Fueling Occupation: The complicity of International Businesses in Israeli Crimes Against Palestinians
The declared war in the Occupied Palestinian Territories has reached one year of tremendous violence. At the time of writing, more than 43,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed, including nearly 17,000 children, in the illegally occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank. The population in Gaza is under a state of siege, lacking food, electricity, medical care, and water supplies. Additionally to the loss of human lives, the Israeli army has destroyed more than 70% of homes, 80% of commercial activities and arable land, hundreds of schools and all universities, and devastated mosques, health care infrastructure, and heritage sites in the Gaza Strip. The war has now reached Lebanon, leaving at least one million people and almost two thousand killed.
This conflict has proven to be among the bloodiest military campaigns in modern history. The Israeli government is responsible for grave war crimes, crimes against humanity, and violations of international law and international humanitarian law. Yet, these same violations have represented the norm for over 57 years, and more, for Palestinians living in the illegally occupied OPT.
International business companies and financial institutions (FIs), in addition to the unconditional support of Western powers, are directly enabling this reality to unfold. They are running a high risk of facilitating or directly supporting these violations by profiting from, or investing billions in companies linked to, the Israeli illegal settler enterprise and war machine. This is a complicity that appears even more concerning when considering the February ruling of the ICJ on the South Africa case declaring the plausible risk of genocide against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.
Making business companies accountable for the perpetuation of illegality, injustice, and violence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is of fundamental importance in this historic time. The extent to which we, as active members of civil society, will increase our awareness of this global power structure and make ourselves responsible in front of it, will largely determine the possibility of a sustained peace in the territories between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
The Israeli Apartheid regime against Palestinians
Business involvement in rights violations, such as land-grab, illegal annexation, and forced expulsion of the population, have a long history in Occupied Palestine. It is necessary primarily to remember that the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, which were unilaterally annexed by Israel in 1967, have been recognised as illegally occupied territories under international law by many UN human rights experts, human rights organizations, and finally by an Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2004, and reiterated on 19 July 2024.
As an occupying power, Israel retains its obligations over the whole of the OPT (Occupied Palestinian Territories), which arise from numerous international treaties - the Fourth Geneva Convention and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) above all. Since 1967, Israel has been progressively transferring settlements and civilian infrastructure in the occupied territory to integrate them into Israeli territory, explicitly violating the Fourth Geneva Convention. By 2023, 700,000 settlers were residing in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israel has also regularly diverted natural resources and continued its incessant policy of forcible displacement of Palestinians from their lands in order to alter the demographic composition, fragment the Palestinian territory, and expand its illegal settlements. Only in the past three years, thousands of Palestinians have been forced out of their homes and villages without any prospect of return. (the right of Palestinian people to return, one of the most pressing issues affecting those forced into exile, has been systematically overlooked in peace treaties and international UN resolutions.
All of this was allowed by Israel’s entrenched discriminatory rule over Palestinians. While all Israeli Jews and settlers in the OPT are protected under a rights-respecting civilian rule system, the vast majority of Palestinians living both inside Israel and in the OPT, excluding East Jerusalem, have been placed under a draconian military rule since 1948 for the former and 1967 for the latter. This asymmetry has led to the systemic violation of Palestinian fundamental rights, such as civil rights, access to land and resources, freedom of movement, privacy, freedom of expression, housing, and education. Israel also retains primary control over borders, airspace, the movement of people and goods, security, and the registry of the entire population, dictating the legal status and eligibility to receive identity cards of the whole population. Many Human Rights organisations, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, and the UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territory have repeatedly denounced such an oppressive system as persecution and apartheid (full legal analysis by HRW on the occurrence of crimes of apartheid and persecution in the OPT), two of the most severe crimes against humanity under international law. As such, it is within this asymmetrical power structure, definable as settler colonialism, that the involvement of private companies in Palestinian occupied land ought to be addressed.
Business enterprises profiting from Israel’s illegal occupation and violent oppression
Business companies and Western financial institutions have been the big winners of the Israeli apartheid regime and machinery of oppression for decades, contributing to the violent dispossession, economic harm, and expropriation of Palestinians, in exchange for hundreds of billions in profit.
