Israeli Defense Minister Orders Plan To Build Concentration Camp for Gaza’s Civilian Population    Israel Katz says the so-called 'humanitarian city' will be built on the ruins of Rafah

by Dave DeCamp | Jul 7, 2025

 

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has ordered the IDF to prepare a plan to establish a camp to concentrate the entire civilian population of Gaza on the ruins of the southern Gaza city of Rafah.

According to Haaretz, Katz said that once Palestinian civilians are pushed into what he is calling a “humanitarian city,” they will not be allowed to leave. The idea is to first transfer 600,000 civilians from the al-Mawasi tent camp on the coast in southern Gaza, followed by the rest of the civilian population.

Katz said that if conditions permit, the “city” could be built during a potential 60-day ceasefire, comments that will make Hamas less likely to agree to a temporary truce. The Israeli defense minister also said that during the ceasefire, Israel will maintain control of the “Morag Corridor,” a strip of land between Rafah and Khan Younis.

Katz also suggested the camp can facilitate the government’s ultimate goal of ethnic cleansing, which it refers to as “voluntary migration,” telling reporters that Israel will implement “the emigration plan, which will happen.”

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has previously said that the goal of Israel’s current military operation, dubbed Gideon’s Chariots, is to create a concentration camp south of the Morag Corridor and pressure the civilians forced into it to leave.

“The Gazan citizens will be concentrated in the south. They will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places,” Smotrich said in May.

Katz’s comments come after Reuters reported that the controversial US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) had proposed to the US government the idea of creating camps it called “Humanitarian Transit Areas” inside Gaza or possibly outside Gaza. 

The GHF plan describes the camps as “large-scale” and “voluntary” places where the Palestinian population could “temporarily reside, deradicalize, re-integrate and prepare to relocate if they wish to do so.” 

Katz said Israel is seeking “international partners” to manage the zone and that four aid distribution sites would be set up inside the camp, suggesting the GHF will be involved in the plan. GHF aid sites are secured by American security contractors, who have been credibly accused of using live ammunition and stun grenades to disperse crowds of hungry Palestinian civilians.

https://news.antiwar.com/2025/07/07/israeli-defense-minister-orders-plan-to-build-concentration-camp-for-gazas-civilian-population/

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

Nader Terani, How America Betrayed Itself      POSTED ON JULY 10, 2025

 

In a world where so much else is happening including, only recently, savage American and Israeli strikes against Iran, Gaza has become little more than background noise. Yes, that 25-mile strip of land and its towns and cities have been all but leveled by Israeli air power and military might. (In northern Gaza, an estimated 72% of all buildings have been damaged or utterly destroyed.) Worse yet, it never truly seems to end, does it? Since the brutal October 7, 2023, Hamas assault on Israel, the devastation has never stopped and the people still living (if you can even think of it as “living”) in Gaza, an estimated 2.1 million of them at “critical risk” of famine and many at the edge of starvation, are almost invariably in danger when they try to get food.

And that, of course, is when food is even available. For much of March and April, Israel cut off all food supplies to Gaza. And then, just a couple of weeks ago, they completely closed the crossing points into northern Gaza, the most direct route for aid. And of course, when the food does get through and desperate Gazans swarm the few food distribution sites, Israeli soldiers seem to shoot some of them down almost daily, even when they clearly pose no threat at all.

What a nightmare! And yet, these days, Gaza is barely in the news most of the time, especially after the nightmare of Middle Eastern hell spread to Iran, a new horror in the region. That country was, of course, only recently attacked by Israel and the U.S. on the insistence of the leaders of both countries, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump, that it was preparing to build nuclear weapons (though the best evidence — provided by, believe it or not, Tulsi Gabbard, the Trump administration’s director of national intelligence — is that they weren’t). Of course, no one thought to attack North Korea while it was building nuclear weapons and that country, mind you, was the ninth to get them. But no matter, 10 was evidently the magic number. And with that in mind, let TomDispatch regular Nader Terani, himself an American of Iranian background, take you into that Middle Eastern world of both horror and grim madness in a distinctly personal fashion. Tom

I Love America And Now It’s Bombing My Family in Iran    BY NADER TERANI 

We bombed Iran and, despite a temporary cessation of hostilities, it’s likely that President Donald Trump and his counterpart in Tel Aviv, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, intend to drag the United States into yet another destabilizing effort in the Middle East, perhaps the most dangerous one yet. As an Iranian American, I feel as if my greatest fears are now being realized.

