EXCLUSIVE: Top Economists Back Francesca Albanese's Report on the 'Economy of Genocide' in Gaza
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.
Francesca Albanese speaks during the gala of the Publico 2025 Awards in Madrid on June 25, 2025. Photo By Matias Chiofalo/Europa Press via Getty Images
Last week, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese made
headlines across the world for exposing the dozens of companies that she says have profited from Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Albanese’s UN report, ‘
From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide,’ goes beyond just the typical weapons-manufacturing culprits, and calls out financial institutions, educational institutions, and Big Tech companies, including Alphabet Inc. (Google), Amazon, IBM,
Palantir, as well as many, many others.
In response, the US Mission to the UN
renewed its calls for the UN secretary-general to condemn Albanese and remove her as special rapporteur for human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
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Now, world-leading economists, including former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, French economist Thomas Piketty, and Lebanese-American statistician and essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb, are praising Albanese for her report.
Zeteo has obtained an exclusive English copy of the economists’ open letter on Albanese’s report, in which they accuse corporations of “maintaining the Apartheid regime and enabling the subsequent genocide.” Read the full letter below.
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.
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
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