Fuelling the war machine
The U.S. has by far been the first military aid provider to the Israeli military. Only since the start of the hostilities, the Biden administration has worked to deliver more than 14 billion dollars in military equipment and infrastructure to Israel, on top of the annual 3.8 billion dollars in aid Israel received annually to be spent on U.S-made weapons. Thus, U.S. corporations have always been the ones profiting the most from Israeli military campaigns and the enhancement of high-tech security systems within the Israeli state and the Occupied Territories. Since the start of hostilities on October 7, military contractor stocks have skyrocketed. This is also true for companies, such as Caterpillar, Toyota, and Ford, that are not usually involved in the weapon industry. For all those companies, the war on Gaza has been and continues to be an immense source of profit.
Boeing, General Dynamics, and General Electric are among the greatest U.S.-based weapon companies in the world. They have been the primary providers of military equipment, such as artillery munitions, bombs, vehicles and bombs, surveillance systems, and drones, to the Israeli military. The primary aerial munitions Israel has used to bomb Gaza are the MK-80 bomb series, whose metal bodies are only produced by General Dynamics in the U.S. The MK-80s are considered some of the most destructive bombs used by Israel in Southern Gaza. One of those bombs means “instant death” for whoever finds himself within 365 metres.
According to an investigative analysis conducted by the New York Times, by November, Israel had dropped 208 of these bombs in densely populated civilian areas “where Israel had ordered civilians to move for safety”. CNN also reported the use of 500 of these bombs in Northern Gaza, in strikes such as the one in Jabalia refugee camp that killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians - accounting for a war crime. The use of these bombs in such areas should be considered a deliberate violation of international law and international humanitarian law, which prescribes discrimination between military and civilian targets. As documented by Amnesty International, these are just some of the cases in which U.S. made bombs were used in attacks that breach international law and international humanitarian law.
Furthermore, two of the major Israeli providers of military technologies, Elbit and Israel Aerospace Industries, have received direct funding by the European Union for several projects within the framework of Horizon 2020 Framework. This funding is part of a long-lasting cooperation between the EU and Israeli companies and institutions on scientific research, that between 2014 and 2020 was worth 1.28 billion euros. Despite not being not condemnable by itself, as it explicitly excludes military purposes, this collaboration runs high risk of financing and contributing to developing dual-use technologies, namely technology that can be deployed for both military and non-military purposes.
The case of Elbit System is highly representative in this respect. The company is the largest provider of weapons and surveillance systems to the Israeli military that have been largely used during the assault on Gaza. It has been reported that munitions carrying the label Elbit Systems were in the October 13 unlawful killing of Reuters journalist Isam Abdahllah and six others. On April 1, a Elbit System drone bombed a World Central Kitchen convoy, killing seven aid workers. Both strikes are being investigated as war crimes.
Enhancing Israeli settlement infrastructure
Other companies, such as Caterpillar, Hyundai and Ford Motor Company, furnish heavy machinery, vehicles, and infrastructure that the Israeli government has used to dismantle dozens of homes in East Jerusalem and construct settlements and industrial zones in the occupied area.
Caterpillar machinery has been extensively used by the Israeli military since the 1960s for the demolition of houses and the construction of settlements, land invasions and repression of Palestinian protests. Caterpillar provides to Israel the D-9 bulldozers that were used by the Israeli army in its land invasion of Gaza on October 7.
It has also been reported that Hyundai infrastructure has been used to dispossess the already restricted water access to Palestinian communities, and to profit from its sale of stolen water back to Palestinians, who are forced to buy over half the water they consume. Between September 2021 and May 2022, Al-Haq documented private corporations, acting on Israeli military orders, destroying 11 Palestinian water structures, and between June 2019 and April 2022, destroying 90 Palestinian wells.
Exemplary of the pervasiveness of Israeli expansionist projects is the construction of the Jerusalem Light Rail (JLR), a project connecting the Western part of the city with the illegal settlements in East Jerusalem and in the West Bank, thereby consolidating the ties between the settlements and the Israeli state. Several European companies, such as Spanish COMSA, CAF, GMV and TYPSA, are contributing and enabling such construction, thus becoming complicit in the breach of international law and alleged war crimes, in particular of the Hague Convention IV respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, that forbids an occupying power to build infrastructure that is not done for the service of the occupied population for military purposes. The construction of the railway is a way for Israel to make the illegal occupation of Palestine irreversible, and it amounts to a war crime. The involvement of companies in building and running the JLR, can therefore be regarded as “aiding and betting” those crimes.