Like many Iranian Americans, I love this country and the many blessings that it’s provided my family — so much so that I proudly chose to wear the uniform of its Navy. I’ll never forget the immense sense of pride I felt, on July 31st, 1996, when I was sworn into the United States Navy, or the unparalleled sense of responsibility I experienced when I wore my uniform for the first time as an American sailor graduating from boot camp at the Recruit Training Center in Great Lakes, Illinois, in 1997. I then had the honor of being selected as the first Iranian American to serve as a member of the United States Navy Presidential Honor Guard in Washington, D.C. And on every one of those occasions, my loved ones, Iranian immigrants all, proudly stood by my side, beaming with joy as I embarked on what I viewed as a sacred commitment to serve the nation that I love.

We Have to Remember Who We’re Meant to Be

Like many immigrant families, mine came to the United States in search of peace, prosperity, and the possibility of becoming part of the fabric of the country that had given the world the Bill of Rights and the sacred tenet of “equal justice under the law”; the country that had given history George Washington, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., among others; the nation that had served as a safe harbor for German refugees like Albert Einstein and Hollywood film director Billy Wilder fleeing Nazi persecution; the great nation that did indeed free the world from the scourge of Hitler and the Third Reich in World War II, and later landed the first menon the surface of the moon. No nation has had so much potential to do good in the world as we do in the United States of America. Our Founding Fathers, imperfect as they might have been, passed on to us the proposition that liberty and human dignity are anything but idle words — that they are, in fact, fundamental human values written in the very hearts of every person. In short, they passed on to us a promise: that all men, every soul, in fact, is endowed by our Creator with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Nor did those founders suggest that such sacrosanct, if now seemingly self-evident, values stopped at American shores. They were all too aware that, for centuries, imperial forces had pillaged and wreaked havoc globally on smaller, defenseless countries and on civilizations virtually everywhere. Throughout the centuries, such imperial powers had risen by way of their strength, if not their virtue, and fallen thanks to their global misadventures. And let’s be clear, by any metric you want to mention, the United States is indeed a global imperial force at an all-too-critical crossroads. The question is: Will we allow parasitic and nefarious entities and interests to drain us of our resources, cajole us into breaking yet more international laws, and turn us into a global pariah while betraying the great founding promise of our republic?

With Donald Trump at the helm of state, the answer is likely to be a resounding yes.

Why the Con, Don?

In order to understand the peril in which we find ourselves as a nation, we need look no further than Trump’s recent betrayal of his own director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. Just three months ago, she testified before Congress that, according to the assessment of the intelligence community, Iran had not made the decision to weaponize its nuclear program.

When asked about Gabbard’s assessment recently, Trump quipped, “I don’t care what she said,” as if she had merely been offering an opinion of her own, not testifying about a multi-agency conclusion that Iran was not a nuclear threat. In fact, as a matter of religious edict, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, had declared a “fatwa,” ruling that the potential global devastation of nuclear weapons violated the very tenets of the Islamic faith and that his country was forbidden to develop such weaponry.

For my part, more than 25 years ago, as a young sailor on active duty, I found myself recruited by the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Defense HUMINT Service (now the Defense Clandestine Service) specifically because of my Persian-Farsi skills and cultural knowledge. Even then, it was widely reported that our government had a wealth of intelligence capabilities when it came to determining the exact scale, scope, and goals, not to speak of mindset and shoe sizes of the Iranian leadership, especially when it came to their military and nuclear capabilities.

