Skip to main content

Palestine: Like Western ones, Indian companies too embedded in the 'economy of genocide'

By Sudhanva Deshpande, Vijay Prashad 

The Israeli genocide of the Palestinians has persisted for two years —a “live-streamed genocide”, as Amnesty International called it in its April 2025 annual report. Thus far, Israel has murdered over 66,000 Palestinians —the overwhelming majority of whom are civilians; 20,000 of the dead are children, meaning a Palestinian child has been killed every hour since October 2023. Two million Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to remain on the move as Israel continues to pummel the small area with missile and bomb attacks. Meanwhile, thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank have faced eviction as part of a broader ethnic cleansing policy Israel is pushing for the entire region between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
During these two years, Israel has violated the sovereignty of seven states, from Lebanon to Qatar, killing uncounted numbers of people in these countries with no official United Nations sanction. This murderous rampage appears endless, but world opinion has now almost entirely turned against Israel. When Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces an International Criminal Court warrant for crimes against humanity, spoke at the United Nations, the General Assembly hall was almost empty. Netanyahu is now unwelcome in most countries.
Almost, most. These qualifications are necessary because many countries continue to provide political support for the Israeli genocide and broad-ranging military support for the mass killings. Two recent reports measure this enduring support for Israel’s genocide. The first, From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide, came from Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. Published in June 2025, the report prompted direct and virulent personal attacks on Albanese, even extending to her husband, who works at the World Bank. The report’s substance, detailed below, elicited no rebuttal from the Western governments, which would be hard-pressed to respond to the factual claims about Western corporate complicity in the genocide.
The second report, Profit and Genocide: Indian Investments in Israel, was written by Hajira Puthige of the Centre for Financial Accountability in New Delhi. Published in September 2025, it details the complicity of Indian corporations in the Israeli genocide.
Western Support
Israel’s most important ally is the United States, whose government continues to provide diplomatic support —the US vetoed a sixth UN Security Council cease genocide resolution in September 2025— while supplying weapons and money. Since October 2023, the US has sent over a thousand weapons shipments to Israel.
Apart from the United States, Israel’s closest allies are the states of Europe, both individually and in the European Union. These states have cracked down on their own citizens for peacefully protesting the genocide while they made arms deals with Israel. For instance, Germany began a major embargo on weapons sales to Israel but simultaneously signed a deal to import €350 million worth of weapons from Israel. Although many European states have pledged to recognise Palestine, this aligns with their existing agreements to a two-state solution; they have yet to sanction Israel in any way for its genocide.
Albanese’s report, From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide, demonstrates not only how Western states have defended Israel’s genocide but also how Western corporations have profited from both the genocide in Gaza and the illegal occupation and apartheid across the Israeli landscape, including the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Western companies are no longer merely implicated in West Bank apartheid, as previously documented, but are now embedded in the economy of genocide. The report documents complicity across eight key sectors: arms manufacturers, technology, construction, mining, finance, insurance, universities, and charitable organisations. Albanese developed a database of 1000 corporate entities but highlighted only a handful, such as Amazon, BlackRock, Caterpillar, Google, Lockheed Martin, and Microsoft. Technologies previously used to control and dispossess Palestinians are now being used to inflict mass violence and immense destruction.
The report asserts that international law provides no safe harbour for firms complicit in genocide. Albanese argues that corporate engagement with any component of the genocide violates jus cogens (compelling law) norms and constitutes international crimes. She notes that the International Court of Justice’s provisional measures and the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants “signal the risk that corporate entities – and their executives – that engage in the [Occupied Palestinian Territory] are implicated in serious international crimes”. The report concludes with a call for corporations to cease relations with Israel until the occupation and genocide end. Albanese advocates for comprehensive sanctions, arms embargoes, the suspension of trade agreements, and the prosecution of corporate executives to pressure the world to stop its support for this genocide.
Indian Support
In recent months, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu have exchanged public birthday wishes on X. In early September 2025, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich —member of a far-Right party who expresses such extreme racism and homophobic views that he is sanctioned by several governments, including the UK— led a delegation to Delhi to meet with Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. They signed a major bilateral investment agreement to boost trade and investment. Sitharaman stressed the need for greater collaboration in “cybersecurity, defence, innovation and high-technology”.
A few days later, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel stated unequivocally that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Sporadic news reports over the past two years have detailed India’s continued arms relationship with Israel. Al-Jazeera published reports on recent arms transfers, based on documents that its journalists had seen. Albanese’s report also documents weapons transfers from a company in Hyderabad to Israel. However, until recently, there has been no major study of the Indian complicity in the genocide. This gap is filled by the Centre for Financial Accountability’s publication of Puthige’s report, which details the complicity of the Indian billionaire class and their corporations.
Here are some examples:
Adani. Adani-Elbit Advanced Systems India, Ltd. manufactures the Hermes 900 drone, which has been used in Gaza. Adani Ports, which owns Haifa Ports, is therefore the owner of an Israeli navy facility that harbours Israel’s submarine fleet.
Tata. Tata Consultancy Group has been working on the Project Nimbus system, which provides surveillance and targeting of Palestinians in Gaza. Tata has sold Israel Land Rover vehicles, which the Israeli military has converted into the MDT David, an armoured vehicle it uses in patrols in the West Bank and in Gaza.
Ambani. Reliance Jio has been working closely with Israeli digital firms to build Israel’s digital infrastructure, while Reliance Defence has worked with Rafael Advanced Defence Systems to build missile systems and drones for the Israeli military.
Jains. Jain Irrigation, through NaanDanJain, works to supply and build irrigation systems in the illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank of the OPT.
The report provides evidence that powerful and influential sections of Indian business, like their Western counterparts, are directly complicit in the genocide.
---
This article was produced by Globetrotter. Sudhanva Deshpande is a leading theatre personality of India. Deshpande has been associated, as an actor and director, with Jana Natya Manch (Janam) (People’s Theatre Front) , a radical theatre activist group, since 1987. He also heads Leftword Books, an independent publication, as its managing editor and May Day Bookstore and Café as a proprietor/barista. In his long association with Janam, Deshpande has acted in over 8000 performances of more than 60 street plays, directed more than 30 street plays, and conceptualized and written dozens of street and proscenium plays on issues of contemporary political and social relevance. Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are On Cuba: Reflections on 70 Years of Revolution and Struggle (with Noam Chomsky), Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism, and (also with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of US Power. Chelwa and Prashad will publish How the International Monetary Fund is Suffocating Africa later this year with Inkani Books

