Israel and the Albanese Report
An Economy of Genocide
It makes for stark and dark reading. The report for the UN Human Rights Council titled From economy of occupation to economy of genocide makes mention of “corporate entities” who have been enriched by “the Israeli economy of illegal occupation, apartheid and now genocide.” Authored by the relentless Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, it is unflinching in its assessments and warnings to companies doing business with Israel.
What makes the investigative undertaking by Albanese useful is its examination of the corporate world and its links to the colonial, settler program of removing and displacing a pre-existing population. The machinery of conquest of any state necessarily involves not only the desk job occupants in civilian bureaucracies and high-ranking military commanders, but those in the corporate sector, eager to make a profit. “Colonial endeavours and associated genocides,” writes Albanese, “have historically been driven and enabled by the corporate sector. Commercial interests have contributed to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of their lands – a mode of domination known as ‘colonial racial capitalism’.”
Eight private sectors come in for scrutiny: arms manufacturers, tech firms, building and construction entities, those industries concerned with extraction and services, banks, pension funds, insurers, universities and charities. “These entities enable the denial of self-determination and other structural violations in the occupied Palestinian territory, including occupation, annexation and crimes of apartheid and genocide, as well as a long list of ancillary crimes and human rights violations, from discrimination, wanton destruction, forced displacement and pillage to extrajudicial killing and starvation.”
Central to the multifaceted economy of genocide, the report charges, is the military-industrial complex that forms “the economic backbone of the State.” Albanese cites a stellar example: the F-35 fighter jet, developed by US-based Lockheed Martin, in collaboration with hundreds of other companies “including Italian manufacturer Leonardo S.p.A, and eight States.”
Since October 2023, the process of colonisation and displacement has assumed an air of urgency, aided by the private sector. In 2024, US$200 million was advanced for “colony construction”. Between November 2023 and October 2024, 57 new colonies and outposts were established “with Israeli and international companies supplying machinery, raw materials and logistical support.” Examples include the maintenance and expansion of the Jerusalem Light Rail Red Line, the construction of the new Green Line, encompassing 27 kilometres of new tracks and 50 stations in the West Bank. The infrastructure has proven to be invaluable in linking the colonial project to West Jerusalem. Despite some companies withdrawing from the project “owing to international pressure”, an entity such as the Spanish/Basque Construcciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles has been a keen participant, along with suppliers of excavating machinery (South Korea’s Doosan and Sweden’s Volvo Group), and providers of materials for the light-rail bridge (Germany’s Heidelberg Materials AG).
Beyond the structural and physical program of construction and displacement, all designed to extinguish any semblance of self-determination on the part of the Palestinians, come other features of the colonial project. A prominent feature of this, Albanese notes, is that of “surveillance and carcerality”. Repressing Palestinians has become a “progressively automated” affair, with tech companies feeding Israel’s voracious security appetite with “unparalleled developments in carceral and surveillance devices”, some of which include closed-circuit television networks, biometric surveillance, advanced tech checkpoint networks, drone surveillance and cloud computing.
Palantir Technologies Inc., a specialist in software platforms, comes in for a special mention. “There are reasonable grounds to believe Palantir has provided automatic predictive policing technology, core defence infrastructure for rapid and scale-up construction and deployment of military software, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which allows real-time battlefield data integration for automated decision making.”
With the report released, the dance of dissimulation began. Lockheed Martin told the Middle East Eye that foreign military sales were not their preserve as far as accountability or cause of concern was, a lofty, business-like attitude unshackled from a moral compass. Such sales took place between governments, meaning that the US government would be best placed to answer any questions. Hand washing and deferrals of guilt is a private sector speciality after all.
In a more direct fashion, both Israel and the United States have continued their “Hate Albanese” campaign, boringly reiterating old accusations while adopting novel interpretations of international law. Given the obvious loathing of international human rights conventions by Israeli officials and their US backers, this is decidedly rich, even more so given such jurisprudence as that of the International Court of Justice’s Advisory Opinion of July 2024, and the International Criminal Court arrest warrants for Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (These developments figure prominently in Albanese’s assessment.)
According to the ICJ, all States were under an obligation to “cooperate with the United Nations” on ensuring “an end to Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Territory and the full realization of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination”. Israel’s continued presence in the OPT was illegal. “It is a wrongful act of a continuing character which has been brought about by Israel’s violations, through its policies and practices, of the prohibition on the acquisition of territory by force and the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people.”