It’s Never Actually Been About Nukes or Regime Change

To be clear, I’m no fan of the repressive Iranian regime and wholeheartedly reject its fundamentalist ideology. At the same time, since my country’s leaders and its intelligence community have regularly reaffirmed that Iran is not a nuclear threat, why would Donald Trump, as well as Republican Senators like Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz, so casually betray that community and the trust of the American people?

Why would the Trump administration allow itself to appear to be so schizophrenic by moving the goalposts on what has often seemed like a daily basis? The answer: such head fakes and confusion are part of their strategy. Chaos is the point, a crucial aspect of the psychological tactics deployed against the American public to distract us from their end game. My guess is that, not unlike Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s brain worm, Donald Trump and many of the corporate oligarchs who support him suffer from a parasitic infection — a murderous devotion to Israeli Prime Minister (and International Criminal Court-charged war criminal) Benjamin Netanyahu’s master plan for the Middle East. He, of course, seeks to destabilize that entire region and expand the borders of Israel into countries like Lebanon, Syria, and even possibly the Iranian peripheries. That scheme, called “The Greater Israel Plan,” has been the decades-long aim of radical right-wing elements in the Israeli government.

The modern iteration of that strategy was commissioned by Netanyahu himself. As Jonathan Granoff asks at The Hill:

“Why does [Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Likud Party] make no credible effort at building a better future for Palestinian people, knowing it serves only to align their interests more closely with Hamas? And why amid all the chaos strike Iran and aggravate the risk of wider war? Where does Israel’s policy of violent coercion rather than cooperation and an ever-widening reliance on military force come from?”

And he answers those questions this way: “It actually has an identifiable source. In 1996, Netanyahu, then Likud party leader, commissioned the policy document ‘A Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,’ whose lead drafters were neoconservatives Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, co-architects of the disastrous U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.”

The desire to implement just that end-game scenario by hardline members of the Israeli government is the only reasonable way to explain the otherwise confounding actions of both the Trump and Netanyahu governments. A rational person could argue that the hundreds of millions of dollars poured into the Trump campaign in 2024 by pro-Israel billionaires like Miriam Adelson were a mere pittance when compared with the possibility of stealing so much in the way of land and resources in the Middle East. You could also be forgiven for imagining Benjamin Netanyahu, seduced by the wicked wiles of that infamous crew, considering the constricted borders of Israel and thinking: Why not? Why shouldn’t I take it?

Of course, I’m hardly the first person to notice the strange, almost cultish loyalty of so many of our elected officials to his dangerous way of thinking. For instance, in his book Solving 9-11: The Deception That Changed The World, investigative journalist Christopher Lee Bollyn wrote: “Today, the United States of America is by all appearances an Israeli-occupied state. The U.S. Congress dutifully authorizes the annual payment of an immense tribute to Israel, some three thousand million dollars a year.”

Bollyn certainly offers a striking explanation for the events now taking place before our eyes, the voluntary death spiral into which we, as a nation, have been thrust at least in part by the radical Netanyahu government and his death-cult devotees led by the current American president.

Blowback: It’s Not Good for Israel Either

In the same way that Donald Trump’s greed-fueled ambitions far outweigh any desire to do right by the United States, Benjamin Netanyahu’s psychopathic schemes in pursuit of his end game have only served to degrade the international reputation of Israel, making it (outside of the United States) essentially a pariah nation. Even within this country, the Trump administration’s kowtowing to the whims of Netanyahu’s regime, from an unprecedented crackdown on free speech (supposedly to quell “anti-semitism”) to defunding major universities, has earned a massive backlash from both the left and the right.

What makes all of this so tragic is that the state of Israel, through its citizenry, has the capacity to do so much good in this world of ours. My Jewish friends all have a keen sense of justice and a deep sense of compassion towards the plight of the oppressed, values that have been handed down to them, particularly from Holocaust survivors who witnessed the abject evil wrought upon humanity by men with messiah complexes who were without honor or virtue. And that’s exactly why Israelis should, in the end, reject the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu, so that their country can indeed once again become a cherished safe haven for the Jewish people living alongside the future nation of Palestine.