Constructing an open air Panopticon Companies: targeted killings, surveillance, and violation of privacy
Long before October 7, technology had become a major instrument in the hands of Israel of control and repression in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Through its strong relationship with Big-Tech, Israel has progressively enhanced a comprehensive surveillance system to control and monitor Palestinian lives and consolidate existing practices of policing and segregation that have been in place since the 1990s. This has resulted in the construction of an automated apartheid regime, made of biometric recognition systems, vast databases, and trained machine learning algorithms to target and neutralise ‘suspicious’ subjects in civilian contexts, and enabled by the technology coming from companies such as Google, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft. For those Tech giants, the ongoing occupation of Palestine has become a tremendous source of profit.
Since 2019, IBM, one of the greatest American multinational technology corporations in the world, has been assigned by the Israeli government to design and operate the Eithan System of the Israeli population, immigration, and Border Authority. This system, which largely resembles the surveillance practices enhanced against the black population during the South African apartheid regime, gathers personal data on all Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, non-citizen residents in East Jerusalem, and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
Through the Eithan system, for instance, the Israeli authorities control the permits required for Palestinian workers who work in Israeli or in Israeli settlements, as well as permits required for Palestinians to cross the Green Line for civil purposes, such as medical needs, family visits, or travel. The system also registers all the crossings under Israeli surveillance, such as the Allenby Bridge Crossing, between the West Bank and Jordan, and the Erez Checkpoint, the only crossing for people in Gaza to access the rest of the Occupied Territories and Israel. It is not surprising that IBM is the same company that developed the system of identification and screening of migrants at the U.S. border.
IBM is therefore directly involved in the implementation of Israel’s repressive permit regime and discriminatory policies against Palestinians, such as restrictions of freedom of movement, voting rights, right to family life and access to services.
In 2021, Google and Amazon signed a 1.2 billion dollar contract with Tel Aviv to develop the so-called ‘Project Nimbus’. The project aims at providing cloud computing infrastructure, AI, and other technology services to the Israeli military and government. According to an independent investigation done by the Intercept, these capabilities can be used by Israel government and military “for facial detection, automated image categorization, object tracking, and even sentiment analysis that claims to assess the emotional content of pictures, speech, and writing”. These capabilities add to the already existing pervasive surveillance systems that Israel has used to closely control and monitor Palestinians wherever they are, such as Red Wolf, Blue Wolf and Wolf Pack. According to an Amnesty International report, these systems have been systematically used for arbitrary restrictions of movement and resulted in a constant risk for Palestinians of being arbitrarily arrested, interrogated, and detained.
Although there is an immense lack of transparency surrounding the whole project, project Nimbus have raised a wave of protests and consequent dismissals of dozens of Google and Amazon workers, claiming that they refuse to be implicated in what have been defined an “AI-powered genocide”. These accusations appear even more plausible given the long history of Israel’s employment of AI systems for military and policing purposes. It has been revealed that Israel has been using automated machine learning systems, namely Gospel and Lavender, to produce killing targets at an unprecedented pace. These systems have been used with little or no human oversight to target identified suspects in their own houses with a blunt consideration of civilian casualties. It is highly probable that these systems have been responsible for the unprecedented death toll during the ongoing war in Gaza, as Lavender listed more than 30,000 legitimate targets only in the first months of the incursion, deserving the name of “cold enabler of mass death”, facilitating a “mass assassination factory”.
Given this mortal use of AI systems, the words of journalist Ramzy Baroud are revelatory of the enormous moral and legal responsibilities of tech giants: “Israel’s war on the Palestinian people, which now has the help of these tech giants, remains one of the gravest injustices that continues to scar the consciousness of humankind. No amount of Google justification or Amazon rationalisation can change the fact they are facilitating Israeli war crimes in Palestine.”
