Who’s Profiting from Genocide?

What Francesca Albanese’s Report Reveals—and Why It Matters for the Climate

Let’s be clear: genocide is never just a military operation. It’s an economy.

This week, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese released a groundbreaking report—“From the Economy of Occupation to the Economy of Genocide” naming dozens of global corporations complicit in and benefitting from Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. The report makes what many of us have long known impossible to ignore: multinational corporations are not just “doing business” with Israel—they are profiting from displacement, resource theft, and mass death.

And it’s not just harming people. It’s killing the planet.

Albanese’s report lays out how corporations across defense, tech, finance, construction, and agriculture are directly enabling Israel’s assault on Gaza. This is not indirect. This is not abstract. These companies are not passive observers—they are profiteers.

  • Weapon Manufacturers like Lockheed Martin, Elbit Systems, Boeing, BAE Systems, and General Dynamics are supplying the bombs raining down on hospitals and refugee camps.

  • Tech Giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and Palantir provide the cloud computing, AI surveillance, and targeting software that power Israel’s military intelligence.

  • Construction Firms like Caterpillar, HD Hyundai, and Volvo provide bulldozers used to demolish Palestinian homes—often paid for with public funds or foreign aid.

  • Hospitality Platforms like Booking.com and Airbnb list vacation rentals on stolen Palestinian land, laundering settler colonialism into leisure.

  • Financial Institutions including BlackRock, Barclays, Citigroup, JPMorgan, and Deutsche Bank fund Israeli military bonds and invest in all the above sectors.

This is what an economy of genocide looks like: global, profitable, and deeply entrenched in the status quo.

Genocide and Ecocide Are Two Sides of the Same Coin

The same companies enabling genocide are actively destroying ecosystems. This isn’t a coincidence—it’s a pattern.

Caterpillar, already infamous for displacing Palestinian families, is a major contributor to fossil fuel extraction and mining projects that poison Indigenous lands in the Global South.

Palantir, which boasts about using AI to “optimize” military surveillance, is also deployed by ICE in the United States to track, detain, and deport climate refugees and migrants.

Netafim, an Israeli irrigation company profiting off stolen Palestinian water, is celebrated as “sustainable innovation” in the ag-tech world—masking eco-apartheid as green tech.

In short: genocide and ecocide share a supply chain. And we need to cut the cord.

Elbit Systems, an Israeli weapons manufacturer, supplies drones and surveillance tech to police at the U.S.-Mexico border—and to ICE.

HP and Google provide AI and cloud infrastructure for the Israeli military while also marketing themselves as “green tech” leaders.

Chevron and ExxonMobil continue to fund and extract from the Eastern Mediterranean, leveraging Israel’s military occupation to secure infrastructure.

This is greenwashing meets genocide—a deadly symbiosis between environmental harm and militarized violence.

What This Means for Us

This moment calls for more than statements. It calls for a total redefinition of what sustainability means—because there is nothing sustainable about silence in the face of genocide.

If you are a brand, an artist, a designer, a policymaker, a curator, or a student: you are being called in. Your work, your budget, your institution may be entangled—knowingly or not—with the companies Albanese has exposed. Now is the time to do the work.

What We Must Do—Now

1. Follow the Money

Study the companies listed in Albanese’s report. If you work with—or fund—any of them, ask questions. Divest. Cut ties.

2. Demand Institutional Accountability

Museums, universities, nonprofits, and sustainability conferences are often quietly sponsored by companies profiting from Israeli apartheid. Push for transparency. Refuse complicity. Call it what it is.

3. Connect the Struggles

The fight for Palestinian liberation is not separate from climate justice. This is all one system: extraction, occupation, militarization, profit. As we say often: everything is political—because everything is connected.

4. Build and Invest in Alternatives

Mutual aid, abolitionist design, food sovereignty, fossil-free infrastructure, and Indigenous stewardship—these are not just buzzwords. They are the way forward. Center Global South leadership. Fund frontline communities.

5. Say Palestine

Refuse the pressure to sanitize. Refuse the pressure to stay neutral. In the face of genocide, neutrality is complicity. If your liberation practice does not include Palestine, it is incomplete.

A Propaganda Crisis, Too

These companies aren’t just selling tools of war—they’re shaping narratives. They sponsor art exhibitions, climate conferences, design summits. They greenwash occupation and brand apartheid as “security innovation.”

The most dangerous lie today is that “sustainability” can coexist with genocide. It can’t.

No climate justice without Palestinian liberation. No sustainable future while apartheid is profitable.

So What Can We Do?

Divest

Campaign for your workplace, university, or city to divest from the companies named in the report. Check your retirement funds. Audit your donors. Pull the receipts.

Expose

If your favorite brand or cultural institution is collaborating with Amazon, Palantir, or Caterpillar—say something. Publicly. Email them. Call it what it is: complicity.

Cut the Narrative Loop

Refuse to use language that normalizes occupation: “conflict,” “both sides,” “retaliation.” This is genocide.

Build Alternatives

Support community-owned energy, Palestinian agricultural cooperatives, and local solidarity economies. Join land back and degrowth movements—they are connected.

Organize for Policy

Push for legislation that bans military trade with apartheid regimes and prohibits companies from profiting off human rights abuses.

Tell the Truth, Consistently

Use your platform to amplify the names, the facts, the systems. Share this report. Write your own version. Make the invisible visible.

We can’t talk about genocide without talking about resource theft, land colonization, and environmental destruction. The same weapons being used to bomb hospitals and schools in Gaza are being manufactured by companies who also profit from climate collapse—polluting ecosystems, propping up fossil fuel economies, and creating the conditions for displacement that militarized borders are then built to contain.

We must hold the line. Genocide is not inevitable—it is designed. And anything that is designed can be dismantled. If we want to build a just, livable future, we must start by divesting from the machinery of death—and investing in life.

Let this be the beginning.

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Emel Mathlouthi