In that regard, one could easily make the case that the greatest threat to the nation of Israel is Benjamin Netanyahu. In his years of public life, due to his unrepentant acts of horror and violence, especially in his latest tenure as prime minister, even American support for Israel has cratered. And the global decline is starker yet, with European nations like Ireland, Luxembourg, and Spain now considering massive embargoes of the Israeli state.

Freedom Is Not Free, Can America Survive?

In 1997, when I was stationed in Washington D.C., my friend Jeff (Smitty) Smith’s little brother came to visit him from Missouri. Smitty and I took him around D.C. and finally came to the then-newly-built Korean War Memorial. If you’ve been there, then you know that the stark and hallowed message of that memorial is: “Freedom Is Not Free,” words chiseled in stone. On seeing this, Smitty’s brother was taken aback, and asked, “What does that mean?” Then 19 years old, I hadn’t really thought about that, but it hit me instantly. “I think it means,” I told him, “that our American soldiers are willing to pay the ultimate price for our freedom.”

I thought of that day again as I was writing this, how in the age of Donald Trump we’ve betrayed the sacrifices of all those generations and how far we’ve fallen as a nation. After I reached out to my editor, Tom Engelhardt, with my ideas for this piece, my mom asked me if it was “safe” to write such an article while Trump was president. After all, he and his goon squad, to their everlasting shame, have gone to the ends of the earth to crush free speech, especially any criticism of Israel or the administration’s nefarious deeds writ large. (Just ask Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student who dared coauthor an op-ed questioning the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by the Netanyahu regime, only to quickly find herself disappeared off the street by masked agents of the Department of Homeland Security and imprisoned by the American government.)

In truth, that such thoughts even entered my mother’s mind or mine made me first sad and then ticked off. But certain patterns of history seem all too tragically repetitive. When an imperial power is in peril, unless there is a significant course correction, potential tyrants can take control, with the urge to destroy sovereign nations abroad and crush sacred freedoms at home.

In truth, though, it doesn’t have to be that way for us. Yes, we are now governed by wildly lesser men than the great ones of our past. Which is why none of us should cede any ground, when it comes to patriotism or the very idea of national security, to the likes of Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth who mistake violence and jingoism for love of country. Such lesser men have the urge to manipulate the immense levers of power in their own favor while using those same levers to crush the righteous dissent of the American people.

This is no longer a matter of right versus left, but of uniting all people of peace and goodwill to reclaim the promise of our founding, ensuring that the precious future aspirations of all peoples, be they Americans, Israelis, or Iranians, not be crushed within the grip of a death cult of End Times fundamentalists who, like Heath Ledger’s Joker in the Batman film The Dark Knight, would happily engulf human civilization in flames and laugh as the world around them burns.

Copyright 2025 Nader Terani

Featured image: Minneapolis protest against Donald Trump by Fibonnaci Blue is licensed under CC BY 2.0 / Flickr

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.

 

Nader Terani is currently pursuing his doctor of medicine degree with an emphasis on global health. He is also an American veteran and had the honor of being the first Iranian American selected to serve as a member of the elite U.S. Navy Presidential Ceremonial Honor Guard in Washington, D.C. Nader also served with the Defense Intelligence Agency where he worked in clandestine HUMINT military intelligence operations.

 

https://tomdispatch.com/i-love-america/

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

Israel’s Genocide Is Big Business – and the Face of the Future

By Jonathan Cook / Jonathan Cook Blog

 

The Financial Times revealed this month that a cabal of Israeli investors, one of the world’s top business consulting groups and a think-tank headed by former British prime minister Tony Blair had been secretly working on plans to exploit the ruins of Gaza as prime real estate.

The secret consortium appears to have been seeking practical ways to realise US President Donlad Trump’s “vision” of Gaza as the “Riviera of the Middle East”: transforming the small coastal enclave into a playground for the rich and an enticing investment opportunity, once it can be ethnically cleansed of its Palestinian population.

Meanwhile, the UK government has declared Palestine Action a terrorist organisation – the first time in British history that a direct-action campaign group has been banned under Britain’s already draconian terrorism legislation.