Profiting from illegally occupied land for profit: the case of Airbnb and Booking.com
Closing the cycle, the military occupation of Palestinian land and the dismantling of entire villages, has eventually become a huge source of profit for numerous travel agencies. By listing and hosting dozens of houses for rent in occupied land, Airbnb and Booking.com are contributing to making these settlements more profitable and sustainable, and thus facilitating the illegal transfer of Israeli citizens to the settlements, as stated in the Human Rights Watch report Bed and Breakfast on Stolen Land. Similarly, Amnesty International concludes that by boosting the settlement tourism industry and, as a result, the settlement economy, Booking.com is “contributing to, and profiting from, the maintenance, development and expansion of illegal settlements”.
Palestinians, in return, have not only lost their rights to cultivate their lands, but are no longer allowed to access them, let alone granted the right to build a house on it and rent it out. Palestinians-ID holders are prohibited from entering settlements except as labourers under special permits. Consequently, settlements heavily restrict their freedom of movement and, because of those travel restrictions, limit their right to access education and health services and protections for keeping families intact.
Thus, the two global travel companies are conducting their business under conditions of inherent discrimination, and a breach of international human rights law and international humanitarian law. Both Airbnb and Booking.org enlist their houses as located in “Israel”, thus misleading consumers and contributing to the mystification and erasure of Palestinian history.
Ein Yabroud is a Palestinian village, north-east of Ramallah, in the Israeli Occupied West-Bank. It was home to the parcel of land that Palestinian Awni Shaaeb had inherited from his grandfather in the 1930s and that was used by his family to grow wheat, barley and chickpeas. In 1975 the village was occupied by Israeli Settlers and replaced by the settlement of Ofra, where Awni Shaaeb is prevented from accessing. Today, Ofra is one of the settlements that Airbnb uses to host its houses. When acknowledging the business that was taking place in his farmland, Shaaeb replied “for someone to occupy your land, that’s illegal. For someone to build on your land, to rent it out, and profit from it - that is injustice itself”.
The complicity of European FIs and the Need to Perform Human Rights Due Diligence
The Don’t Buy Into Occupation Coalition (DBIO), a joint initiative between 25 Palestinian, regional and European organisations, found that 776 European Financial Institutions (FIs) have financial relationships with 51 of the businesses directly involved with Israeli settlements and with one or more of the “listed activities that raise particular human rights concerns”. Between January 2020 and August 2023, USD 164.2 billion was provided in the forms of loans and underwriting to these companies.
Despite the financial flows refers to the total financial relationship between the creditor and the company, whose activities are also conducted outside of the settlements, investment in a company supports the company in its entirety, connecting the investor with all the adverse impact of a company on human rights and its contributions to the violation of international law.
Companies have an obligation to carry out enhanced due diligence in conflict-affected areas as prescribed by the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Likewise, financial institutions are responsible for using their leverage to prevent and address the harm that a business company, on which they have invested, is causing. Following the words of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), “considering the illegal and pervasive nature of the settlements in the OPT, it is almost impossible to think of a way in which a company engaging in activities in the illegal settlements, would comply with International Law”. Thus, disinvestment from companies currently operating in Israeli settlements is paramount to safeguard the rule of law from widespread illegality.
The regulation of corporate conduct, effective accountability, and guaranteeing remedies for those affected is paramount in the context of Occupied Palestine. For this end, different tools have been implemented at the international and European levels. Firstly, the UN Database of business enterprises involved in certain activities relating to settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which was updated on 30 June 2023 and will be updated annually from September 2024 onwards. Secondly, the update of the OECD Guidelines and the UN Binding Treaty on Business and Human Rights, which requires business enterprises, including financial and investment funds, to “prevent abuses in occupied or conflict-affected areas, including situations of occupation”. At the European level, in 2022 the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive was published by the European Commission. Despite being a step forward in enhancing business human rights due diligence, the Directive falls short in many aspects, especially with regards to financial institutions that will only be required to perform due diligence in the pre-contractual phase of relationship, instead of on an ongoing basis.
States have also a responsibility to cooperate to enact measures to block trade with Israeli illegal settlements. Ireland proposed the Control of Economic Activity (Occupied Territories) Bill 2018, which would prohibit importing and selling goods and services produced in illegal settlements located in territories under military occupation. Similarly, on May 14 2021 the Portuguese Parliament introduced a bill proposing a ban on the import and sale of goods, services, and natural resources from settlements established in occupied territories. The Belgian parliament introduced a law prohibiting the sales of products and services resulting from serious violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law in occupied territories. These are just some examples of how political decisions are fundamental and effective in preventing financial flows and business activities to fuel human rights abuses and violations of international law.
