“You can’t have genocide without an economy behind it.”
United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese doesn’t say this as a metaphor. She means it — literally.
Her latest report, The Economy of Genocide, lays bare a chilling truth. She follows the money, and what she finds is brutal in its clarity: The violence in Palestine isn’t just a war.
It’s a business model.
This Is What Genocide Looks Like on a SpreadsheetAlbanese names over 60 companies—some of them global giants—that are not just bystanders to Israel’s occupation of Palestine but active profiteers.
Behind every demolished home, every surveillance checkpoint, every illegal settlement is a web of corporations fuelling, funding, and feeding off the violence.
Here’s how:
Destruction and Displacement: Bulldozer companies whose machines flatten Palestinian neighbourhoods. Missile manufacturers boasting “battle-tested” weapons — tested on real people, then sold globally as elite tech.
Surveillance and Segregation: Tech firms supplying facial recognition systems, databases, and digital profiling tools that track and control Palestinian movement in real time.
Colonialism as a Real Estate Opportunity: Construction, utility, and infrastructure companies laying roads, water lines, and electricity grids in illegal settlements — infrastructure built atop stolen land, in violation of international law.
Even tourism platforms like Booking.com and Airbnb are cashing in—advertising properties in illegal Israeli settlements built on stolen Palestinian land, as if it were just another sunny vacation spot.
While homes turn to rubble and families to memories, CEOs, shareholders, and venture capitalists cash in.
Complicity by DesignHere’s the worst part:
They know.
They’ve known.
They’ve always known.
These companies have been warned for years by UN bodies, human rights groups, and communities on the ground.
Yet they continue to invest, operate, and profit. Why?
Because war pays. And because the system allows it.
They hide behind familiar excuses:
"We just make the tools—what people do with them isn’t our problem."
But here’s the truth: If you're supplying bricks to build an illegal wall, or designing code for surveillance, or cash to fund illegal settlements, you're not neutral.
You're a partner.
Who Protects the Protectors?Despite decades of warnings, boycotts, UN resolutions, and now an official genocide report, most of these companies have not disengaged. Why?
Because the global system lets them get away with it.
International law provides some tools for accountability — namely, the International Criminal Court (ICC) and International Court of Justice (ICJ) — but these institutions are slow, underfunded, and politically constrained.
Their ability to go after private corporations is limited, and their reach often blunted by state protectionism.
Resisting the SystemBut there’s another economy rising — one of resistance, accountability, and hope.
Students occupying campuses. Lawyers filing lawsuits. Journalists refusing silence. Supermarket shelves emptied of complicit brands. UN experts naming names.
“They can’t kill us all. They can’t silence us all,” Albanese says. “But we have to act together.”
What starts as scattered voices can become a unified roar. What begins as isolated protests can grow into a global uprising.
“Alone, we are as fragile as butterflies. But if we flap our wings together…”
“We become the storm. And may that storm be justice.”
This Is a Business Model. Disrupt It.If genocide is being funded, we must divest.
If it’s being marketed, we must boycott.
If it’s being legalised, we must resist.
If it’s being silenced, we must speak.
This isn’t just a call for justice. It’s a call to tear down the machinery that makes mass death profitable. Because genocide doesn’t start with bullets — it starts with budgets.
And you? You're not powerless.
You’re a consumer, a voter, a citizen, a voice.
And if enough of us rise — not as spectators, but as disruptors — we just might bankrupt the business of genocide.