Notably, the government of Keir Starmer took the decision to proscribe Palestine Action after lobbying from Elbit Systems, an Israeli weapons maker whose factories in the UK have been targeted by Palestine Action for disruption. Elbit supplies Israel with killer drones and other weapons central to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

These revelations came to light as the United Nation’s special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, published a report – titled “From economy of occupation to economy of genocide” – exposing Big Business’ extensive involvement in, and profits from, Israel’s crimes in Gaza.

In an interview with US journalist Chris Hedges, Albanese, an expert in international law, concluded: “The genocide in Gaza has not stopped, because it is lucrative. It’s profitable for far too many.”

 

Albanese lists dozens of major western companies that are deeply invested in Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people.

This is not a new development, as she notes. These firms have exploited business opportunities associated with Israel’s violent occupation of the Palestinian people’s lands for years, and in some cases decades.

The switch from Israel’s occupation of Gaza to its current genocide hasn’t threatened profits; it has enhanced them. Or as Albanese puts it: “The profits have increased as the economy of the occupation transformed into an economy of genocide.”

The special rapporteur has been a growing thorn in the side of Israel and its western sponsors over the past 21 months of slaughter in Gaza.

That explains why Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state, announced soon after her report was issued that he was imposing sanctions on Albanese for her efforts to shed light on the crimes of Israeli and US officials.

Revealingly, he called her statements – rooted in international law – “economic warfare against the United States and Israel”. Albanese and the UN system of universal human rights that stands behind her, it seems, represent a threat to western profiteering.

Window on the future

Israel effectively serves as the world’s largest business incubator – though, in its case, not just by nurturing start-up companies.

Rather, it offers global corporations the chance to test and refine new weapons, machinery, technologies, data collection and automation processes in the occupied territories. These developments are associated with mass oppression, control, surveillance, incarceration, ethnic cleansing – and now genocide.

In a world of shrinking resources and growing climate chaos, such innovative technologies of subjugation are likely to have domestic, in addition to overseas, applications. Gaza is the corporate world’s laboratory, and a window into our own future.

In her 60-page report, Albanese writes that her research “reveals how the forever-occupation has become the ideal testing ground for arms manufacturers and Big Tech… while investors and private and public institutions profit freely”.

Her point was underscored by the Israeli arms firm Rafael, which issued a promotional video of its Spike FireFly drone that showed it locating, chasing and killing a Palestinian in what it called “urban warfare” in Gaza.

As the UN special rapporteur points out, quite aside from the issue of genocide in Gaza, western companies have been under a legal and moral obligation to sever ties with Israel’s system of occupation since last summer.

That was when the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, ruled Israel’s decades-old occupation was a criminal enterprise based on apartheid and forcible transfer – or what Albanese refers to as policies of “displacement and replacement”.

Instead, the corporate sector – and western governments – continue to deepen their involvement in Israel’s crimes.

It is not just arms manufacturers profiting from the genocidal levelling of Gaza and the occupations of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Big Tech, construction and materials firms, agribusiness, the tourism industry, the goods and services sector, and supply chains have also got in on the act.

And enabling it all is a finance sector – which includes banks, pension funds, universities, insurers and charities – keen to continue investing in this architecture of oppression.

Albanese describes the mosaic of companies partnering with Israel as “an eco-system sustaining this illegality”.

Escaping scrutiny

For these corporations and their enablers, international law – the legal system Albanese and her fellow UN rapporteurs are there to uphold – serves as an impediment to the pursuit of profit.

Albanese notes that the business sector can escape scrutiny by shielding behind other actors.

Israel and its senior officials are on notice for committing genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

When she wrote to 48 companies to warn them that they were colluding in this criminality, they either responded that this was Israel’s responsibility, not theirs, or that it was for states, not international law, to regulate their business activities.

Corporations, Albanese points out, can secure their biggest profits in the “grey areas of the law” – laws they have helped to shape.

