US corporations and military planners welcome the ‘legal maneuver space’ Israel has opened up for them to profit from warfare that slaughters and starves civilians
by Jonathan Cook at jc.substack shared Aug 5, 2025 via thefreeonline at https://wp.me/pIJl9-HhH Telegram t.me/thefreeonline/3785

‘Wounded child, no surviving family’
Israel’s genocide is big business – and the face of the future
The Financial Times revealed this month that a cabal of Israeli investors, one of the world’s top business consulting groups and a think-tank headed by former British prime minister Tony Blair had been secretly working on plans to exploit the ruins of Gaza as prime real estate.
The secret consortium appears to have been seeking practical ways to realise US President Donlad Trump’s “vision” of Gaza as the “Riviera of the Middle East”: transforming the small coastal enclave into a playground for the rich and an enticing investment opportunity, once it can be ethnically cleansed of its Palestinian population.

A/HRC/59/23: From economy of occupation to economy of genocide – Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 (Advance edited version)
Meanwhile, the UK government has declared Palestine Action a terrorist organisation – the first time in British history that a direct-action campaign group has been banned under Britain’s already draconian terrorism legislation.
Notably, the government of Keir Starmer took the decision to proscribe Palestine Action after lobbying from Elbit Systems, an Israeli weapons maker whose factories in the UK have been targeted by Palestine Action for disruption. Elbit supplies Israel with killer drones and other weapons central to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
These revelations came to light as the United Nation’s special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, published a report – titled “From economy of occupation to economy of genocide” – exposing Big Business’ extensive involvement in, and profits from, Israel’s crimes in Gaza.

In an interview with US journalist Chris Hedges, Albanese, an expert in international law, concluded: “The genocide in Gaza has not stopped, because it is lucrative. It’s profitable for far too many.”
Albanese lists dozens of major western companies that are deeply invested in Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people.
This is not a new development, as she notes. These firms have exploited business opportunities associated with Israel’s violent occupation of the Palestinian people’s lands for years, and in some cases decades.
The switch from Israel’s occupation of Gaza to its current genocide hasn’t threatened profits; it has enhanced them. Or as Albanese puts it: “The profits have increased as the economy of the occupation transformed into an economy of genocide.”
The special rapporteur has been a growing thorn in the side of Israel and its western sponsors over the past 21 months of slaughter in Gaza..
Read Report here Advance edited version English:Word-Francesca Albanese
That explains why Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state, announced soon after her report was issued that he was imposing sanctions on Albanese for her efforts to shed light on the crimes of Israeli and US officials.
Revealingly, he called her statements – rooted in international law – “economic warfare against the United States and Israel”. Albanese and the UN system of universal human rights that stands behind her, it seems, represent a threat to western profiteering.
Window on the future

Israel effectively serves as the world’s largest business incubator – though, in its case, not just by nurturing start-up companies.
Rather, it offers global corporations the chance to test and refine new weapons, machinery, technologies, data collection and automation processes in the occupied territories. These developments are associated with mass oppression, control, surveillance, incarceration, ethnic cleansing – and now genocide.
In a world of shrinking resources and growing climate chaos, such innovative technologies of subjugation are likely to have domestic, in addition to overseas, applications. Gaza is the corporate world’s laboratory, and a window into our own future.
In her 60-page report, Albanese writes that her research “reveals how the forever-occupation has become the ideal testing ground for arms manufacturers and Big Tech… while investors and private and public institutions profit freely”.
Her point was underscored by the Israeli arms firm Rafael, which issued a promotional video of its Spike FireFly drone that showed it locating, chasing and killing a Palestinian in what it called “urban warfare” in Gaza.
As the UN special rapporteur points out, quite aside from the issue of genocide in Gaza, western companies have been under a legal and moral obligation to sever ties with Israel’s system of occupation since last summer.
That was when the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, ruled Israel’s decades-old occupation was a criminal enterprise based on apartheid and forcible transfer – or what Albanese refers to as policies of “displacement and replacement”.
Instead, the corporate sector – and western governments – continue to deepen their involvement in Israel’s crimes.
It is not just arms manufacturers profiting from the genocidal levelling of Gaza and the occupations of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Big Tech, construction and materials firms, agribusiness, the tourism industry, the goods and services sector, and supply chains have also got in on the act.
And enabling it all is a finance sector – which includes banks, pension funds, universities, insurers and charities – keen to continue investing in this architecture of oppression.
Albanese describes the mosaic of companies partnering with Israel as “an eco-system sustaining this illegality”.

Help Noor and Amal survive the genocide in Gaza…. How it worked!|
Escaping scrutiny
For these corporations and their enablers, international law – the legal system Albanese and her fellow UN rapporteurs are there to uphold – serves as an impediment to the pursuit of profit.
Albanese notes that the business sector can escape scrutiny by shielding behind other actors.
Israel and its senior officials are on notice for committing genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
When she wrote to 48 companies to warn them that they were colluding in this criminality, they either responded that this was Israel’s responsibility, not theirs, or that it was for states, not international law, to regulate their business activities.
Continue reading “Israel’s Genocide is Big Business – How it Works- the Face of a Future we must Stop-“


