The Power of Civil Society
Civil society has proven to be a driving force of change. It was mainly a push from below, coming from ordinary people, students, and workers, that contributed to the shift to business and government policies, enhancing a strict opposition and disengagement from the violations committed in the Occupied Territories. The Boycott, Disinvestment, Sanctions (BDS) is a Palestinian-led Civil Society movement created in 2005, when Israel was constructing the Wall in the West Bank that was declared illegal by an Advisory Opinion of the ICJ in 2004. The principle upholding the Movement is to induce Israel to recognise Palestinian right to self-determination and the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes - from which they have been displaced since the 1948 Nakba. Its method is that of a non-violent, continuous resistance similar to the one that was successfully used in South Africa against the Apartheid regime. The Movement is now a global reality, comprising tens of millions of members coming from trade unions, farmers coalitions, racial, social, and climate justice movements, universities, that has gained substantial results pressuring states and companies to disengage from the Israel apartheid system.
BDS calls for all civil society organisations and “people of conscience” to practise broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives, and to pressure governments to impose sanctions and embargoes against Israel and its apartheid regime. Since its inception, the movement largely contributed to some of the most important changes at the international, national, and business level. On June 2024, the UN called all states and companies to immediately end arms transfers to Israel; Turkey has suspended all trades with Israel; Spain denied a ship carrying weapons for Israel to Haifa to stop at the port of Cartagena, after a large scale social protest at the port; Bolivia has announced the suspension of all diplomatic relations with Israel, while Colombia stopped all its arms purchases from Israel; the Brazilian government suspended a deal with Elbit Systems worth USD 200 million; Norway’s sovereign fund, the world’s largest, has recently announced that by November 2023 it had divested entirely its almost half a billion dollars worth of Israel Bonds; many Danish pensions funds have disinvested from Israeli companies operating in the illegal settlements; KLP, Norway’s largest pension company has divested $69 million from Caterpillar; dozens of universities around the world have committed to ending institutional ties with complicit Israeli institutions or divesting with companies complicit in illegal settlements.
Acknowledging the multifaceted and entrenched levels with which Israeli occupation has been imposed over the Palestinians, these measures aim to target Israel not only economically and politically, but also on a cultural and social level. The BDS movement, as the boycott movement in South Africa, is a demonstration that through sustained and persevering action, civil society can achieve enormous transformations, opening a breach in the possibility of radically transforming apparently consolidated political and social realities.
Some Conclusions
These pages did not have the intention of being exhaustive nor to bring forward any new contribution to the “Israel-Palestinian” issue. Much more could and should be said on the history of Israeli occupation of Palestine. An occupation that endured without any real accountability of the repeated violations committed against the Palestinian people, their lands, and culture, given the implications of Western economic and political institutions throughout the last seven decades.
This piece was an attempt to give a glimpse of the vast power structure that is at play in the perpetuation of these violations, underlying that political oppression and exploitation is powerless without the whole range of technologies, actors, and practices that sustain it. By describing it many times as “too complex” to be understood, the risk is to obscure the all too material factors that sustain this perpetuous conflict and, more importantly, to fail to hold parts legally and ethically accountable for the unbearable crimes that have been committed long before October 7.
Arms and technology businesses surely have a primary role in furnishing the necessary infrastructure for occupation to be practically exercised and enhanced, though one should not underestimate the role academic, sports, and cultural institutions, including the world of music, sports, arts, literature, and social sciences, and the media play in endorsing certain policies and state (violent) ideologies. This is why resistance is a duty that should be practised everywhere and in every moment, to be actively lived in daily gestures and consuming choices, to oppose discourses and practices that directly or indirectly foment injustice and widespread illegality.
As civil society we have a duty to be informed and to make our institutions and businesses that surround our daily life accountable for their acts when those explicitly breach basic legal and ethical principles. What is at stake is not only the faith of millions of people and of the Arab region, but the very significance and existence of the ideas of democracy, rule of law, and justice around the world. We have a historic and generational responsibility in the enduring struggle for a free Palestine, and for a more just and equitable world order.