. The report links today’s corporate collusion with settler-colonialism to a long and bloody history of corporate imperialism: from the charter companies of the British Empire to the land grabs of the Jewish National Fund. What’s different today is the level of technological sophistication and the scale of denial.
Israel calls itself a “start-up nation.” But this start-up has been backed by military investors from day one. The algorithm that tracks your face at a checkpoint? The drone that stalks a refugee column? The AI that selects the next “precision strike”? All of it beta-tested on Palestinian bodies, then sold globally.
There is a straight line from the bulldozer demolishing a home in Rafah to the quarterly report filed by Caterpillar. From the drone strike that kills a family to the software patch pushed by an Israeli tech start-up later acquired by Google.
“This is not just about military occupation,” the report says. “It is about the replacement of one people with another.”
The law is not neutral. It is absent.
Despite the report’s careful legal framework, what’s striking is the powerlessness of law. The UN can write reports. The ICJ can issue rulings. But the bombs keep falling, and the deals keep closing.
We live in a world where the genocide of Palestinians can be livestreamed, debated, and still be profitable. Where arms shipments to a state under ICJ investigation for genocide continue without interruption. Where the very corporations that fuel war crimes also run our children’s classrooms, our hospitals, our phones.
No more plausible deniability
The report ends with a call to action: “Corporate entities must refuse to be complicit—or be held to account.” But they won’t refuse. That’s the point. They will have to be forced. Through divestment (the BDS movement is now 20 years old). Through boycott. Through legal prosecution. Through public pressure that makes it more expensive to kill than to walk away.
This is not about charity. It is not about ethics workshops in tech campuses or ESG scores in investment portfolios. It is about power and the structures that sustain it.
Palestine is not just a lab. It is not a case study. It is the front line of a global system that has fused capitalism with militarism and called it innovation.
Let us not be the generation that watched genocide in real-time and did nothing but update our terms of service.