Comments

TRENDING

India's chemical industry: The missing piece of Atmanirbhar Bharat

By N.S. Venkataraman*  Rarely a day passes without the Prime Minister or a cabinet minister speaking about the importance of Atmanirbhar Bharat . The Start-up India scheme is a pillar in promoting this vision, and considerable enthusiasm has been reported in promoting start-up projects across the country. While these developments are positive, Atmanirbhar Bharat does not seem to have made significant progress within the Indian chemical industry . This is a matter of high concern that needs urgent and dispassionate analysis.

A comrade in culture and controversy: Yao Wenyuan’s revolutionary legacy

By Harsh Thakor*  This year marks two important anniversaries in Chinese revolutionary history—the 20th death anniversary of Yao Wenyuan, and the 50th anniversary of his seminal essay "On the Social Basis of the Lin Biao Anti-Party Clique". These milestones invite reflection on the man whose pen ignited the first sparks of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and whose sharp ideological interventions left an indelible imprint on the political and cultural landscape of socialist China.

Urgent need to study cause of large number of natural deaths in Gulf countries

By Venkatesh Nayak* According to data tabled in Parliament in April 2018, there are 87.76 lakh (8.77 million) Indians in six Gulf countries, namely Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). While replying to an Unstarred Question (#6091) raised in the Lok Sabha, the Union Minister of State for External Affairs said, during the first half of this financial year alone (between April-September 2018), blue-collared Indian workers in these countries had remitted USD 33.47 Billion back home. Not much is known about the human cost of such earnings which swell up the country’s forex reserves quietly. My recent RTI intervention and research of proceedings in Parliament has revealed that between 2012 and mid-2018 more than 24,570 Indian Workers died in these Gulf countries. This works out to an average of more than 10 deaths per day. For every US$ 1 Billion they remitted to India during the same period there were at least 117 deaths of Indian Workers in Gulf ...