From Israel came the view that the report was “legally groundless, defamatory and a flagrant abuse of [Albanese’s] office.” A June 20 letter to UN Secretary-General António Guterres from the Trump administration obtained by The Washington Free Beacon took issue with Albanese’s supposed record of “virulent antisemitism and support for terrorism”, bitchily sniping at her legal qualifications. Little is actually mentioned of international law in the bilious missive by US Ambassador Dorothy C. Shea, acting representative to the UN, other than a snotty dismissal of UN General Assembly resolutions and advisory opinions by the International Court of Justice as lacking any binding force “on either States or private actors”.
Shea claims Albanese “misrepresented her qualifications for the role by claiming to be an international lawyer despite admitting publicly that she has not passed a legal bar examination or been licensed to practice law.” A fabulous accusation, given the surfeit of allegedly qualified legal members working in the Israeli Defense Forces and other offices executing their program of displacement, starvation and killing.
The accusations against various corporate entities, notably over 20 US entities, were “riddled with inflammatory rhetoric and false accusations”, making such daring claims of “gross human rights violations”, “apartheid” and “genocide”. These charges, ventured through letters of accusation, constituted “an unacceptable campaign of political and economic warfare against the American and worldwide economy.”
It comes as little surprise that the security rationale – one that says nothing of the Palestinian right to self-determination, let alone rights to life and necessaries – marks the entire complaint against Albanese’s apparent lack of impartiality. “Business activities specifically targeted by Ms. Albanese contribute to and help strengthen national security, economic prosperity, and human welfare across the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe.” Just don’t mention the Palestinians.
We Will Never Forget that the BBC Has Helped to Enable a genocide
A damning report has now confirmed what many of us already knew: that the BBC’s reporting of Israel’s war on Gaza is far from impartial.
The Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) analysed the BBC’s coverage of the 12 months following Hamas’ one-day attack on 7 October 2023. Their huge report reveals a clear dynamic: “the marginalisation of Palestinian suffering and the amplification of Israeli narratives.”
The report showed that, despite the killing of 34 times more Palestinians, the BBC gave Israeli deaths 33 times more coverage, interviewed more than twice as many Israelis as Palestinians (1,085 v 2,350), and shared the Israeli perspective 11 times more frequently than the Palestinian one (2,340 v 217).
Complicit in genocide
The report, which examined over 35,000 pieces of content produced by “the world’s most trusted broadcaster,” is full of similarly shocking evidence. But perhaps the most deplorable is the BBC’s failure to report confessions of genocidal intent by Israel’s leaders. Not a single BBC article reported Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu’s biblical “Amalek” reference – a people the Jews were commanded by God to annihilate – or president Herzog’s claim of Palestinian collective responsibility. Just 12 out of 3,873 articles bothered to mention former defence minister Gallant’s statement in which he referred to Palestinians as “human animals”, ordered “a complete siege on the Gaza strip”, and promised “we will eliminate everything”. Genocidal intent is notoriously difficult to prove when classifying an act as genocide, yet here are Israel’s own leaders, readily admitting their intention to wipe out an entire people.
Peter Oborne, one of several journalists to question the BBC about the findings in the report during a parliamentary meeting, said: “You never educated your audience about the genocidal remarks, and according to this report, on one hundred occasions, one hundred occasions, you’ve closed down the references to genocide by your guests. This makes you complicit.”
Lack of crucial context
Oborne’s brilliant tirade, which can be viewed here, also flagged the BBC’s failure to report on two Israeli military doctrines – the Hannibal directive and the Dayiha doctrine – which provide essential context to understanding Israel’s response to the 7 October attacks.
The Hannibal directive allows the Israeli military to use any force necessary to prevent its soldiers from being captured and taken into enemy territory – even if that means opening fire on those captives. A major investigation by Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed that the procedure was activated during the 7 October attacks, and a UN report concluded that at least 14 Israeli civilians were deliberately killed by their own army on that day as a result of the directive. But as Israel refused to cooperate with the UN investigation – and barred medical professionals and others from doing so – we do not know the true figure. A year-long investigation by Electronic Intifada, however, found it to be in the hundreds.