Lockheed Martin’s F-35 jets, whose “beast mode” has been shop-windowed by Israel as it has destroyed Gaza, depend on some 1,600 other specialist firms operating in eight separate states, including Britain.

Late last month the UK high court, while admitting British-made components used in the F-35 were likely to contribute to war crimes in Gaza, ruled that it was up to Starmer’s government to make “acutely sensitive and political” decisions about the export of these parts.

UK foreign secretary David Lammy, by contrast, told a parliamentary committee it was not for the government to assess whether Israel was committing war crimes in Gaza, using British arms, it was “a decision for the court”.

Lockheed Martin has joined the buck-passing. A spokesperson said: “Foreign military sales are government-to-government transactions. Discussions about those sales are best addressed by the US government.”

Big Tech collusion

Albanese also points the finger at leading tech firms for rapidly and deeply embedding in Israel’s illegal occupation, including by acquiring Israeli start-ups that exploit expertise gained from the oppression of Palestinians.

The NSO Group has developed Pegasus phone spyware that is now being used to surveill politicians, journalists and human rights activists around the world.

Last year the Biden administration signed a contract with another Israeli spyware firm, Paragon. Will we learn one day that the US used exactly this kind of technology to spy on Albanese and other international law experts, on the pretext that they were waging so-called “economic warfare”?

IBM trains Israeli military and intelligence personnel, and is central to the collection and storage of biometric data on Palestinians. Hewlett Packard Enterprises supplies technology to Israel’s occupation regime, prison service and police.

Microsoft has developed its largest centre outside the US in Israel, from which it has fashioned systems for use by the Israeli military, while Google and Amazon have a $1.2 billion contract to provide it with tech infrastructure.

The prestigious research university MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has collaborated with Israel and companies like Elbit to develop automated weapons systems for drones and refine their swarm formations.

Palantir, which supplies the Israeli military with Artificial Intelligence platforms, announced a deeper strategic partnership in January 2024, early in Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, over what the Bloomberg news agency termed “Battle Tech”.

Over the past 21 months, Israel has been introducing new automated programs driven by AI – such as “Lavendar”, “Gospel” and “Where’s Daddy?” – to select huge numbers of targets in Gaza with little or no human oversight.

Albanese calls this “the dark side of the start-up nation that is so embedded, so intimately related to the military industry aims and gains.”

Not surprisingly, tech firms are falling back on all-too-familiar smears against the special rapporteur and the UN for pulling back the veil on their activities. The Washington Post reported that, in the wake of Albanese’s report, Google’s co-founder, Sergey Brin, called the UN “transparently antisemitic” in a chat on a staff forum.

Concentration camp

There are a long list of other household names in Albanese’s report: Caterpillar, Volvo and Hyundai are accused of supplying heavy machinery to destroy homes, mosques and infrastructure in Gaza and the West Bank.

Leading banks such as BNP Paribas and Barclays have underwritten treasury bonds to boost market confidence in Israel through the genocide and maintain its favourable interest rates.

BP, Chevron and other energy firms are profiting from existing gas fields in the eastern Mediterranean and pipelines that pass through Palestinian maritime waters off Gaza. Israel issued exploration licences for Gaza’s own undeveloped gas field, off the coast, shortly after launching its genocidal slaughter.

Israel’s latest plan to create, in its own words, a “concentration” camp inside Gaza – where Palestinian civilians are to be tightly confined under armed guard – will doubtless rely on business partnerships similar to those behind the bogus “aid distribution hubs” Israel has already imposed on the enclave’s people.

Israeli soldiers have testified that they are being ordered to shoot into crowds of starving Palestinians queueing for food at these hubs – explaining why dozens of Palestinians have been killed daily for weeks on end.

Those hubs, run by the misleadingly named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, were in part the brainchild of the Boston Consulting Group, the same management consultants caught this month plotting to turn Gaza into Trump’s Palestinian-free “Riviera of the Middle East”.

Israel’s planned concentration camp built on the ruins of the city of Rafah – to be termed, again deceptively, a “humanitarian zone” – will require all those entering to be “security screened”, using biometric data, before their incarceration.