Remembering a remarkable rebel: Personal recollections of Comrade Himmat Shah

By Rajiv Shah   I first came in contact with Himmat Shah in the second half of the 1970s during one of my routine visits to Ahmedabad , my maternal hometown. I do not recall the exact year, but at that time I was working in Delhi with the CPI -owned People’s Publishing House (PPH) as its assistant editor, editing books and writing occasional articles for small periodicals. Himmatbhai — as I would call him — worked at the People’s Book House (PBH), the CPI’s bookshop on Relief Road in Ahmedabad.

Swami Vivekananda's views on caste and sexuality were 'painfully' regressive

By Bhaskar Sur* Swami Vivekananda now belongs more to the modern Hindu mythology than reality. It makes a daunting job to discover the real human being who knew unemployment, humiliation of losing a teaching job for 'incompetence', longed in vain for the bliss of a happy conjugal life only to suffer the consequent frustration.

History, culture and literature of Fatehpur, UP, from where Maulana Hasrat Mohani hailed

By Vidya Bhushan Rawat*  Maulana Hasrat Mohani was a member of the Constituent Assembly and an extremely important leader of our freedom movement. Born in Unnao district of Uttar Pradesh, Hasrat Mohani's relationship with nearby district of Fatehpur is interesting and not explored much by biographers and historians. Dr Mohammad Ismail Azad Fatehpuri has written a book on Maulana Hasrat Mohani and Fatehpur. The book is in Urdu.  He has just come out with another important book, 'Hindi kee Pratham Rachna: Chandayan' authored by Mulla Daud Dalmai.' During my recent visit to Fatehpur town, I had an opportunity to meet Dr Mohammad Ismail Azad Fatehpuri and recorded a conversation with him on issues of history, culture and literature of Fatehpur. Sharing this conversation here with you. Kindly click this link. --- *Human rights defender. Facebook https://www.facebook.com/vbrawat , X @freetohumanity, Skype @vbrawat

As 2024 draws nearer, threatening signs appear of more destructive wars

By Bharat Dogra  The four years from 2020 to 2023 have been very difficult and high risk years for humanity. In the first two years there was a pandemic and such severe disruption of social and economic life that countless people have not yet recovered from its many-sided adverse impacts. In the next two years there were outbreaks of two very high-risk wars which have worldwide implications including escalation into much wider conflicts. In addition there were highly threatening signs of increasing possibility of other very destructive wars. As the year 2023 appears to be headed for ending on a very grim note, there are apprehensions about what the next year 2024 may bring, and there are several kinds of fears. However to come back to the year 2020 first, the pandemic harmed and threatened a very large number of people. No less harmful was the fear epidemic, the epidemic of increasing mental stress and the cruel disruption of the life and livelihoods particularly among the weaker s...

Muslim women’s rights advocates demand criminalisation of polygamy: Petition launched

By A Representative   An online petition seeking a legal ban on polygamy has been floated by Javed Anand, co-editor of Sabrang and National Convener of Indian Muslims for Secular Democracy (IMSD), inviting endorsements from citizens, organisations and activists. The petition, titled “Indian Muslims & Secular Progressive Citizens Demand a Legal Ban on Polygamy,” urges the Central and State governments, Parliament and political parties to abolish polygamy through statutory reform, backed by extensive data from the 2025 national study conducted by the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA).

Bangladesh alternative more vital for NE India than Kaladan project in Myanmar

By Mehjabin Bhanu*  There has been a recent surge in the number of Chin refugees entering Mizoram from the adjacent nation as a result of airstrikes by the Myanmar Army on ethnic insurgents and intense fighting along the border between India and Myanmar. Uncertainty has surrounded India's Kaladan Multimodal Transit Transport project, which uses Sittwe port in Myanmar, due to the recent outbreak of hostilities along the Mizoram-Myanmar border. Construction on the road portion of the Kaladan project, which runs from Paletwa in Myanmar to Zorinpui in Mizoram, was resumed thanks to the time of relative calm during the intermittent period. However, recent unrest has increased concerns about missing the revised commissioning goal dates. The project's goal is to link northeastern states with the rest of India via an alternate route, using the Sittwe port in Myanmar. In addition to this route, India can also connect the region with the rest of India through Assam by using the Chittagon...