Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, French economist Thomas Piketty, and others join open letter supporting Albanese amid US calls to remove her as the UN special rapporteur on Palestine.
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ECONOMISTS IN PRAISE OF SPECIAL RAPPORTEUR FRANCESCA ALBANESE’S REPORT TO THE UNITED NATIONS: ‘FROM ECONOMY OF OCCUPATION TO ECONOMY OF GENOCIDE’
History teaches us that economic interests have been key drivers and enablers of colonial enterprises and often of the genocides they perpetrated. The
corporate sector has been intrinsic to colonialism since its inception, with corporations historically contributing to the violence against, the exploitation, and ultimately the dispossession, of Indigenous people and lands, a mode of domination known as racial colonial capitalism. Israel’s colonisation of the occupied Palestinian territories is no exception.
The recent report by Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, constitutes a major contribution to understanding the political economy of Israel’s Apartheid state, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and, now, their genocide. As such, we believe, it must be studied and debated widely and freely.
In view of the
virulently hostile and indeed intimidating letter from the US government to the UN Secretary General demanding the dismissal of Ms Albanese and the quashing of her excellent report, we felt the need to express our strong support for Ms Albanese and to encourage the UN to dismiss the shrill demands of the US and Israeli governments. (
Do please read the letter, US government felt offended)
Following a well-trodden path of genocide denial and of bullying anyone who challenges the right of the colonial power to dispossess Indigenous peoples, the US and Israeli governments, with most European governments too timid to take a stance, demand that the international community turn a blind eye to the ongoing genocide and, in particular, to the key role that multinational and national corporations are playing in maintaining the Apartheid regime and enabling the subsequent genocide.
As economists we feel the duty to highlight three key findings that Ms Albanese’s report unveils with clarity and precision.
First,
occupation and genocide are highly lucrative for conglomerates. These include not only the usual arms and ‘defence’ big businesses (e.g., Lockheed-Martin, the primary maker of the F35s, ELBIT, Israel’s own arms manufacturer, and Palantir, the software company whose algorithms have most likely been crucial in the selection of ‘targets’ across Gaza) but also household brand names (e.g., Caterpillar, BNP Paribas, Barclays, Allianz, Chevron, BP, Petrobas, A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S). As Israel’s defence budget doubled, with the active support of the US government, it
crowded in large ‘investments’ into Israel’s killing machine across this international network of complicit conglomerates in which thousands of Israeli companies are intertwined with US, European, Korean and even a Brazilian mega-corporation. This explains why Israeli equities rose by 161% at a time of falling demand, production and consumer confidence.
The second finding in Ms Albanese’s report that deserves extensive study is that the Palestinian territories Israel occupies have functioned as
Big Tech’s ideal laboratory and testing ground – a function that the transition from occupation to genocide has only heightened. No country, for instance, has given as much access to a population’s biometric data as Israel has given to IBM. Since 7th October 2023, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Palantir have been expanding their cloud capital services at a breathtaking pace. Face recognition software, target selection algorithms and automated execution systems are being tested in real time, at will, and with fewer ethical constraints than in the case of experiments on laboratory rats. Big Tech could not be happier!
The third key finding is that
top US and European universities are financially dependent on remaining wedded to Israel’s Apartheid and permanent occupation/conflict political economy. Many top US and EU institutions will face serious financial difficulties if they were to stop backing Israel’s genocide. Ms Albanese’s report must be commended for drawing this sordid dependency of stellar Western universities and research institutions (including the Technical University of Munich, MIT Labs, the University of Edinburgh among others). The peoples of Europe and America have a right to know that some of their most cherished academic institutions are financially reliant on helping Israel reproduce its political economy of occupation and genocide.
In a few years, almost everyone will claim they opposed this genocide. But it is now that people of good conscience need to take a stand. As economists we stand, today, with Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur under attack by the US and Israeli governments because her recent
report throws indescribably important light on the political economy of Israel’s occupation and genocide.
Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek finance minister
Thomas Piketty, author of ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of ‘The Black Swan’
Michael Hudson, president of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET)
Guy Standing, professorial research associate, SOAS University of London
Jayati Ghosh, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
Giuseppe Mastruzzo, director of the International University College of Turin (IUC)
Jomo Kwame Sundaram, research advisor at Khazanah Research Institute
Robert H. Wade, professor of Political Economy and Development at London School of Economics and Political Science
Christopher Cramer, professor of the Political Economy of Development at SOAS University of London
Nidhi Srinivas, associate professor of management at Milano School of Policy, Management, and Environment
