In early July, Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, issued a damning report detailing how large corporations profit from the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and genocide in Gaza that has taken place since October 7, 2023.
Albanese is an Italian legal scholar and human rights expert who has long been critical of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, and has specified before the UN that Israel is responsible for carrying out a genocide in Gaza.
In a letter addressed to UN Secretary-General on June 20, 2025, the Trump administration called for Albanese’s removal from her current position due to her alleged support for terrorism and anti-Semitism—allegations that are without foundation.[1]
Previously, more than 100 human rights groups came to Albanese’s defense after she was subjected to a smear campaign by the Israeli government.
Citing a newly published study by Harvard University Press on the corporations that built the British Empire, Albanese begins her report by noting that “[c]olonial endeavours and associated genocides have historically been driven and enabled by the corporate sector.”
Albanese goes on to state that the corporate sector has immeasurably contributed to the Israeli colonization of Palestinian lands and displacement of its population dating to the 1948 Nakba and 1967 Six-Day War (when Israel took control over the West Bank and Gaza) by “providing Israel with the weapons and machinery required to destroy homes, schools, hospitals, places of leisure and worship, livelihoods and productive assets, such as olive groves and orchards, to segregate and control communities and to restrict access to natural resources.”
Albanese continues: “By helping to militarize and incentivize illegal Israeli presence in the occupied Palestinian territory, the corporate sector has contributed to the creation of the conditions for Palestinian ethnic cleansing.”
Albanese identifies Elbit Systems, Israel Aerospace Industries, and Lockheed Martin as key weapons suppliers profiting massively off occupation and war that have enabled Israel’s genocide of Gazans.[2]
Lockheed Martin produces the F-35 and F-16 fighter jets, which “have been integral to equipping Israel with the unprecedented aerial power to drop an estimated 85,000 tons of bombs, much of it unguided, to kill and injure more than 179,411 Palestinians and obliterate Gaza,” according to Albanese.
Albanese goes on to discuss the collaboration between Elbit Systems and the Israeli Defense Ministry and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the development of new drone technologies, including drone swarms, that are used to terrorize Palestinians.
Shipping companies like the Danish giant A.P. Moller-Maersk, meanwhile, make huge profits shipping weapons to Israel.
Tech giants provide the computer, artificial intelligence (AI) and data analysis systems that are used to spy on the Palestinians and help Israel develop more effective social control over them.
One of the key tech companies, IBM, was deeply complicit in the Nazi Holocaust. Since 2019, it has operated a central database enabling the Israeli governmental use of biometric data on Palestinians, and supporting a discriminatory permit regime.
Before IBM, Hewlett Packard [now Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)] maintained the database and its Israeli subsidiary is still providing servers to Israel’s military and police so it can better subjugate the Palestinian population.
Microsoft, co-founded by Bill Gates, is another tech company whose technologies are embedded in Israeli institutions, and it has major contracts with the Israeli military for systematizing its software.
In 2021, Israel awarded Alphabet Inc. (Google) and Amazon.com, Inc., a $1.2 billion contract (Project Nimbus)—largely funded through the Ministry of Defense—to provide additional core tech infrastructure to Israel. These three companies—Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon—have granted Israel virtually government-wide access to their cloud and artificial intelligence technologies, further enhancing its social control capabilities.
Palantir, a CIA-startup company at the cutting edge of new AI technologies, has helped the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) develop artificial intelligence systems such as “Lavender,” “Gospel” and “Where’s Daddy?” to process data and generate lists of targets for bombing operations.
In January 2024, Palantir announced a new strategic partnership with Israel and held a board meeting in Tel Aviv “in solidarity” with it.
Albanese goes on to discuss Caterpillar Inc.’s provision of bulldozers and other equipment used to demolish Palestinian homes and infrastructure over decades.
According to Albanese, Israel has evolved Caterpillar’s D9 bulldozer into automated, remote-commanded core weaponry of the military, deployed in almost every military activity since 2000, clearing incursion lines, “neutralizing” territory and killing Palestinians.
Hyundai and Volvo have also provided equipment to the IDF that has been used to raze Palestinian areas, including East Jerusalem, and to raze farmland, including olive groves. Additionally, they have supplied equipment used to construct what Albanese terms “illegal colonies” taken over by Israeli settlers for at least 10 years.[3]
The real estate company Keller Williams’ complicity in Israeli occupation became apparent when it ran a real-estate roadshow in Canada and the U.S. sponsored with companies developing and marketing thousands of apartments for Jewish settlers in the West Bank.
The Alabama-based Drummond Co., whose founder Gary Drummond[4] was close to Bill Clinton, and the Swiss-based Glencore, founded by another top Clinton donor and felon, Marc Rich[5], are Israel’s primary suppliers of coal.
Chevron’s consortium supplied more than 70% of Israel’s energy consumption and supplies Israeli refineries that produce jet fuel for IDF planes that bomb Gaza.[6]
Albanese notes that, “by supplying Israel with coal, gas, oil and fuel, companies are contributing to civilian infrastructures that Israel uses to entrench permanent annexation and now weaponizes in the destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza. The same infrastructure that these companies supply resources into has serviced the Israeli military and its energy-intensive tech-driven obliteration of Gaza.”