Doubtless other contractors, using largely automated systems, will control the camp’s interior until, in the Israeli government’s words, “an emigration plan” can be implemented to expel the population from Gaza.

Albanese points to the many precedents for private corporations driving some of the most horrifying crimes in history, from slavery to the Holocaust.

Albanese urges lawyers and civil society actors to pursue legal avenues against these firms in the countries in which they are registered. Where possible, consumers should exert what pressure they can by boycotting these corporations.

She concludes by recommending that states impose sanctions and an arms embargo on Israel.

Further, she calls on the besieged International Criminal Court – four of whose judges are, like her, under US sanctions – as well as national courts “to investigate and prosecute corporate executives and/or corporate entities for their part in the commission of international crimes and laundering of the proceeds from those crimes”.

Psychopathic culture

All of this is crucial to understanding why western capitals have continued to partner in Israel’s slaughter, even as Holocaust and genocide scholars – many of them Israeli – have reached a firm consensus that its actions amount to genocide.

Governing parties in western countries like the US and Britain are largely dependent on Big Business, both for their electoral success and, after victory at the polling booth, in maintaining popularity through the promotion of “economic stability”.

Keir Starmer reached power in the UK after spurning the popular grassroots funding model of his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, and wooing instead the corporate sector with promises that the party would be in its pocket.

His reassurances were also key to making sure the billionaire-owned media – which had ferociously turned on Corbyn, constantly vilifying him as an “antisemite” for his democratic socialist and pro-Palestinian positions – smoothed Starmer’s path to Downing Street.

In the US, the billionaires even have one of their own in power, in Donald Trump. But even his campaign depended on funding from big donors like Miriam Adelson, the Israeli widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.

Adelson is among a number of top donors, funding both main parties, who make no bones about their number one political priority being Israel.

Once in power, parties are then effectively held to ransom by major corporations on large areas of domestic and foreign policy.

The financial sector had to be bailed out by taxpayers – and still is through so-called “austerity measures” – after its reckless excesses crashed the global ecomomy in the late 2000s. Western governments considered the banks “too big to fail”.

Similarly, Israel – the world’s biggest incubator for the arms and surveillance industries – is just too big to be allowed to fail as well. Even as it commits genocide.

Critics of the rise of globalised corporations over the past half century, such as famed linguist Noam Chomsky and law professor Joel Bakan, have long noted the inherently psychopathic traits of corporate culture.

Corporations are legally obligated to pursue profit and prioritise shareholder value over other considerations. Limitations on their freedoms to do so are near non-existent after waves of deregulation from suborned western governments.

Bakan observes that corporations are indifferent to the suffering or safety of others. They are incapable of maintaining enduring relationships. They lack any sense of guilt, or capacity for self-restraint. And they lie, cheat and deceive to maximise profits.

These psychopathic tendencies have been on show in scandal after scandal, whether from the tobacco and banking industries, or from pharmaceutical and energy companies.

Why would Big Business behave any better in pursuing profits tied up in the Gaza genocide?

Bakan addresses those who confuse his argument with a conspiracy theory. The psychopathic behaviours of corporations simply reflect the legal imperatives on them as institutions – what he calls their “logical dynamic” – to maximise profit and sideline rivals, whatever the consequences for the wider society, future generations or the planet.

Growing fat on genocide

The stakes in Gaza are high for western governments precisely because they are so high for the business world growing fat on Israel’s genocide.

Governments and corporations have an overwhelming shared interest in protecting Israel from scrutiny and criticism: it serves as their colonial attack dog in the oil-rich Middle East, and it acts as a cash-cow for the weapons, surveillance and incarceration industries.

Which explains why Trump and Starmer, on one side, and university administrations, on the other, have invested so much political and moral capital in crushing the spaces, especially in academia, where free speech and protest are supposed to be most prized.

The unversities are far from a disinterested party. Before their campus encampments were trashed by police, student demonstrators sought to highlight how heavily invested the universities are in the economy of occupation and genocide, both financially and through research partnerships with the Israeli military and Israeli universities.