The BBC has also never mentioned Israel’s Dahiya doctrine. Named after a Beirut suburb that was decimated by Israel in 2006, the Dahiya doctrine is the use of disproportionate force to destroy civilians and everything that supports them so that they will never again contemplate resistance. It is a form of collective punishment – and unquestionably a war crime – that has been applied to Gaza over the past 20 months. The BBC’s decision not to ever mention this doctrine is, as Oborne calls it, “a grotesque omission”, for it provides fundamental context to Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza following 7 October.
No desire to change
You only have to look at the representative the BBC chose to respond to the accusations in the report and defend its Gaza coverage to see how little it cares – and how unlikely it is to change. Richard Burgess, executive news editor at the BBC, admitted he’s “not a Middle East expert” and doesn’t claim to understand the doctrines. A rightly exasperated Oborne responded, “Then send someone along who does!” When a senior news editor is asked to justify their organisation’s coverage of what is widely considered a genocide, ignorance of the full facts is truly an appalling defense.
Soon after the report was released – as if to demonstrate its complete unwillingness to modify its pattern of bias – the BBC announced that its long-awaited documentary, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, would not be aired. The film explores the systematic destruction of Gaza’s health service by Israeli forces as well as the abuse suffered by Palestinian medics. The BBC claimed that broadcasting the film could create “a perception of partiality”. But as former BBC journalist and news presenter Karishma Patel tweeted: “How? This film shows the reality of Israel’s actions. You can’t fling the accusation of bias at realities you simply don’t want on air.” Just as the harrowing documentary on life in Gaza seen through the eyes of Palestinian children was pulled by the BBC months previously, the BBC’s silencing of Palestinian voices appears to be institutional. It’s simply what it does.
Israel apologists
And just when you think it couldn’t get any worse, it does. On 27 June, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a horrific article about the Gaza Health Foundation (GHF) – the controversial Israeli-controlled aid distribution centres. The IDF soldiers Haaretz interviewed confirmed what Palestinians have been claiming for weeks: that soldiers are being ordered to massacre desperate, starving civilians queuing up for food. “It’s a killing field,” one soldier said. “Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They’re treated like a hostile force – no crowd-control measures, no tear gas – just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars.” Another added, “Sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there’s no danger to the forces…I’m not aware of a single instance of return fire.”
Did the BBC pick up on this story? Of course it didn’t. It did however publish an ‘explainer’ about the shootings at GHF sites via its Verify service. BBC Verify calls itself a “specialist team of journalists” who “fact-check information, verify video, counter disinformation, and analyse data to separate fact from fake.” But rather than using actual testimony from IDF soldiers to corroborate reports of shootings, their specialist journalists looked at some video footage and concluded that they paint a murky picture: “While the videos show an overall picture of danger and chaos, they do not definitively show who is responsible for firing.”
The rest of the article reads like a PR piece for the government of Israel: Israeli government spokesman David Mencer is quoted saying that the reports of hundreds of civilians being killed is “another untruth”; Hamas are of course likely responsible; while a GHF spokesperson is “pleased” with its first month of operations. We know the BBC Verify journalists will have read the Haaretz article. That they chose to completely ignore it and concoct this pile of Israel apologia is frankly appalling.
The truth is coming out
The BBC obviously has no intention of reforming and will continue to provide cover for Israel’s crimes for as long as it possibly can. But despite their best efforts, the truth about Israel is finding its way out. The documentary that the BBC refused to air has now found a home on Channel 4 in the UK and on Zeteo News worldwide. And the BBC’s attempt to control their Glastonbury coverage by barring pro-Palestinian band Kneecap from their live broadcast, failed spectacularly when punk duo Bob Vylan chose to use their set to condemn Israel’s war crimes, live on air. Lead singer Bobby called out the UK and US for being “complicit in war crimes” and led chants of “free Palestine” and “death to the IDF”, which the crowd enthusiastically shouted back. The crowd’s response, and the fact that a huge number of other artists also spoke out in support of Palestine, suggests the tide is shifting.
True to form, the BBC swiftly removed Bob Vylan’s performance from iPlayer and released a grovelling statement expressing regret that it hadn’t pulled the live stream and describing Vylan’s words as “deeply offensive” and “utterly unacceptable.” That our state broadcaster is so quick to condemn words but ignores a massacre of unarmed civilians tells you everything you need to know about the BBC – and you can’t help but sense that it is losing control of the narrative. Anyone with any conscience simply cannot agree that calling out a genocide is worse than committing one.
History will not be kind to the genocide enablers. And thanks to reports like CfMM’s, we will always remember on whose side the BBC stood.