At the end of her report, Albanese discusses the financial industry’s investment in war and occupation-profiteering companies. She points out that the Wall Street behemoth BlackRock is the second largest institutional investor in Palantir, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and IBM, and the third largest in Lockheed Martin and Caterpillar.
Another Wall Street giant, Vanguard, is the largest institutional investor in Caterpillar, Chevron and Palantir, and the second largest in Lockheed Martin and Elbit Systems.
Additional aspects of Albanese’s report discuss the importance of faith-based charities and universities in supporting the infrastructure of military occupation and genocide.
The latter entities do this in part by erasing the Palestinian perspective from their curricula and by supporting research into weapons systems that are used to kill Palestinians, most egregiously at MIT—Benjamin Netanyahu’s alma mater.
Albanese makes comparisons in her report not only to the British Empire but also Nazi Germany, where the Nuremberg tribunal prosecuted German corporate executives in companies like I.G. Farben that helped influence Hitler’s policies and profited from the genocide of the Jews.
A new Nuremberg-style tribunal is needed today to hold corporate executives accountable for their crimes in Gaza and elsewhere around the world.
Unfortunately, there is no outside power stronger than either the U.S. or Israel at this time that could stage such a trial and make the perpetrators accountable for their actions.
Albanese herself calls for sanctions and a full arms embargo on Israel and payment of reparations to Palestinian victims.
These measures would be welcome although the current power-dynamic in the world makes them unlikely to materialize.
Ultimately, what is really needed is a mass movement of people committed to socialist transformation.
U.S. Pouring Hundreds of Millions Into IDF Bases
As the corporate profiteering and IDF rampage continues, Haaretz reported based on a review of newly surfaced U.S. Army Corps of Engineers documents that the U.S. is overseeing a sprawling military construction initiative in Israel with projects valued at more than $1.5 billion.
Financed through military assistance provided under a $3.8 billion annual aid package agreed to by former President Barack Obama, the upgraded basing network is designed to accommodate the Israel Air Force’s new refueling aircraft and helicopters, a new headquarters for the IDF’s Shayetet 13 naval commando unit, and launching pads for Lockheed F-15 and F-35 fighter jets.
Middle East Monitor reported that despite U.S. officials claiming the aid is for mutual security, the scale of America’s construction projects in Israel “shows something else entirely: deep, long term military entrenchment.”
One new U.S. funded project at Tei Nof airbase involves construction of expanded runways and building of new hangars to prepare for Israel’s new CH-53K military helicopters. Other projects involve the construction of new piers for the Israeli Navy, building underground bunkers and command centers, expanding weapons storage and renovating housing for U.S military personnel stationed at Israeli bases.
The Middle East Monitor said that together these projects “paint a clear picture: the U.S. isn’t just supporting Israel with weapons—its physically building the infrastructure of Israel’s military power, on Israel soil, with American money.” To the ultimate benefit, one might add, of the “merchants of death” cited in Albanese’s report.
- For previous CAM articles on corporate war-profiteering and the efforts of activists to hold corporate executives responsible, see here, here and here. CAM has also reported on secret U.S. military base facilities in Israel.
The Trump administration has also placed sanctions on Albanese who has been subjected to repeated smear attacks and death threats for helping to expose U.S.-Israeli war crimes and human rights violations and trying to hold officials accountable for their misconduct. See Chris Hedges, “The Persecution of Francesca Albanese,” Consortium News, July 10, 2025. ↑
Albanese writes that the 65% surge in Israeli military spending from 2023 to 2024—amounting to $46.5 billion, one of the highest per capita worldwide—generated a sharp surge in the annual profits of Elbit Systems, Israel Aerospace Industries and other war-profiteering companies. ↑
Albanese writes that Hyundai and Volvo “have continued supplying the Israeli market despite abundant evidence of the criminal use of this machinery by Israel and repeated calls from human rights groups to sever ties. Passive suppliers become deliberate contributors to a system of displacement.” ↑
Jeremy Kuzmarov, Warmonger: How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the US Trajectory from Bush II to Biden (Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 2024), 383. Drummond accompanied Clinton on a tour of Colombia in the late 1990s. Drummond was at the time facing lawsuits for paying right-wing paramilitary fighters to terrorize the population along the 120-mile rail line from Drummond’s two main mines—valued at $7.5 billion—to their port on the Caribbean. The paramilitaries tortured and killed innocent people to keep them from providing haven to the left-wing FARC rebels who had bombed the railway leading to Drummond’s mines in response to their displacement of locals and poisoning of the local environment. A Drummond employee was convicted of arranging for the paramilitaries to kill two Drummond Co. union leaders. Glencore has multiple investments in shady mining operations in Africa. ↑
Rich was pardoned by Clinton on his last day in office. ↑
BP and Chevron are the largest contributors to Israeli imports of crude oil, as major owners of the Azeri Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline and the Kazakh Caspian Pipeline Consortium and their associated oil fields. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of six books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); and with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