The need to ringfence Israel from scrutiny also explains rapid moves in the West both to impute “antisemitism” to every effort to hold Israel, or its genocidal army, to account.

The desperate lengths to which governments will go was on display this month as UK officials and the establishment media kicked up a storm of outrage after a punk band at Glastonbury chanted “Death, death to the IDF!” – a reference to Israel’s genocidal army.

And as the power of the antisemitism accusation has weakened from misuse, western capitals are now rewriting their statutes to designate as “terrorism” any attempt to put a spoke in the wheels of the genocide economy, by for example sabotaging weapons factories.

Morality and international law are being scattered to the winds to keep the West’s most important colonial spin-off a money-maker.

Business as usual

Israel’s indispensability to the corporate sector and a captured western political class extends far beyond tiny Gaza. Israel is playing an outsize role as a war-industries incubator on a global battlefield in which the West seeks to ensure its continuing military and economic primacy over China.

Last month the global business elite – comprising tech billionaires and corporate titans, joined by political leaders, media editors, and military and intelligence officials – met once again at the publicity-shy Bilderberg summit, this year hosted in Stockholm. 

Prominent were the CEOs of major “defence” suppliers and arms manufacturers such as Palantir, Thales, Helsing, Anduril and Saab.

Drone warfare – being used in innovative ways by key military clients like Israel and Ukraine – was high on the agenda. The greater integration of AI into drones appears to have been a mainstay of the discussions.

The subtext this year, as in recent years, was a supposed rising threat from China and an associated “authoritarian axis” comprising Russia, Iran and North Korea. This threat is seen chiefly in economic and technological terms.

In May, Eric Schmidt, the former head of Google and a Bilderberg board member, wrote with alarm in the New York Times: “China is at parity or pulling ahead of the United States in a variety of technologies, notably at the AI frontier.”

He added that the West was in a race against China over the imminent development of super-intelligent AI, which would give the winner “the keys to control the entire world”.

Schmidt, like other Bilderberg regulars, predicts that the power-draining needs of super AI will lead to ever-intensifying energy wars for the West to stay top dog.

Or as a Guardian report on the conference summed up the mood: “In this desperate winner-takes-all race for the keys to the world, in which the ‘geopolitics of energy’ becomes ever more important, power stations – along with the data centers they feed – are going to become the No 1 military targets.”

Israel’s slaughter in Gaza is seen as playing a critical role in opening up the “battlescape”.

The same corporations cashing in on the Gaza genocide stand to benefit from the more permissive environment – legally and militarily – created by Israel for future wars, ones where massacred civilians count only as “incidental deaths”.

An April article in the New Yorker magazine set out the challenge facing US military planners, who have considered themselves hobbled since the 1980s by the rise of a human rights community that developed an expertise in the laws of war independently from the Pentagon’s self-serving interpretations.

The result, say US generals regretfully, has been a “general aversion to collateral damage risk” – that is, killing civilians.

Pentagon military planners are keen to use the slaughter in Gaza as a precedent for their own genocidal violence in subduing future economic rivals like China and Russia who threaten the official US doctrine of “global full-spectrum dominance”.

The New Yorker sets out this thinking: “Gaza not only looks like a dress rehearsal for the kind of combat US soldiers may face. It is a test of the American public’s tolerance for the levels of death and destruction that such kinds of warfare entail.”

According to the magazine, the genocidal violence being unleashed by Israel is opening up the “legal maneuver space” – the space needed to commit crimes against humanity in full view.

This is where much of the impulse comes from in western capitals to normalise the genocide – present it as business as usual – and demonise its opponents.

The arms makers and tech companies whose coffers have been swollen by Israel’s genocide in Gaza stand to make far greater riches from a similarly devastating war against China.

Whatever the script we are sold, there will be nothing moral or existential about this coming battle. As ever, it will be about rich people keen to get even richer.

https://scheerpost.com/2025/07/23/israels-genocide-is-big-business-and-the-face-of-the-future/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.